All Hell Let Loose (95 page)

British land worker Muriel Green revealed to her diary a surge of depression such as infected every Allied nation on hearing news of the Arnhem failure. ‘We all thought the war was so nearly over and now we hear of such sacrifice of lives it makes me miserable. I suppose we are taking victory so much for granted it makes such disasters seem worse.’ As the war entered its final phase, it became ever harder for families to endure the loss of loved ones with whom they yearned to share the fruits of peace. Ivor Rowberry, a twenty-two-year-old trainee accountant killed while serving as a signaller with the South Staffordshires, left behind words for his parents which reflected the sentiments of many fighting men of many nations:

Allied hopes of breaking into Germany – even of winning the war in 1944 – did not immediately collapse at the end of September, with the failure of
Market Garden
. Instead, they shrank progressively during the weeks that followed, as their soldiers floundered into a sea of mud and local disappointments. Too much historical attention has focused on the drama of the dash for Arnhem; even had Montgomery secured a Rhine bridge, it is implausible that he could have exploited this to break through into Germany. More promising possibilities lay in the path of Hodges’ First US Army, around Aachen just inside the German frontier; in early and mid-September, this nearest sector of Hitler’s West Wall was scarcely defended, yet between the 12th and 15th the Americans failed in a succession of unconvincing attempts to break through. Hodges was the least impressive US Army commander, and his autumn operations were conducted with notable clumsiness. Five more weeks elapsed before First Army occupied the ruins of Aachen. If Patton had commanded there, it is just possible that a quick breach in the West Wall might have been achieved. As it was, his Third Army battered at Metz through September, cursing the incessant rain, to no consequence except that of a mounting casualty list.

Hodges’ next serious error was to launch his army into a desperate, bloody two-month struggle to clear the Huertgen forest, which was thought to threaten his right flank and rear. Four American divisions in turn suffered misery, heavy losses and soaring combat-fatigue rates in the dense woodland. The Germans doggedly held their ground, imposing a price for each small advance, and by the time First Army emerged onto the Roer plain in early December, all hopes of an early victory had perished. Montgomery’s armies, meanwhile, were obliged to spend the autumn clearing the Scheldt estuary to open Antwerp. This was a task that might have been fulfilled in days in mid-September, when the enemy was in disarray; in October and November, however, it required months of hard fighting in waterlogged terrain. Again and again, units launched attacks along narrow open causeways exposed to withering German fire.

The Scheldt estuary was defended not by SS panzers or elite infantry formations, but by the 70th ‘White Bread’ Division, formed from medical cases, which a German naval officer described as ‘an apathetic, undisciplined mob’. Yet it required no great skill to fire machine-guns and mortars at attackers exposed in plain view: for weeks, these ailing Germans frustrated the best of the Canadian Army. The CO of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada wrote of ‘the utter misery of the conditions and the great courage required to do the simplest things. Attacks had to go on along dykes swept by enemy fire. To go through the
polder
meant wading, without possibility of concealment, in water that at times came up to the chest. Mortar fire, at which the Germans were masters, crashed at every rallying point … It was peculiarly a rifleman’s fight in that there were no great decisive battles, just a steady continuous struggle.’ Most attacks had to be conducted by platoon-sized forces, advancing on a one-man front. So deadly was German automatic fire that the proportion of fatalities to wounded men was 50 per cent higher than usual.

After a week fighting in the Breskens pocket, a single Canadian brigade had lost 533 men, including 111 killed. By the end of November, one division committed had suffered 2,077 casualties including 544 killed or missing, and the other lost 3,650 casualties in thirty-three days, 405 men from each of its rifle battalions. This represented a rate of loss almost as heavy as that the Canadian troops suffered in the November 1917 Passchendaele battle, generally regarded as one of the worst experiences of World War I. Even low-grade German defenders could a hold a line in country where armour could not operate, bunkers provided protection against all but direct hits, and the treeless landscape offered no scope for tactical subtlety.

The 1 November amphibious assault on Walcheren island was a messy and expensive business, and a week’s hard fighting was required before the Germans surrendered. The first Allied convoy to unload at Antwerp arrived only on 28 November. Given the decisive impact of supply problems on the Allied armies from late August onwards, and the miracle that Antwerp’s docks had been captured intact in September, failure to seize the Scheldt approaches proved the worst single mistake of the campaign. Responsibility stretched all the way down the Allied command chain from Eisenhower. But Montgomery was the man with operational responsibility, the general who considered himself a master of war, and he must bear principal blame. ‘By the winter Americans had ceased to regard Monty as amusing,’ said Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, ‘and in the cases of [Bedell] Smith and Bradley … contempt had grown into active hatred.’

The Western Allies lost a small chance of breaking into Germany in September – small, because probability suggests that they lacked sufficient combat power to win the war in 1944 – because they succumbed to the euphoria of victory in France. They lacked energy and imagination to improvise expedients to overcome their supply problems, as an advancing German army might have done. It is also arguable that the large resources committed to Pacific operations in 1944, in defiance of the ‘Germany First’ strategy, denied Eisenhower the margin of men and shipping which might just have enabled his armies to deliver a war-winning punch. Both the US and British armies were chronically short of infantry, and over-weighted with redundant anti-aircraft and anti-tank units. In Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, these absorbed 47,120 precious men, 7.1 per cent of total strength, while in Normandy only 82,000 of 662,000 British soldiers deployed were riflemen. In the course of the winter some AA and AT units were broken up and their personnel transferred to the infantry, but until the end of the campaign too few British and American soldiers were fighting, too many performing marginal roles. Allied tactics were adversely influenced by the degree to which their armies made themselves prisoners of vehicles.

The Anglo-Americans failed to convert a big victory into a decisive one, and paid the price in the months of fighting that followed.
Wacht
, the German Nineteenth Army’s newspaper, wrote on 1 October: ‘The English, and even more the Americans, have throughout this war sought to avoid a very large sacrifice of lives … They still shrink from total commitment, the true soldierly sacrifice … American infantry only attack with a great armoured spearhead, and only launch an assault after a great hail of shells and bombs. If, then, they still meet German resistance, they break off the attack immediately and try again next day with their heavy firepower.’ If this view was self-serving, it was not wholly invalid.

The winter of 1944 proved one of the wettest for decades in western Europe. From October onwards, the weather reinforced the Germans, imposing stagnation across the front. ‘Dear General,’ Eisenhower wrote to Marshall on 11 November, ‘I am getting exceedingly tired of weather.’ If conditions were wretched for all the combatants, they hurt the Allies most, because they were trying to keep moving. Waterlogged ground rendered rapid off-road advances impossible, tanks and vehicles thrashed and flailed in mud up to their track guards and wheel hubs, air operations were drastically constricted, and the Germans exploited every water obstacle. The British had become casualty-conscious as their armies shrank amid the exhaustion of national manpower reserves; they spent the winter advancing slowly through eastern Holland, sometimes making no headway for weeks. Nijmegen stands barely thirty-five miles west of Wesel, but the Reichswald forest lay in between; six months intervened between the capture of the former town on 20 September 1944, and the British crossing of the Rhine at Wesel on 23 March 1945.

For all Patton’s celebrity, his army made slow progress through Alsace-Lorraine, eventually reaching the German border in mid-December. On his right, Gen. Jake Devers’ 6th Army Group met bitter resistance from Germans defending a perimeter on the west bank of the upper Rhine, the so-called Colmar pocket. Private William Tsuchida, a medical aidman in the Vosges, wrote to his parents:

Airborne soldier Pfc Bill True was intensely moved when, one evening in the midst of the Dutch battles, a little girl approached the foxhole occupied by himself and another man, and handed them two pillows. Here was a tiny, innocent gesture towards decencies of civilisation which otherwise seemed immeasurably remote.

Allied supply difficulties persisted, even when ships began to unload at Antwerp. Anglo-American soldiers required far larger quantities of food and comforts than their enemies deemed necessary, and expended prodigious quantities of ammunition to secure even modest local objectives. Eisenhower’s troops advancing across Europe behaved much better than the Russians, but almost all soldiers living in fear of their lives display a cruel indifference towards the property of others. A Dutch doctor described his disgust on seeing the village of Venray, just behind the front line in Holland, after it had been occupied by British soldiers: ‘Words cannot describe how appalled I was when I saw how the town had been pillaged and destroyed. I spoke to an elderly English officer whose words speak for themselves: “I’m very sorry and deeply ashamed, the Army has lost its reputation here.”’

The killing of prisoners was never institutionalised, as on the Eastern Front, but Eisenhower’s men committed their share of excesses. A Canadian soldier described his experience of a patrol in Holland, in which his unit captured eight dismounted German tankers attempting to get back to their own lines. Their officer spoke good English, and the enemies chatted for some minutes about the cold, and how they would like to light a fire. They had just passed a farmhouse, he said, where there might be schnapps and a pig. Could they roast it? The Canadian said later, ‘The war was over for him, and I guess he was glad.’ Then, suddenly, the lieutenant leading the patrol turned to his Bren-gunner and said, ‘Shoot them.’ The German officer who had been making jokes ‘sort of made a little run forward and put his arms across his chest and said something and the guy with the Bren just cut loose … There were two, I think, still flopping like gaffed salmon, and this guy we called Whitey from Cape Breton – we called him Whitey because he was always boasting how good a coalminer he was – he shot those two with a pistol … It probably went into our history, I guess, as a German patrol wiped out. None of us really thought too much about it … But I’ll tell you this, a year before, if I’d been there, I’d have been puking up my guts.’

Allied forces edged towards the German border yard by painful yard. During a November attack in Alsace, within seconds of encountering devastating German machine-gun fire Private Robert Kotlowitz found himself the only unwounded survivor of his platoon.