Armageddon (18 page)

Although radio communications were vital, and the relatively powerful sets mounted in vehicles and at unit headquarters were effective, within infantry companies and platoons 1944 portable wireless technology was unreliable, and often useless, especially in woods or among buildings. Batteries were short lived. At night, an impediment known as “mush” was especially prevalent in the atmospheric conditions of north-west Europe. Troops in fixed positions depended overwhelmingly on field telephones, whose cables were severed with irksome frequency by incoming fire or merely by passing vehicles. Once an action began, it was hard for a local commander to discover what was happening to his forward platoons and companies. If a unit ran into trouble, it was often many minutes, even hours, before its predicament became known at regiment, division or corps level. Lieutenant Edwin Bramall carried a small megaphone on his belt, to communicate with his men above the relentless din of battle. Tank crews, through their access to the radio net, were always better informed than their accompanying infantry, who knew nothing beyond what they could see through the hedge in front of them, or above the parapet of a foxhole. Platoon and company communications in 1944–45 depended chiefly upon runners carrying written messages to the rear, no advance upon the method employed by Greek and Roman armies two millennia earlier.

It was often hard for a local commander to judge how he should handle himself. Conscientious junior officers instinctively wanted to go first. Yet, if they did so, they often fell, and the assault lost impetus. Experienced leaders placed themselves near the front, but not on point, though this sometimes prompted feelings of guilt. Lieutenant William Devitt of the U.S. 83rd Division once asked for volunteers to cross a road first, and got none. Eventually he persuaded some men to move, and followed them. “Why didn’t I go first? Perhaps I should have. I don’t think it was fear. I just felt it was better to lose a man than the leader.” Devitt was absolutely right, but such everyday battlefield decisions were hard for inexperienced young officers.

Like most riflemen, “Red” Thompson never fired an aimed shot in the whole campaign—only “approach fire” from the hip, as his unit advanced upon an objective. He never threw a grenade, and indeed was mortally frightened of the thermite bomb he was obliged to carry. When he joined his battalion, “Nobody had time to teach you anything, you just had to pick it up for yourself. I learned to take care of myself; to be wary; to look, to listen; and to dig holes which you usually left before you finished them. I knew I was just cannon fodder.” Proficient American leaders were critical of the failure of officers to keep their soldiers informed. “If the men can be told each day just where they are and what should take place the next day,” wrote a Ranger company commander sourly, “they would do their jobs a great deal better.” Infantry replacements, who not infrequently joined a unit hours before it was committed to an attack, in such circumstances found themselves utterly bewildered about what was expected of them. A U.S. officer described an action during the winter of 1944 in which newcomers were “naturally scared and actually had to be herded out of their holes to make the attack.”

Two British divisions which analysed officer casualties—very similar to those in U.S. formations—found that platoon leaders accounted for 31.2 per cent; company commanders for 30 per cent; battalion COs for a remarkable 18 per cent. Of these losses, 69 per cent were incurred in attack, 23 per cent in defence, 8 per cent on patrols. Fifty-seven per cent were caused by shelling, 35 per cent by small arms, 6 per cent by mines. Accidents with weapons and men shot by their own sentries accounted for 4 per cent. Forty per cent of officers were hit in close-quarter fighting—within 400 yards of the enemy—18 per cent at longer ranges, 13 per cent while forming up for attacks. A British rifle company officer who landed on D-Day faced an almost 70 per cent probability of being hit at some time before May 1945, and nearly 20 per cent prospect of being killed. Among other ranks, there was a 62 per cent likelihood of being hit, a 14 per cent chance of being killed.

“I never failed to be impressed as I went from the rear to the front,” said U.S. Major-General W. M. Robertson. “I would see this mass of artillery and tank destroyers and regimental and battalion headquarters. At the front lines, a small number of men were carrying the attack. There were about 1,100 men in the assault element [of an infantry regiment]. They took 90% of the casualties. In an infantry division, they carry your battle.” There was considerable bitterness among fighting soldiers about the promiscuity with which decorations were awarded to officers who never faced enemy fire. “Enlisted personnel,” reported a U.S. Corps Combat Observer, “being far from dumb or gullible, wonder why a divisional commander, assistant divisional commander, divisional G-2, G-3* 
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and other rear echelon personnel can receive Silver Stars for ‘gallantry in action’.”

Riflemen, Patton told an officers’ conference, made up 65.9 per cent of a U.S. infantry division—an over-generous estimate by the general—inflicted 37 per cent of casualties on the enemy, but took 92 per cent of the formation’s losses. Artillery comprised 15 per cent of manpower, inflicted 47 per cent of casualties, but suffered only 2 per cent of losses. The infantry elements of an armoured division accepted 65 per cent of its casualties. Third Army’s commander put his own flamboyant spin upon these statistics, arguing for the use of technology and high explosives to minimize casualties: “Americans as a race are the most adept in the use of machinery of any people on earth, and . . . the most adept in the construction of machines on a mass-production basis. It costs about $40,000 for a man to get killed. If we can keep him from being killed by a few extra dollars, it is a cheap expenditure.” Here, from the commander most avowedly committed to the virtue of personal courage, was a vivid statement of the doctrine of firepower which dominated American tactics in north-west Europe.

Many Allied commanders lamented the infantry’s practice of halting to call down artillery fire when they encountered even two or three Germans, rather than themselves engaging the enemy at close quarters. Infantry dependence on artillery created the chronic shortages of ammunition which so retarded the campaign timetable, and imposed a monumental burden on the supply system. “Reliance on fire superiority to win our battles alone is extremely fallacious,” wrote U.S. Major-General John Dahlquist in an irritable circular to all units of his 36th Division. “We cannot sit off at a distance, shell the enemy and wait for him to quit . . . Indiscriminate firing of heavy weapons and artillery at long distances at unremunerative targets must stop.” Exactly the same failures were identified in the British Army. Von Rundstedt asserted in his post-war interrogation that he considered the British even more cautious in action than the Americans. “That [British] infantry tactics ultimately advanced little from the standards of 1916 is disgraceful,” observes one magisterial study. Its author, Dr. Timothy Harrison Place, acknowledges the argument, made by defenders of both Montgomery and the British Army, that “artillery-dominated tactics . . . were the only practicable ones given the fragility of morale and dwindling reserves of manpower.” Yet Harrison Place rejects this view, and concludes that failure to master infantry small-unit tactics appropriate to the conditions of 1944–45, and to break free from the tyranny of dependence upon artillery bombardment as a substitute for energetic ground attack, accounted more than anything else for the indifferent performance of the British Army in north-west Europe.

The director of military training at 15th Army Group in Italy wrote a paper about British shortcomings in 1943 which remained just as valid in 1944–45: “Our tactical methods are thorough and methodical but slow and cumbersome. In consequence our troops fight well in defence and our set-piece attacks are usually successful, but it is not unfair to say that through lack of enterprise in exploitation, we seldom reap the full benefit of them. We are too flank-conscious, we over-insure administratively, we are by nature too apprehensive of failure and our training makes us more so.”

Hitler’s and Stalin’s armies were imbued with an insouciance, indeed brutality, about casualties. It might be argued that 1944–45 Wehrmacht and Red Army battlefield behaviour characterized as “fanatical” or “suicidal” by the Western allies was no more than had been routinely demanded of British and French infantry in the First World War: the dictators’ soldiers were required to obey orders that were overwhelmingly likely to result in their deaths. Yet here was the point: British and American generals of the Second World War believed that their soldiers neither would nor should allow themselves to be sacrificed in the same fashion as their fathers had been on the Somme, at Passchendaele and in the Argonne. Allied commanders in north-west Europe sought to avoid making demands upon their men which they believed would be found unacceptable.

“The American soldier,” Brigadier-General Pearson Menoher, Chief of Staff of the U.S. XV Corps, wrote after the campaign, “. . . has not, in general, been as effective as the German infantryman . . . The desire to close with the enemy and kill him to the extent displayed by the Russians . . . is, to a great degree, missing.” Colonel Hervey Tribolet likewise observed: “There has been considerable comment about lack of aggressiveness on the part of the infantry at times . . . There is something wrong with our system . . . A soldier in a rifle company, when he is kept in [line] continuously, may anticipate only four things: to be killed; to be wounded or to get sick; to be captured; or to get combat fatigue.” Such strictures display the frustrations of professional soldiers about the performance of amateurs under their command. The battlefield behaviour, and limitations, of the Western allies reflected the societies from which they were drawn. “The British army’s reliance on overwhelming firepower did have the disadvantage that it led to a slow rate of advance,” an academic analyst acknowledges. But he adds: “it had the great advantage that it enabled troops to reach their objectives without intolerable losses and with morale more or less intact.”

By common consent, Allied artillery was very well handled. As an infantryman, U.S. Captain William DuPuy made a critical tactical point after the campaign: “When I seriously considered what I had accomplished, I had moved the forward observers of the artillery across France and Germany. You need the infantry to do that, but the combat power comes from this other source.” This is true and important. Yet one of the major causes of the Allies’ difficulties in north-west Europe was that their soldiers—and often generals—were over-impressed by the spectacle of bombardment, and sometimes failed to grasp its limitations. A soldier of the 22nd Infantry described watching a firepower demonstration during his training in the U.S. in 1942. Artillery and machine-guns plastered the ground before rifle companies assaulted it: “We walked over the hill that had been fired on and nothing could have lived after that.”

This was a delusion. It was remarkable how resistant were defenders in well-dug positions to anything save a direct hit. Every soldier suffered trauma from the experience of bombardment, yet a shell might land ten feet from a foxhole without killing its occupants. Lieutenant-Colonel Wally Aux commanded a battery of the Americans’ most powerful artillery. His regiment, attached to VII Corps, possessed 155mm and 240mm guns, together with eight-inch howitzers. The latter could throw their shells 35,000 yards. Every spectator was awed by the spectacle of these huge pieces firing on the German positions. Yet, very often, the long reach of Aux’s guns was meaningless, because targets could not be accurately observed. When they were firing upon map references transmitted by circling fighter-bombers, Aux “was never really convinced that they knew what they were asking us to shoot at.” He said: “We seldom knew what we were firing upon. Very often, it was interdiction and harassing fire on roads, a round or two an hour through the night. Much of our fire was unobserved, and of doubtful effect.”

Watching distant shellbursts, it was easy to fantasize about the anguish suffered by enemy soldiers beneath. Yet there was an immense amount of empty real estate in Europe, upon which imprecisely directed explosives could fall. At a range of 16,500 yards, Aux’s guns achieved a probable error of fifty-four yards. This may suggest remarkable exactitude, but it meant that a German tank or artillery piece could be quite undamaged, save for its crew’s nerves and burst eardrums, even by meticulously aimed shells. Allied firepower was of vital importance in deciding the outcome of the campaign. The Germans regarded American and British gunners with a respect seldom extended to their armour and infantry. But only footsoldiers and tanks could make the advance into Germany. Just sufficient Germans seemed to survive even the most intense bombardments to sustain a vigorous defence.

American and British footsoldiers might have performed better in the flat polder of Holland and in the forests around the German frontier if they had mastered the Wehrmacht’s skill at infiltration. Small groups of German attackers often worked their way by stealth between gaps in defensive positions, rather than making frontal attacks in open order. Infiltration required a high degree of initiative by junior NCOs and men. German enthusiasm for such tactics reflected their “mission-led” tactical doctrine. That is to say, leaders at every level were told what they were supposed to do, then left to decide for themselves how to do it, whereas Anglo-American doctrine was far more prescriptive about tactical method. “The great story used to be that the Germans wouldn’t fight unless there was somebody there to give them orders,” said Lieutenant Roy Dixon. “We soon realized that this was nonsense.”

It would be absurd to pretend that all German units displayed Clausewitzian zeal and imagination, especially in the last year of the war. But infiltration was the most effective and least costly means of gaining ground on terrain where tanks and men walking or running upright presented easy targets. “I thought our tactics were very unimaginative,” said Lieutenant Edwin Bramall. “I would have liked to see more skirmishing and more fire and movement.” Captain David Fraser said: “The British Army was enormously road-bound, and it affected operations.” An American unit commander summarized the weaknesses of U.S. infantry training as follows: failure to follow creeping artillery barrages closely enough; carelessness when exposed to fire—“men walk when they should creep or crawl”; lack of defensive training in armoured units; unreadiness to undertake night operations; failure to take advantage of fog and darkness to cross open ground. As the armies advanced into Germany, there were also many complaints from commanders about their men’s lack of training for street fighting, a highly specialized art.