Armageddon (39 page)

Gordon and his unit emerged from the Hürtgen utterly traumatized by the experience: “We were thankful we were still alive, but for how long no one knew . . . The day after, a few fellows just couldn’t take the strain any more, just went psycho, shouting and running all around like madmen. They got these fellows out as soon as possible, as it was bad on the morale of the other men.” Wilmer Pruett, an eighteen-year-old from the woods of North Carolina serving with the 281st Combat Engineers observed again and again in the Hürtgen: “If there’s another war, the only way they get me is to burn the forest and sift the ashes.”

STRESSES OF BATTLE

B
OTH THE
A
MERICAN
and British armies pondered deeply the problem of combat fatigue, the cause of serious losses of fighting soldiers, above all infantrymen. In some units committed to the Hürtgen battle, combat fatigue reached epidemic proportions. A British medical report concluded that “the act of going sick, of giving in, is an all-or-nothing phenomenon, and is damaging to the personality.” Most men, it concluded, were less effective soldiers after returning to duty, as did more than 50 per cent. The same report observed the paradox that a soldier who ran away from the battlefield was treated as a criminal and harshly punished, while the man who reported sick with combat fatigue was sympathetically received, although “the physical escape of the deserters and the psychological escape of the hysteric were expressions of the same mechanism.” The report noted that the problem seemed much smaller in the German Army, “though precipitating trauma was obviously greater.” This was a polite way of suggesting that the German soldier, in defeat, was experiencing a tougher war than his Allied counterpart, on the road to victory. The report failed to remark the small but obvious point, however, that suspected Wehrmacht malingerers were shot. Although combat fatigue was recognized only with the utmost reluctance in the German Army, and not at all in Stalin’s formations, there are no grounds for supposing that German or Russian soldiers were less afflicted by the shock of battle than men of other armies. They were simply denied the sympathy accorded to American and British sufferers.

A British analysis concluded: “Battle exhaustion cases occurred chiefly among men of poor type who, during training have constantly been guilty of petty crimes.” The U.S. Army rejected this thesis, and took the view that many good men succumbed to combat fatigue and could be rehabilitated for return to duty. In the course of the north-west Europe campaign, British Second Army recorded twelve men per thousand as psychoneurotic admissions to hospitals. Comparable American ETO figures were fifty-two men per thousand, a total of 102,989 cases. Some 8.9 per cent of all men who passed through the U.S. Army in the Second World War were recorded as suffering at some time from combat fatigue. Martin Van Creveld, writing of the “enormous number of psychiatric casualties” the U.S. Army suffered in that war, suggests that the condition was regarded by the ordinary soldier and his superior as “a legitimate, almost normal complaint.” The problem was especially prevalent among newly arrived replacements. Although combat fatigue was far less readily acknowledged in the German Army, the consulting psychiatrist at Second Panzer Army recorded in 1943 that it was especially common “among men who had not had time to form strong comradely ties with buddies.” Together with trench foot, which was invariably highest in units where morale was low, combat fatigue represented a huge drain on Allied fighting manpower. Twenty-six per cent of all those who served in combat formations in the ETO between June and November 1944 at some time reported sick in these terms. “Combat fatigue was one of the most important causes of non-effectiveness among combat troops,” concluded a U.S. Army post-war report. “News spread among the troops that they could avoid distasteful duty at least temporarily by getting into medical evacuation channels. It was very difficult under combat conditions to distinguish between malingering and mild combat exhaustion.”

Officers who succumbed were often treated more generously than enlisted men. Lieutenant Colonel Ferdinand Chesarek, commanding the 28th Field Artillery, relieved a major of his duties and sent him to the rear, with a report simply recommending that he should not again be employed forward of a corps command post: “The strain of battle in a field artillery CP is greater than he can undergo and still function efficiently . . . when the situation becomes involved, he works himself into such a state as to make impossible the continuation of his duties.”

In the winter of 1944, Allied fighting strength was further eroded by the loss of thousands of men who simply quit. “There were increasing signs of plummeting morale,” writes Carlo d’Este, “manifested by a rapidly rising desertion rate so serious that Eisenhower . . . became the first [U.S. commander] since Lincoln in the Civil War to order an American soldier executed for desertion.” No reliable figures are available for overall losses caused by desertion and absences without leave, but Martin Van Creveld suggests “several hundred thousand,” of whom a mere 2,854 were ever brought to trial. Available statistics show that the desertion rate in U.S. armies in Europe reached 45.2 per thousand in 1944 and 63 per thousand in 1945. On 1 January 1945, the U.S. provost-marshal acknowledged that more than 18,000 American deserters were roaming the ETO, while the British admitted to more than 10,000. A further 10,000 British soldiers were charged with the lesser offence of Absence Without Leave.

Unsurprisingly desertion, like combat fatigue, was overwhelmingly an issue in combat units. A sample of British offenders in north-west Europe revealed that more than 80 per cent of deserters had absconded from infantry rifle companies. This represented a serious haemorrhage of fighting manpower. The figures suggest that Eisenhower’s armies were deprived of the equivalent of several divisions, men who disappeared from their units to become scavengers, supporting themselves by lives of active or passive criminality. They became familiar flotsam in every urban area of western Europe. This teeming horde sustained a huge traffic in stolen military rations, fuel, equipment and even vehicles, feeding the black markets of impoverished France, Belgium—and Britain. In Brussels in December 1944, an average of seventy jeeps
a day
were being reported lost. A significant proportion of supplies destined for the armies was diverted into civilian hands. More than a few men in General Lee’s ComZ and its British counterpart did not desert but instead made their contribution to the war effort by selling stores which they were entrusted with moving to the front. Fortunes were made in those days, in those ways. In the British Army, concern about organized looting, black-marketeering and theft of military equipment became so widespread that a restriction was imposed on the value of postal money orders soldiers were permitted to send home. Disciplinary problems of all kinds were a serious issue. Eisenhower was driven to suggest the public execution of men convicted of rape.

The U.S. Army suffered severely in north-west Europe for the grave policy error it had made earlier in the war, of according a low priority to manning infantry formations and providing replacements for their casualties. “We are about to invade the continent,” General Marshall wrote to Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, in May 1944, “and have staked our success on our air superiority, on Soviet numerical preponderance, and on the high quality of our ground combat units.” Marshall might have added: “and on the willingness of the Soviets to accept the overwhelming burden of ground casualties.” It was also debatable whether the Chief of Staff had, indeed, given the emphasis he claimed to ensuring the quality of fighting manpower. The U.S. Army’s belief that quality personnel were wasted in ground combat units is readily demonstrated by the manner in which it allocated recruits after educational testing. Only 27.4 per cent of American infantry soldiers attained grades I or II in initial army testing, while 29 per cent were grade IIIs, and 43 per cent grades IV or V, which reflected “low intelligence and suitability for training.” The educational standard of men shipped to combat arms ranked far below that of those posted to administrative branches. For instance, 89.4 per cent of soldiers sent to the army’s Finance Department had achieved grades I or II, as had 35.3 per cent even of those sent to the military police. Many riflemen in the U.S. Army felt themselves abandoned by God and by their own country. Charles Felix’s unit was outraged to read in
Stars & Stripes
that men sentenced to imprisonment for rear-area disciplinary offences were being offered a transfer to infantry as an alternative: “So that’s what they really think of us!”—shades here of Hollywood’s
The Dirty Dozen.
To put the matter plainly, infantry—the core of every army’s fighting power—reposed at the bottom of the U.S. War Department barrel. For those who had to fight America’s battles in Europe, the cost of this monumental misjudgement was painful indeed.

“Replacements . . . are not satisfactory. They never have been,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel C. Ware, G-1 of the U.S. 1st Division. “It seems the infantry has been the last thing to be taken care of.” Orders to other commands to release men for infantry service were treated with shameless cynicism. One batch of 514 men released by the USAAF to the army was found to muster 231 court-martial convictions between them. In the words of the U.S. official historian, commanders “saw in the emergency retraining program an opportunity to rid their units of misfits and undesirables.” Senior officers remarked on the absurdity of maintaining 198 anti-aircraft units in the U.S. armies in north-west Europe, when the Luftwaffe was almost moribund. It was a measure of the scale of manpower waste that even a modest reduction to 146 AA battalions freed 38,000 men for transfer to infantry. Far more decisive action could have been taken to reduce the grotesquely long support tail and to strengthen infantry units. The British Army gained some benefit from the fact that, unlike its ally, its best foot regiments possessed a prestige which allowed them to recruit quality manpower. However, overall British policy towards infantry was no more imaginative than that of the Pentagon. In a withering memorandum to the War Office, a British divisional commander deplored the fact that many high-ranking officers regarded the infantry “as a legitimate dumping ground for the lowest forms of military life.”

Yet the root cause of Eisenhower’s chronic manpower difficulties was an earlier Washington policy decision. The U.S. had created a ground army far smaller than its population would have allowed because the War Department woefully underestimated the size of the force that would be needed to defeat Hitler. Millions of potential recruits were rejected by medical boards, which were encouraged to set high standards. It was true that America needed a much bigger navy than Germany. The U.S. Navy’s outstanding performance made it probably the most impressive of America’s three wartime services. The U.S. decision to create a huge air force represented a rational exploitation of the nation’s technological brilliance. But it remains astonishing that only eighty-nine U.S. Army divisions were deployed for active service. It may be argued that, given the difficulties of supplying America’s armies in Europe, the commitment of more ground soldiers would merely have compounded these. Yet, even among the five million men drafted to the U.S. Army, only two million served in combat roles, in the loosest interpretation of that phrase. Barely 300,000 men were available in north-west Europe even in 1945 to confront direct German fire, as members of rifle companies or armoured units. It remains insufficiently understood that, while overall casualty rates on the Western Front in the Second World War were vastly lower than those of the First World War, a rifleman’s prospects of surviving the entire campaign unwounded were not much better than those of his father in Flanders. The campaign could have been won more quickly, and Allied forces might have advanced much further east, if Eisenhower had been given more soldiers, and especially more infantrymen.

BOGGED DOWN

T
HE
G
ERMAN SOLDIER
found the experience of the Hürtgen Forest battle every inch as unpleasant as his American counterpart. “It’s Sunday, my God, it’s Sunday,” wrote a German infantry medic of the 1058th Regiment. “With dawn, the whole of our front receives a barrage. The earth trembles. The concussions take our breath away . . . We go forward to counter-attack. The captain is leading it himself. We cannot go far. Our people are dropping like tired flies. Suddenly, the artillery begins its monstrous song again . . . If only we had the munitions and heavy weapons the American has, we would have sent him to hell a long time ago.”

The same man noted on 26 February, near Grosshau: “Two wounded are brought to my hole, one with a torn-up arm, the other with both hands shot off. I am considering whether or not to cut off the rest of the arm. I’ll leave it on. How brave those two are. I hope to God all this is not in vain. When the Ami really attacks again, then he has got to break through. I can’t believe that this ground can be held any longer. Many of our boys just ran away, can’t find them, and have to hold out with this small group.” The U.S. 22nd Infantry noted that between 16 November and 3 December it captured 764 Germans, against some thirty-seven of its own men taken prisoner. The figures highlighted the reluctance of many of the defenders to fight to the last.

Willi Pusch, an eighteen-year-old soldier of the German 3rd Parachute Division, had seen his company reduced from eighty men to fifteen in Normandy, from which he emerged convinced that the war was lost. After two months refitting the unit in Holland, on 22 November they were committed to the last stages of the battle for the Hürtgen Forest. Pusch, a heavy, cheerful man with the huge hands of the East Prussian peasant, once again saw his company shattered. “The forest was a very brutal place,” he said. They were withdrawn and attached to an improvised battle group, which was then given the support of a single tank for a counter-attack. As they advanced to the start line under heavy American artillery fire, the tank swerved off the road and promptly ditched in the mud and snow. The footsoldiers expressed profound relief. “That’s it for us,” they agreed, and trickled away to the rear.