CHAPTER THREE

The Frontiers of Germany

FADING DREAMS

THERE WAS NEVER a specific moment in the late autumn of 1944 at which the Western allies resigned themselves to continuing the war into 1945. Arnhem loomed larger in the consciousness of the British than in that of a GI in a foxhole in Alsace-Lorraine. Rather, as each local offensive faltered, as German resistance stiffened, and above all as incessant rain and the movement of the armies ploughed the battlefield between Switzerland and the sea into a quagmire, commanders progressively diminished their expectations and moderated their ambitions. Each small disappointment or failure fed the next.

In the historiography of the Second World War, millions of words have been expended upon the British defeat at Arnhem, where prospects of success were always slight. Montgomery’s failure to secure the approaches to Antwerp has been discussed. Yet the best chances of breaking through into Germany in 1944 lay many miles further south, around Aachen and in the hills and forests of the Ardennes. During their summer planning sessions, Eisenhower’s staff eliminated the Ardennes from the list of prospective Allied routes into Germany. In considering options, they talked only of the northern and southern sectors of the front, with the Ardennes as a hinterland in between, unconsidered as a site for offensive operations. This was probably a mistake. Once already in the war, in 1940, the Germans had demonstrated what could be done by determined men among the Ardennes passes, and of course they would so again in Decem-ber 1944. It became impossible to send large forces through the Ardennes once the Germans stiffened their line in October, but in September something important might have been achieved there. At that stage, however, the Allied planners believed that other and easier avenues lay open.

The principal American command in the west was held by the fifty-one-year-old Missourian Omar Bradley of 12th Army Group. This was already larger than Montgomery’s 21st, and was destined to keep growing fast through the months that followed. Bradley was responsible for two armies, which would eventually become four, the greatest American force in history to be led by a single officer. It was a myth created by the correspondent Ernie Pyle that Bradley was beloved of his men as the “soldiers’ general.” Patton and Montgomery were the only two senior commanders familiar to their own men, because both took great pains to see that it was so. Bradley had risen to his role not because of any conspicuous feat of generalship, but because he inspired confidence among his peers and possessed a well-deserved reputation for efficiency and grasp of logistics—a science which Patton, for one, neglected. During their time together in the Mediterranean, Eisenhower had grown implicitly to trust and respect Bradley, who had commanded first a corps and then an army there: “the best rounded combat leader I have yet met in our service,” Ike wrote to Marshall. “While he probably lacks some of the extraordinary and ruthless driving power that Patton can exercise at critical moments, he still has . . . force and determination . . . a jewel to have around.” Amid the stresses to which Eisenhower was subjected by Montgomery and in some degree by Patton, it was a relief for him to turn instead to the plainspoken, reliable 12th Army Group commander, a keen bridge-player and expert rifle shot since his rural childhood.

In recent years, Bradley has incurred harsh censure from some critics, notably the American historian Carlo d’Este, who dismisses him as a plodder. In north-west Europe, to his own detriment the Missourian allowed exasperation with Montgomery to become an obsession. For all his customary steadiness, Bradley was prone to outbursts of savage temper. He showed himself far more ruthless than Montgomery in sacking corps and divisional commanders, while he was no more successful than the British commander in persuading his armies to hurry on the battlefield. In one important respect, however, Ernie Pyle’s judgement on Bradley was correct: 12th Army Group’s commander wanted to do the business of defeating the Germans with the maximum application of American firepower and industrial might, and the least possible expenditure of American lives. He had not come to Europe to prove himself a Rommel or von Manstein. He intended to take every possible American under his command home with him again. For this, indeed, he deserved the gratitude of his soldiers.

ON 13 SEPTEMBER, Bradley’s forces—men of Hodges’s First Army—were close to Aachen, and barely sixty miles from Cologne, on the Rhine. Yet it would be almost six months before they took the latter city and closed up to the greatest of Germany’s rivers, a mere hour’s road drive from their autumn front line. In August and early September, Patton’s Third Army had pushed some 500 miles across France in twenty-six days. America’s other armies had likewise advanced far and fast. From September until the early spring of 1945, however, most of the fighting along the entire front would take place within a belt of Dutch, Belgian, German and French territory ten to twenty miles deep. Before D-Day, Churchill feared that the Allied armies would become locked in a long battle of attrition in Normandy. In reality, they were able to break out of their D-Day beachhead and secure a critical victory in little more than two months. Yet in Holland, in the western hills of Germany and in the fields of Alsace-Lorraine, the liberators became stalemated for almost half a year, making small advances at painful cost. Once momentum had been lost, it was not regained until the Germans were ground down in battles etched painfully into the legend of the U.S. Army. American failures were less spectacular than those of the British in Holland, but they were at least as serious in delaying the end of the war.

Part of the German—and sometimes Russian—genius for war was a readiness to seize opportunities with both hands, swiftly to exploit weakness before the enemy could reinforce a threatened spot. At no time in the north-west Europe campaign before the Ruhr Pocket in April 1945 did Anglo-American forces achieve the kind of comprehensive envelopment of enemy forces which was commonplace on both sides of the Eastern Front. Even the undoubted disaster inflicted upon the Wehrmacht at the Falaise Gap in August 1944 was incomplete, and allowed the escape of just sufficient men to provide skeletons upon which broken formations could be clothed with the flesh of new men and equipment.

“The Allied drive lost its impetus with reaching of the Siegfried line in the north and the Moselle river in the south,” recorded the U.S. Army’s official post-war report on “Strategy in North-West Europe.” “The prepared enemy positions, the extent of the area covered by the Allied troops over a short space of time, and the need for additional supplies at forward points to sustain the drive, made it apparent that no further large-scale offensive could be launched until additional forces could be concentrated and the logistical situation improved . . . A period of relative inactivity was essential.”

This comfortable official declaration of the inevitability of what took place in the autumn of 1944—or rather did not take place—masks complex issues and possibilities. All the paper arguments about the Allies’ logistical difficulties in early September are valid. But a greater field commander than Eisenhower, together with a more vigorous spirit of enterprise than that which prevailed in his armies, might have overcome the difficulties and found means to drive forward into Germany while the Wehrmacht was still reeling. No setback could alter the inevitable outcome of the war, but the Germans used every day of delay to greater advantage than did the Allies. It was unrealistic for Eisenhower to suppose in September that his armies could head straight for Berlin. The sheer mass of German forces still available to defend the Reich militated against a successful one-stop dash for Hitler’s capital. But the Allies could and should have got to the Rhine, beyond which there were no further significant terrain features to assist the defence, before winter imposed its deadly grip upon military movement.

Patton’s Third Army ran out of fuel in eastern France, well before reaching Hitler’s West Wall, the Siegfried Line. Once his tanks were refuelled, they sped onwards to reach the ancient fortress city of Metz, on the Moselle, on 8 September. Patton expected an easy victory here. The planners were oblivious of the strength of the great chain of sunken forts created in a belt around Metz over a period of 200 years. They received a brutal shock. The Germans had garrisoned the forts strongly, and were reinforcing fast. Not only could the Americans not seize them, but enemy shellfire from Metz rained down on Third Army’s bridgeheads thrown across the Moselle.

The U.S. 317th Infantry suffered much misery at the river, beginning on a warm, clear day, 5 September, when the regiment made its first attempt to cross. Rain over American airstrips precluded fighter-bomber support, and it was decided to attack without artillery preparation. The 1/317th jumped off at 0930, crossing a canal over a partly demolished footbridge. At 1000, the unit halted in the face of enemy machine-gun fire, soon afterwards followed by shelling. American counter-battery fire silenced the German artillery, and at 1030 B Company reached the river bank. Almost half an hour later, as the Americans launched their boats, five were destroyed by mortar fire. By 1500, C Company had withdrawn to its start line, while A and B had dug in along the nearby canal. That night, the 1/317th tried again. German concentrations of mortars and machine-gun fire destroyed most of the boats “and demoralized the troops,” according to the corps’ after-action report. Although the battalion had suffered few casualties, a regimental staff officer reported it “unfit for further immediate action.” The 2/317th was late leaving the start line for its own crossing. As it launched its boats in tense silence, a German voice shouted from the far bank: “Halt! Machinen gewehr!” German guns began to fire across the water on fixed lines, and the crossing was abandoned. The regiment’s third battalion got clear over the Moselle by 1500 on 5 September. But energetic German counter-attacks drove in its bridgehead. The Americans retired to the western shore.

The Germans generally fought well, but their weaker units sometimes surprised the Allies by lack of will and skill, while good American soldiers behaved with resolution. In one of the Moselle bridgeheads at Comy on 11 September, B Company of the 11th Infantry was established around a brick factory. In the early hours of the morning, Lieutenant Mitchell Hazam ran into company headquarters shouting “Tanks!” Sergeant Norris Boyer alerted a nearby 57mm anti-tank gun crew, and the company commander Captain Harry Anderson dashed upstairs. An approaching German tank fired at and missed Hazam as he ran across the street. German infantry were following. Anderson ordered everyone to keep absolutely quiet, and to withhold fire. The enemy made no attempt to clear the houses in which the Americans lay. Anderson called in a tank destroyer, which promptly knocked out one German tank. A 57mm gun hit another. Anderson shot one tank commander in his turret with a rifle. The tank destroyer finished off the tank as it tried to escape. Anderson’s men then opened fire on the German infantry to devastating effect, inflicting some twenty-eight casualties, for the loss of only two Americans killed. Just as firing was dying away and the GIs were rounding up another twenty-eight of the attackers who had surrendered, a German officer suddenly appeared in the street with a machine pistol. Sergeant Boyer shot him. B Company’s notable little success was marred by the loss of one nineteen-man platoon, which was presumed captured in its entirety, since no American bodies were found on its positions after the attack. But the action showed how richly determination could be rewarded on the battlefield.

The archives of the European campaign suggest that many American officers were more honest and self-critical about their units’ weaknesses and failures than their counterparts in any other combatant army. It is impressive to observe the frankness of U.S. Army after-action analyses. Lieutenant-Colonel William Simpson, commanding the 2/10th Infantry, submitted a report in September arguing that the drive towards the German border was seriously hampered by excessive caution: “We lost time because of a lack of boldness and aggressiveness on the part of our scouts.” Suggesting that infantry were much too ready to pull back if they met resistance, he highlighted an incident in his own battalion on the Moselle. He was dismayed to discover an entire rifle company preparing to withdraw on its own initiative, after American artillery rounds began to fall short in its sector. When two tank destroyers withdrew from the forward area, “some of the men of my reserve company, whose commander had been killed, started to withdraw. They were checked by a battalion liaison officer.”

“Every day seems like the day before . . . with the rain pouring down,” Lieutenant-Colonel D. K. Reimers of the 90th Division wrote gloomily in his diary on 23 September. After Third Army’s early repulses at Metz, Patton shifted the focus of his advance thirty miles further south, to Nancy. Here his men made good headway east of the river, until they met substantial armoured forces of the German First Army. Thereafter, in the middle days of September, Patton’s forces fought the fiercest tank battles the Allies had known since Normandy.

The Germans feared Patton above all his peers. More than any other Allied commander, his vision of war reflected their own driving urgency. Von Rundstedt’s deployments on the Western Front flattered Patton’s role in Eisenhower’s plans, and reflected German respect for the explosive American’s energies. In September 1944, Army Group B dispatched in haste to Alsace-Lorraine the best new tanks von Rundstedt could muster, and threw them into battle against the American Shermans. Chester Wilmot observed that in September this became the only sector of the entire Western Front where von Rundstedt’s troops could meet the Allies on more or less equal terms. At heavy cost, above all in armour, the Germans checked Third Army. But the American performance showed what able commanders and determined troops could accomplish. Armoured units of von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army attacked near Lunéville on 18 September. In the four days fighting that followed, General John S. Wood, one of the outstanding U.S. tank leaders in Europe, fought his 4th Armored Division to such effect that the Germans were not merely beaten but shattered. 111th Panzer Division, which had arrived in Lorraine with ninety-eight tanks, ended the battle reduced to seven tanks and eighty men. Unusually, American casualties were far smaller than those of the Germans. It is true that many of the Wehrmacht units were new formations, and that their tanks fresh from the factories suffered as severely from mechanical failure as from enemy fire. But these handicaps did not suffice to grant the Allies victory on many other occasions. When the Germans renewed their offensive on 25 September, they made a little ground, but by the end of the month they had run out of steam. The Americans were going nowhere in a hurry in Lorraine, but Third Army had destroyed some of the strongest forces von Rundstedt possessed on the Western Front.

Patton now began to launch a long, bloody series of assaults on the forts of Metz which cost Third Army a thousand casualties a day, a higher rate of loss than the Arnhem battle. Even Patton’s admirers have nothing to say in praise of his Metz attack, which seemed simply to reflect stubborn determination to achieve a declared objective. Captain Jack Gerrie, a company commander in the 11th Infantry, submitted a withering after-action report on the folly of attempting such operations with depleted units made up to strength with raw replacements. “I took a dim view of trying to take Fort Driant with these men,” he wrote.

I knew they were not trained nor hardened . . . We took a crack at Driant, and as expected we couldn’t make it. The three days we spent in the breach of the fort consisted in keeping the men in the line. All the leaders were lost exposing themselves at the wrong time in order to get this accomplished. The new men seemed to lose all sense of reasoning. They left their rifles, flamethrowers, satchel charges and what not laying right where it was. I was disgusted, and so damn mad that I couldn’t see straight. If it had not been for preplanned defensive artillery fire, they [the Germans] would have shoved us clear out of the fort with the calibre of troops we had. Why? The men wouldn’t fight.

In the eyes of Patton’s critics such assaults demonstrated that, for all his brilliance as a pursuit commander, in a slogging match against the German Army he fared no better than any of his rivals. It has continued to bemuse history that he expended so much effort and so many lives on battering Metz once the strength of the German positions there had become plain. Bradley argued that “there was nothing to be gained by pecking away at those forts. It was too costly.” Patton himself wrote to Henry Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, late in October: “I hope that in the final settlement of the war, you insist that the Germans retain Lorraine because I can imagine no greater burden than to be the owner of this nasty country where it rains every day and where the whole wealth of the people consisted in assorted manure piles.” That month, rainfall in Lorraine doubled the average for the season. For the men on the line, conditions were wretched. Mildew attacked leather, rust coated metal, and mud clogged every movement by men or vehicles. Condoms became a universal prophylactic not for sexual activity, but for protecting rifle barrels, gunsights and radio and telephone mouthpieces from the relentless precipitation. It required an effort of will for a man merely to exist through the days and nights in foxholes and ruins, and an even greater one to participate in operations against the enemy.

The Germans possessed some redoubtable formations to throw into the line. “We were still pretty good,” said Sergeant Max Wind of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers, rebuilt after Normandy into a formation of 8,000 men, about half its established strength. “There were some young boys, but we also had some very experienced men. We respected Patton, because we knew that he respected Germany. But the American soldier was nothing like the Russian. Yes, of course, the U.S. had the material. But we never thought a lot of their soldiers. They lacked the motivation we had.”

The U.S. Seventh Army under Patch, having driven north from the Mediterranean, together with the French First under de Lattre de Tassigny, closed up on Patton’s right through the Vosges Mountains to the Swiss border. The French military contribution was small, and almost entirely symbolic. Their formations suffered chronic problems of indiscipline—indeed, French colonial units in Italy and later Germany were sometimes responsible for mass rapes on a Russian scale. The French left to the Americans the mundane tasks of providing supply and support for their fighting units. No one anyway had illusions about the scope for swift progress in the Vosges region, or about the significance of advances in south Lorraine. Harsh though this reality might seem to men obliged to fight and die there, every Allied planner knew that the vital organs of Germany lay in the north, not in the south of the country.

The most painful missed opportunities of the autumn, perhaps of the entire campaign, occurred 120 miles from Metz, in the U.S. First Army’s sector on the German border south of Aachen. On Wednesday 13 September, four days before Market Garden was launched, the U.S. VII Corps made tentative penetrations of Hitler’s West Wall. The attacking forces were commanded by Major-General J. Lawton Collins, “Lightning Joe,” the ablest and most combative American corps commander in north-west Europe. For the first three days, Collins’s men made good headway. The fortifications were not inherently strong, for Hitler had never expected to need them. They encompassed an interlocking network of pillboxes, for which the German Army Group B had to scrabble to find keys after the August retreat, to allow defenders to occupy them. Most were protected by a thicket of concrete “dragons’ teeth,” designed to arrest armoured vehicles. Early American VII Corps operations encountered only German Home Guard units. By the weekend, however, three days after the first American incursions, substantial regular forces were moving into the line. Even pillboxes became formidable obstacles if they were manned by men who knew what they were doing.

E Company of the American 28th Division’s 109th Infantry fought a typical little action on the morning of 14 September near Harspelt, just inside the German border. The company was depleted by casualties from mortar fire even before it began its attack on the West Wall. It was commanded by a first lieutenant, because its commander had been wounded the previous day. Technical-Sergeant Tom Beers was told to take a twelve-strong platoon with a tank to seize a pillbox. While it was still dark, Beers walked back into Harspelt to show his accompanying tank the way forward. The soldiers crossed their start line at 1030, following the Sherman, and quickly came under mortar and artillery fire. The tank stopped. Its commander called down to Beers, demanding to know when he should stop firing and—by implication—advancing. “Use your head,” said the sergeant irritably. One squad set out towards a pillbox 350 yards away. They were stopped by wire. Beers went forward himself and started cutting it. Then a machine-gun opened fire on the Americans, causing some men to scurry back down the road. One sergeant, Moulding, picked up a BAR light machine-gun and continued forward with three riflemen. Beers said: “It was getting to be quite a run, and the machine-gun fire wasn’t anything to sneeze at.” He shouted back at the men who lay prone fifty yards behind him: “Keep coming—these heinie bastards can’t hit us!” He moved forward himself, and others followed. Nine Americans finally reached the pillbox. Beers fired his rifle into its embrasure, “I guess just for my morale’s sake.” He ran round the back, throwing two grenades to keep the Germans’ heads down. Then they laid a 10-pound satchel charge by the door, which failed to explode. The rest of the company was now 200 yards behind. There was a brief pause before an NCO of another platoon arrived, carrying a new satchel charge. This exploded without doing much visible damage to the pillbox, but evidently shocked its inhabitants. Beers left two men to watch the entrance, and scouted warily around its surrounding fire trenches and sleeping quarters, throwing grenades in front of him, though the positions proved to be empty. Then one of the watchers by the entrance hollered: “They’re coming out!” Twenty-one Germans led by a captain emerged from the pillbox with their hands up. One attempted to make a run for it and was shot. The rest were taken prisoner.

This little skirmish was typical of a hundred others up and down the West Wall, save that attackers elsewhere often met more determined resistance. To the men of the 109th who advanced up the road from Harspelt, the overwhelming superiority of the Allied armies and the strategic weakness of the Germans possessed no significance. They knew only that their depleted company was being asked to assault the vaunted Siegfried Line, with precious little help from anybody else. “I think that the propaganda on the strength of the Siegfried Line has created a feeling of timidity in attacking the defences,” Lieutenant-Colonel H. G. McFealey wrote to Bradley on 22 September. “Once they have had some success, the feeling is gone.”

As with many units in many battles, most of the men involved in the 109th’s little action behaved cautiously and hesitantly. The outcome was decided by the persistence and courage of a handful of NCOs and riflemen. So much depended upon a small minority of such men. As the bold and experienced soldiers were wounded or killed through the weeks that followed, they proved ever harder to replace. The pace of the Allied advance became progressively more sluggish. Lieutenant Witt of the 109th was especially scornful about the behaviour of supporting tanks: “If one gets hit, they all turn tail and run, and it surely is hard to get your men up when that happens.”

South of VII Corps, V Corps also made initial penetrations. But these were halted by German reinforcements. The Americans reported, correctly, that they faced 9th Panzer Division. Its armoured strength was reduced to just three tanks. But as usual the Germans’ professionalism and energy made the most of tiny resources. They counter-attacked again and again, pushing at exposed flanks, about which they considered the Americans morbidly sensitive.

In the chaos of a battlefield on which his forces were widely scattered and short of supplies and ammunition, V Corps’ commander, Gerow, decided that he must consolidate, which meant pulling back his frail bridgeheads across the Sauer river. On Sunday 17 September, attacking American troops of VII Corps likewise encountered counter-attacking Germans head on, and stopped. At the time, this seemed a mere momentary check rather than a momentous issue. Yet just as the champions of tennis tournaments are those who play every point as if it was a match-decider, so the commanders who achieve greatness are those who fight every battle as if their nation’s fate hinged upon it. General Courtney Hodges, commander of First Army, to whom Collins and Gerow reported, was a weak, nervous and indecisive officer. At this moment, had Hodges gripped the battle, thrown everything into pushing Gerow’s corps forward, great things might have been achieved. Supply difficulties were real enough. These could be blamed partly upon Montgomery’s activities on the road to Arnhem, and partly upon Patton’s impetuous advance further south, which deprived Hodges of the opportunity to commit XIX Corps to support the advance on the West Wall in the vital days of mid-September. First Army was obliged to send too many men to cover Patton’s left flank, instead of throwing weight on its own left, towards the Ruhr. Yet, even with all these difficulties, American strength in the Aachen sector was vastly greater than that of the Germans in men, tanks, guns. On 10 September, Eisenhower was still sublimely confident that the Germans could not hold the West Wall, and that Hodges’s forces should be able to get to the Ruhr without serious delay. Instead small groups of Germans, using their weapons aggressively, pinned down much larger American forces, a recurring condition castigated by such able U.S. generals as Gavin. A fatal absence of boldness and determination robbed First Army of a breakthrough. Ground which could have been easily seized in September had to be fought across yard by bloody yard through the months that followed.

Meanwhile, further south, along a front of almost sixty miles through the Ardennes along the Luxembourg border, no significant attempt was made to move forward throughout the next three months, until Hitler launched his great offensive in the forests. The region was almost undefended by the Germans for most of September. The Ardennes had been ruled out of contention by SHAEF, leaving tens of thousands of Americans to fight the terrible battles of Aachen, the Roer dams and Hürtgen Forest, in the narrow sector further north which, the planners had decided, offered the only plausible path east into Germany.

The American battles around the Siegfried Line in September and early October have attracted nothing like the historic attention lavished upon Normandy, Arnhem, the Bulge. Yet in those days, and in that area, perished the last realistic prospect that the Allies might achieve a breakthrough to the heart of Germany in 1944. Thereafter, while it may be suggested that the Allied armies could have performed better in the November battles, it is impossible to argue that a stronger showing would have altered the timetable of the war. The decisive delays were those suffered by Montgomery at Antwerp, and by Bradley and Hodges in cracking the Siegfried Line around Aachen. Once the Germans had been granted a respite to rebuild their forces, the combination of winter weather, supply difficulties and strengthening resistance was bound to be fatal to swift progress.

It is fascinating to speculate what might have happened had Patton and not Hodges commanded First Army, or even 12th Army Group. For all that has been said about the failures of Third Army in Alsace-Lorraine, Patton was the best driver and motivator of formation commanders in north-west Europe. It was his misfortune, and that of the Allies, that in consequence of his disgrace in Sicily he now commanded forces in a sector which could not plausibly be decisive. For all Patton’s fame, his forces were doomed to play a subordinate strategic role. Many of Patton’s actions, and much of his bombast, in the winter of 1944 represented an attempt to wrest strategic primacy for the army under his command, in the face of logic and the instincts of almost all the Allied planners. Patton’s genius for self-promotion, together with such striking achievements as Third Army’s intervention in the Ardennes battle in December 1944, has retained for his soldiers the avid attention of history. Yet the critical battles were fought, and the gravest disappointments suffered, in First Army’s sector further north. If Patton had commanded First Army, even granted his limitations in a tough battlefield slogging match, he might have provided the impetus which Hodges could not give. In Alsace-Lorraine, Patton faced substantial German forces, and it is unsurprising that Third Army failed to achieve a breakthrough. Even if they had done so, a salient driven into southern Germany would not have meant much. Had Patton been employed further north, however, he might have been able to secure a decisive penetration of the West Wall in the autumn of 1944, and changed the course of the north-west Europe campaign.

Three distinguished British officers who fought in Holland that winter and later became army commanders believed that the Allied cause could have profited immeasurably from giving a more important role to Patton. Lieutenant Edwin Bramall said: “I wonder if it would have taken so long if Patton or Rommel had been commanding.” Captain David Fraser believed that the northern axis of advance was always hopeless, because the terrain made progress so difficult. He suggests: “We might have won in 1944 if Eisenhower had reinforced Patton. Patton was a real doer. There were bigger hills further south, but fewer rivers.” Brigadier Michael Carver argued that Montgomery’s single thrust could never have worked: “Patton’s army should have been leading the U.S. 12th Army Group.” Such speculations can never be tested, but it seems noteworthy that two British officers who later became field-marshals and another who became a senior general believed afterwards that the American front against Germany in the winter of 1944 offered far greater possibilities than that of the British in Holland, for which Montgomery continued to cherish such hopes.

STORM OF STEEL

FOR SOLDIERS WHO took part, the north-west Europe campaign seldom looked like a clash of mighty armies, after the fashion of Waterloo or Gettysburg. Rather, it was an interminable series of local collisions involving a few hundred men and a score or two of armoured vehicles, amid some village or hillside or patch of woodland between Switzerland and the North Sea. Only the generals grasped the big picture—or not, as the case might be. For the student of history, it is impossible to follow the course of events without some understanding of how the soldiers of the Second World War fought their battles.

All the combatants accepted some common tactical principles, but applied them in different ways and emphasized different skills. The Germans were frequently obliged to jettison all the rules in 1944–45, because they had to fight with whatever resources were at hand. Theory held good, however, whatever the lapses in practice. Infantry divisions—each 15,000 strong in the case of the Americans, often less for the British and much less for the Germans—supported by modest numbers of tanks, started an attack. The footsoldiers were expected to occupy enemy forward positions after these had been pounded by artillery. Preliminary bombardment sometimes continued for several hours before an assault, with the intention of paralysing those defenders who were not killed. Once the enemy’s front was broken, it became the responsibility of armoured divisions to leapfrog the infantry and exploit success by dashing on across country.

If an advance was sustained through some days or even weeks, fresh troops were passed through the front to take over the attack, as spearheads became exhausted or depleted by casualties. Because some divisions were far more effective than others, all commanders overtaxed their best formations—for instance, the airborne on the Allied side, the Waffen SS on the German—by giving them the toughest jobs again and again. During periods of static fighting, armoured divisions were usually held in reserve behind the front, while infantrymen manned forward positions, supported in daylight by a few tanks or self-propelled guns. Tanks seldom moved at night, because their crews could not see or hear, and became vulnerable to surprise even by infantrymen with grenades. As darkness fell, armoured crews pulled back from the front to refuel and perform maintenance, leaving infantry to hold the line.

When an infantry battalion—800–1,000 strong, but usually under-strength—attacked an enemy position, two of its three rifle companies walked or ran forward in extended line on a frontage of perhaps 400 yards, followed by battalion headquarters, with the third rifle company bringing up the rear, in reserve. The attackers aspired to silence the enemy’s defences by bombardment before the infantry left their start lines, but few units in few battles were lucky enough to be granted a walkover. An infantry commander’s troubles started when the defenders opened fire with machine-guns and mortars, and enemy forward observers called down shellfire. A common cliché was seized upon by fighting soldiers of every nationality to describe their predicament: “all hell broke loose.” The instinct of any normal human being when confronted by mortal peril is to take cover. Again and again in north-west Europe, attacking infantry “went to ground,” sometimes within a few minutes of leaving their start line. The greatest challenge for an officer was to keep his men going forward. Major-General Gerald Templer expressed the issue well, lecturing to a British junior leaders’ course. Imagine yourself leading a platoon up a quiet country lane, he said: “Suddenly, all hell is let loose. You look up, and your platoon sergeant’s guts are hanging on a tree beside you. The platoon is turning to run—it is then, gentlemen, that you must grip those men.” One of Templer’s students recalled: “He paused in absolute silence and, holding out his arm, tightened his fist slowly to give graphic illustration to his words. It was superb theatre, and we sat enthralled.”

In the U.S. Army, some gap between the capability of line infantry and that of elite formations such as the Rangers and paratroopers was inevitable, since the latter attracted the most enthusiastic soldiers. Yet, even allowing for this, there was a notable contrast between the energy of the U.S. airborne divisions, along with a few other outstanding formations, and the lassitude of less proficient units. The 82nd and 101st Airborne showed that the American fighting man at his best—no less an amateur than the rest of the armies—possessed no superior. Yet few other U.S. infantry units matched their determination, leadership and tactical skill. For those of us who consider General James Gavin among the finest fighting soldiers America produced in the twentieth century, it is sobering to study his lacerating diary criticisms of American infantry performance.

Captain William DuPuy, who ended the war commanding the 1/357th Infantry, observed sardonically that he would have been happy to lead a much smaller battalion, if it could have been made up of men who would fight. In every battle, a small proportion of soldiers did all the work. Likewise, Captain Willie Knowlton of the 7th Armored Division said: “A few guys carry your attack, and the rest of the people sort of participate and arrive on the objective shortly after everybody else.” William DuPuy said that he would willingly lead an attack with just forty of a company’s 200 men, if he could choose the forty: “The average man, like nine out of ten, does not have an instinct for the battlefield, doesn’t relish it, and will not act independently except under direct orders.” These wise words miss one brutal point: even if only forty men out of 200 fought effectively or even fired their weapons, the presence of others, the non-fighters, was necessary to divide the enemy’s fire. In other words, while the contribution of forty men might be decisive in winning a battle, the other 160 served an essential, if unwelcome, purpose. They were, quite literally, “cannon fodder.”

Skilled and experienced soldiers were inculcated with the understanding that, when making an attack under fire, it was vital to keep moving. First, this was the only way to win the war. Second—and a more persuasive argument for those at the sharp end—if men halted on open ground between the lines, they became highly vulnerable to mortar and artillery fire. Paradoxically, the closer the attackers came to their enemy, the safer they might become, because he was obliged to stop shelling them. Unfortunately, however, many infantrymen never grasped this, and lacked both effective training and determined leadership. Attacks were especially difficult to control and sustain in wooded country or at night. Where men were out of sight of higher authority, it became hard to prevent them from melting away into cover. German officers complained about this almost as often as Allied ones.

A post-campaign U.S. Army report echoed this view: “Too much cannot be said about the necessity for bold and aggressive action on the part of the infantry. The desire to stop and dig in when first fired upon must be discouraged . . . [Observers reported that] as soon as troops came under heavy mortar and artillery fire, they stopped their forward movement. Unless they moved forward promptly to come to close grips with the enemy, unnecessary casualties were sustained.” Half a century earlier, the American writer Ambrose Bierce offered wry advice to the ambitious professional soldier: “Always try and get yourself killed.” Few of the men in Eisenhower’s armies, however, were ambitious professionals. “The colonel’s the only real soldier here,” Private Charles Felix wrote in his diary, “the rest of us are just civilians.” These were citizens of democracies, imbued since birth with all the inhibitions and decencies of their societies, in profound contrast to the ethos cultivated within the armies of Hitler and Stalin.

“An infantry assault . . . in many instances can be described as mass confusion,” observed a young U.S. platoon commander. It required high courage and determination by officers and NCOs to keep men moving, especially when every visible leader was a target. The first advice Private “Red” Thompson was given by his buddies when he joined the 346th Infantry as a replacement in the winter of 1944 was never to stand anywhere near the company commander in action. The captain invariably carried his map in front of him. The company reckoned that their officer must be conspicuous to every German for miles.

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* ⁶ 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.

“The Americans seemed to us very green,” said Captain Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, a veteran gunner officer with 9th Panzer Division.

They operated by the book. If you responded by doing something not in the book, they panicked. It usually took them three days after an attack to prepare for the next one. We became accustomed to leave only an outpost screen in front for them to bombard, with the main defences positioned further back, so that their initial attack hit thin air. It took the Allies a ridiculously long time to get into Germany. If they had used our blitzkrieg tactics, they could have been in Berlin in weeks.

“With the Allies it was always the same,” said Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder, a twenty-four-year-old regular officer who was adjutant of the 18th Volksgrenadiers.

They attacked in daylight, starting with artillery, then the tanks. If we had just one or two machine-guns still operational, we could make them stop and wait until next day. There was a basic difference between the Allied approach and our own. The Allies would never move without reconnaissance and preparation. We often expected to have to do it on the run, off the cuff. The last time we attacked in Russia, we formed up on the start line straight off the train.

Yet Sergeant Helmut Günther of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers observed sensibly: “It wasn’t that the Allies were cowardly—they just didn’t need to take chances. Slow? They were careful.”

The most vital and difficult tactical relationship was that between tanks and infantry. Advancing armour had to be protected by accompanying footsoldiers. It was the job of a tank to use its gun to deal with its enemy counterparts, preferably at a range of several hundred yards. But when, as constantly happened, armoured vehicles found themselves facing enemy infantry equipped with the deadly Panzerfaust, or meeting well-concealed anti-tank guns, then a tank crew could see little through the narrow vision slits of their steel box. They could not readily use their guns upon short-range targets. Yet “tank terror” was a phenomenon familiar to the Allied infantryman, who also convinced himself, usually fallaciously, that every enemy armoured vehicle was a giant Tiger. “The tank’s inherent weaknesses scarcely featured in [the infantryman’s] thinking,” in the words of a British analyst of the problem. Unskilled footsoldiers failed to perceive that the monsters became chronically vulnerable at close quarters, if defenders kept their nerve. When Allied tanks encountered a German blocking position, they were obliged to stop or even pull back a few hundred yards, until supporting infantry could work their way forward and eliminate the enemy with small arms and grenades.

It was standard German practice to create blocking positions with a mix of one or two well-concealed tanks or assault guns—turretless tanks which profited from their low silhouette—protected by a ring of infantry with Panzerfausts. Which attackers should approach first—footsoldiers or armour? Throughout the north-west Europe campaign, again and again advancing Allied forces played out a black comic music-hall sketch: “After you, Claude—no, after you, Cecil.” Soldiers argued under fire about who should do the business. “Teach the men to work with tanks and not be afraid of them,” urged Lieutenant Jack M. Brown of the U.S. Army. Attacking infantry often huddled behind their own tanks for protection from small-arms fire, which was fair enough. But then, if a Sherman suddenly lurched backwards down the road after spotting Panzerfausts—or, more likely, after two or three of its consorts had been knocked out—the accompanying infantry were prone to scamper backwards too. It was physically difficult for infantry leaders to communicate with armoured crews, shut down in their steel boxes under fire, even when telephones were installed at the rear of tank hulls. In both American and British armies, there was constant reciprocal backbiting. Tank crews complained that their supporting infantry lagged behind, often wilfully. Corporal Patrick Hennessy’s squadron commander said bluntly to his accompanying infantry officer: “If you won’t get in front and clear the fausts, we’re not going on.” Hennessy said: “The infantry were always trying to crowd against the tank for protection, and we kept telling them to keep away. If we hit a mine, the tank would only throw a track, but they would all be blown to bits.”

Infantrymen, in their turn, protested that their supporting tanks were too cautious. “During the advance to Metz the tanks . . . worked wonderfully with doughboys, [but after Metz] I began to notice the change,” wrote Major William Sheehan, a staff officer of the 377th Infantry. “As we went on further the tanks became more and more cautious, and the doughs were asked to do more and more. Of course the tanks are going to suffer losses. Who doesn’t? But the faith first established in the tanks is now lacking.” There was an ugly incident during 30th Division’s actions on the Siegfried Line in September, when Shermans of 2nd Armored Division supporting the infantry against a German counter-attack suddenly discovered that they were all in need of “urgent maintenance.” Lieutenant Roy Dixon, a Sherman troop commander, said: “The infantry always thought: ‘As soon as anything nasty happens, the tanks push off.’ ” Captain “Dim” Robbins, an infantryman, said: “One always felt that the tanks were having a rather cushy time. Co-operation between infantry and armour was pretty poor.”

It should be remarked, however, that the Germans were not immune to the same problem. “The infantry commander sees in the tank a cure for all difficult battle situations,” lamented a combat report of 1/24th Panzer Regiment on the Eastern Front in February 1945.

The infantry commander sees in the tank a powerful armoured monster with a huge gun, without recognising its limitations such as weak side armour, limited vision and manoeuvrability . . . Some infantrymen expect tanks only to move in one direction—forwards. Every necessary halt and pause for observation required by armoured tactics makes them impatient . . . On 14 February tanks were engaged in street fighting in the village of Croesz. Our own infantry didn’t close up with them, even though our gunfire had pinned down the Russian positions. The tanks were obliged to pull back to the infantry positions. In addition, two tanks became total write-offs after hitting mines. Many absurdly extravagant proposals made by infantrymen are simply ignored by tank officers, otherwise the losses would be higher.

When an Allied advance was going well, a tank troop or company led the way until it met resistance or—most frequently—until its leading vehicles were knocked out. Many units rotated the dubious honour of heading a column, because in the course of a given day whoever fulfilled this role could expect to lose his tank if he was lucky, and his life if he was not. It was impossible to avoid heavy tank losses in an advance, whichever army was doing the attacking. But it was a source of constant dismay and frustration to Allied commanders that, after a couple of Shermans had been brewed up by a small German force on the edge of a wood or at the entrance to a village, it frequently required hours to organize and carry out the necessary infantry attack to clear the way for tanks to renew the advance. Armour–infantry co-operation worked best when footsoldiers worked with the same tank battalion for weeks at a stretch, officers getting to know each other. But this was often impossible. Every armoured commander complained that he lacked sufficient infantry support, a reflection of the chronic Allied shortage of riflemen. The British 21st Army Group was armour-heavy, because armoured formations required less manpower. Montgomery’s forces suffered from their imbalance of infantry and tanks throughout the campaign.

The faust, vastly superior German counterpart of the American bazooka anti-tank rocket and British spring-loaded bomb-throwing PIAT, was the decisive weapon in enabling Hitler’s armies to continue the war until May 1945, given the weakness of their artillery and almost complete absence of air support. German units were prodigally supplied with fausts. Even a poorly trained teenager with the courage to ambush a tank at a range of thirty to sixty yards could expect to cripple it with a faust in his hands, and many did so. The Germans also exploited the use of mortars, “poor man’s artillery.” Experienced German units equipped themselves with machine-guns—the excellent MG42, with an alarmingly higher rate of fire than its allied counterparts—on a scale far in excess of their paper entitlement. They knew that on the battlefield few men fired their rifles, and even fewer hit anything when they did so. MG42s gave a small number of troops the ability to generate formidably heavy fire, and enabled German units to “punch above their weight” to the end. Their ingenuity was remarkable. It was not uncommon for a German machine-gunner covering an important line—a road or rail track—at night deliberately to fire tracer well above head-height. This encouraged Allied soldiers who saw the streaks above them to suppose that it was safe to walk upright. Meanwhile, a second gunner without tracer would fire much closer to the ground, his bursts invisible until they caused men to fall.

As S-3 of the 357th Infantry, Captain William DuPuy analysed German tactical skills:

In defence, they took pieces of terrain and knitted them together into positions from which they were able to fire in all directions . . . they used cover and concealment, and they used imagination . . . A handful of Germans could hold up a regiment by siting their weapons properly. If they had two assault guns and 25 men, they put one assault gun up one side of the road, perhaps on a reverse slope firing through a saddle, and another one behind a stone house, firing across the road. They protected these with some infantry and had a couple of guys with Panzerfausts up on the road itself, or just off the road in pits or behind a house. An imaginative Allied commander could send a company round them in a wide encircling movement. But sometimes a unit would stay there and fight all day against 25 men and two assault guns. That happened all too often.

In attack, they were masters of suppression using machine-pistols. They’d spray our front, drive our soldiers to the ground, and then they’d come in on us. The more they shot, the less our people shot, and the more dangerous it got, until finally, when our people had stopped shooting, we knew the Germans were either going to overrun us, or capture some of our people, or kill our people by getting right on top of us.

DuPuy described his horror on finding that a company commander in his unit had positioned his men on a forward slope in full view of the enemy: “It was murder. Finally, after they killed and wounded maybe 20 men . . . the rest just got up and bolted out of there and went over the reverse slope, which is where they should have been in the first place.”

Every German soldier was taught the doctrine of so-called “active defence.” This required a focus not upon holding forward positions to the last man, but rather upon launching fierce counter-attacks while attackers were still milling in disarray upon captured positions. Especially towards the end of the war, on both Eastern and Western Fronts the Germans would man their forward positions thinly, deploying their main forces further back, hopefully beyond the reach of artillery bombardment. When Allied attackers had made their initial advance, occupied German forward positions and given way to physical and mental weariness after a great surge of effort, the Germans counter-attacked, repeatedly evicting Allied troops from positions they had just won. Allied commanders sought to drum into every unit the importance of digging in quickly on an objective. But this was easier said than done. German will and energy for such aggressive tactics remained astonishing to the end, even if there was a decline in the skill of the soldiers available to carry them out. It was a precept of the entire war, that the German Army always detected and punished an enemy’s mistakes.

The qualitative superiority of German tanks to American and British ones was another critical factor in the Wehrmacht’s performance against the Allies. Allied planners, and especially the U.S. War Department, made a fundamental error in 1943. They recognized the weakness of American tank guns and protective armour against those of the enemy. But they concluded that the Allies’ quantitative advantage was so great that the qualitative issue did not matter. “Before we went into Normandy,” wrote an American armoured officer, “we had been led to believe that the M4 Sherman was . . . thoroughly capable of dealing with German armor on an equal basis. We soon learned that the opposite was true.” His own 3rd Armored Division took 232 Shermans into France, and lost 648 completely destroyed, together with another 700 crippled but repairable—a total loss of 580 per cent of strength. The fact that such losses were readily replaceable reflected the Allies’ huge resources. But, for men obliged to contest the battlefield against panzers, awareness of the inadequacy of their own tanks against those of the enemy profoundly influenced their combat behaviour. After painful early experience, most U.S. armoured units gave orders for platoon commanders to ride third in a column, not first.

For a tank crew, it was irrelevant to know that their own army possessed an overall superiority of anything up to ten to one. They were confronted only with the immediate reality that if they fired at a German Tiger or even Panther, their shell was likely to bounce off, unless it struck a weak point below the gun mantle or on the flank. Meanwhile, if an enemy’s shell hit a Sherman, the notorious “Ronson” or “Tommy cooker,” it was likely not merely to stop, but to burn. “The Sherman was a very efficient workhorse, but as a fighting tank it was a disaster,” said Captain David Fraser. The first time Corporal Patrick Hennessy fired his Sherman’s gun at a Tiger tank, he watched the shell hit its hull, then ricochet straight up into the air. “I thought: ‘To hell with this!,’ and pulled back.” Who could blame Allied armoured units for displaying caution amid such realities?

The Germans envied the quantity of U.S. weapons and equipment. But American soldiers complained about the poor quality of much of their own fighting matériel against that of the enemy. A deluge of field reports descended on the U.S. War Department almost to the end of the war demanding more infantry for armoured units, a better tank gun, fewer dud shells, a better-armoured tank destroyer, tent poles which did not snap, combat jackets without a sheen that glittered dangerously in sunshine, a less clumsy sub-machine gun than the Thompson, genuinely smokeless ammunition, an anti-tank gun more impressive than the feeble 57mm, better field glasses, stronger divisional artillery with a less extravagant allocation of transport. Commanders wanted an infantry anti-tank weapon of the quality of the faust: “Numerous cases have been reported where bazooka teams have succeeded in immobilizing tanks, but since they are unable to destroy them, they themselves have been killed by retaliating fire from the tank, and the tank retrieved by the enemy.”

By contrast, every German was dismayed by the ubiquity and impact of Allied air power. Any German vehicle movement in daylight was likely to be rewarded by fighter-bomber attack, of an effectiveness unknown on the Eastern Front. The Russians never matched the sophistication of Allied wireless ground control. The Allies profited hugely, of course, from the fact that their own vehicles could move freely behind the front by day or night, with the Luftwaffe driven from the skies. Yet almost all Germany’s soldiers found it less painful to fight in the west than the east, because the Americans seldom troubled them during the hours of darkness. When Corporal Henry Metelmann was transferred to the west after three years on the Eastern Front, he was amazed to discover that the enemy seemed to undertake no patrolling: “Had they been Russians, they would have given us no rest. Psychologically, I found the drastic change from Russia very confusing.” Especially during the winter months, with only some eight hours of daylight, night respites were priceless to the Germans. They enabled units to rearm, resupply and redeploy without interference save from random artillery harassing fire. It is also important to remember that there were many, many days in the winter of 1944 when characteristic European overcast prevented the Allies from using their air power even in daylight.

ON THE WESTERN FRONT, the war was conducted with much greater humanity than in the east. A man had a better chance of being taken prisoner alive and treated decently. Attitudes in the rival armies varied widely, however, according to the circumstances of the moment. An angry German officer emptied a Luger at “Dim” Robbins after the British captured his positions. Fortunately, Robbins was wearing a heavy tweed coat, which absorbed most of the bullets. Only one hit flesh, removing the end of a finger holding a Sten gun. Soon afterwards, the German was brought in, covered in blood. Robbins’s sergeant-major said comfortingly: “I’ll take him behind that hedge, sir, and finish him off.” Robbins had to dissuade the NCO from doing so. Wehrmacht Sergeant Otto Cranz’s father, who had been a PoW of the Russians in the First World War, always advised his son that if he was captured he should do his utmost to reach the enemy’s rear areas as quickly as possible. Front-line troops were most likely to shoot a prisoner, not least out of envy that a man destined for a camp was being granted a ticket to survive the war, denied to those left behind to continue the struggle.

Captain John Regan of the 357th Infantry “considered it bad psychology to treat prisoners well when first captured . . . [It] would be like congratulating a loser of a football game. We are here to kill Germans, not to baby them.” Lieutenant Tisch of the German 5th Infantry offered a mirror image of Regan’s view: “Front line troops deplore the attitude towards prisoners displayed by the rear echelons, such as giving them cigarettes, candy bars and other familiarities. Our soldiers must be endowed with a hatred and distrust of the enemy in order to pursue the war successfully.” During one of the bloody Moselle crossings Captain Jack Gerrie, a company commander in the 11th Infantry, was enraged to see the Germans shooting down American medics trying to retrieve wounded men after the action. Instead, his men forced German prisoners to go out and retrieve the casualties. When the enemy shot them too, “finally we said ‘to hell with it’ and shot the whole damn bunch [of prisoners].” The highlighted phrase has been deleted in pencil from the U.S. National Archive’s copy of the divisional after-action report. Some sixty German PoWs were killed by the U.S. 11th Armored Division, new to combat, whose men believed for some hours that they were not supposed to take prisoners. Patton wrote in his diary of “some unfortunate incidents in the shooting of prisoners. (I hope we can conceal this).”

Almost every soldier on both sides shared a hatred of snipers, which frequently caused them to be shot out of hand if captured. There was no logic or provision in the Geneva Convention to justify such action. Sniping merely represented the highest refinement of the infantry soldier’s art. Its exercise required courage and skill. Yet sniping made the random business of killing, in which they were all engaged, become somehow personal and thus unacceptable to ordinary footsoldiers. Snipers were readily identified by the bruise and sometimes cuts inflicted by the recoil of a rifle with a telescopic sight tightly affixed to a man’s right eye. The CO of the U.S. 143rd Infantry reported that his men were most reluctant to use sniper rifles themselves, “because they think they will be shot if captured.” This was not a delusion.

Local truces not infrequently took place between Germans and British or American troops, to allow wounded men to be removed from the battlefield. There was a notable incident in the Belgian village of Bure on 3 January 1945. During three days of bitter fighting between the British 13 Para and German panzergrenadiers supported by a tank, the battalion doctor David Tibbs was treating wounded men when his sergeant, Scott, reported that there were some badly wounded men in a house on the front line, and he was going to get them out. Tibbs, preoccupied with his work, acquiesced: “the Germans had a pretty good record of respecting the red cross in our sector.” Accompanied by the battalion padre, Sergeant Scott slowly drove an ambulance with a large red-cross flag up the main street. Firing on both sides stopped. Stretcher-bearers had begun to bring out the wounded when they heard the roar of a tank engine. A Panther clattered up the street towards them. It stopped by the ambulance, and the hatch opened. A German appeared, and admonished them in perfect English: “This time I let you do it—next time, I shoot!” He closed the hatch. The tank lurched back to the German line. The ambulance finished its work and drove to the rear. The battle resumed. Even on the British front, this episode provoked lasting astonishment. “Why were the Germans so accommodating?” mused Dr. Tibbs. “They must have hoped that we would behave in the same way in similar circumstances, and by and large, we did.” It was unthinkable that anything of the kind could have happened in the east.

Most men were less fearful of death than of being maimed. As Private Tony Carullo of the 2nd Infantry walked up a road, he heard a shell and leaped aside into a ditch. When he climbed out again, he found that four men carrying a casualty in a shelter half (or groundsheet) had been obliterated: “There were body parts all over the road, one guy’s nerves were still reacting, everything was mangled. You weren’t scared you were going to die—you were scared of getting mangled up like those guys.” This fear was echoed on the other side of the hill: “You were not afraid of being killed—you feared being horribly wounded, or taken prisoner by the Soviets,” observed Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt of the Luftwaffe flak.

Because battles are fought by men who wear uniforms and carry weapons, it is easy to forget that, in the Second World War, the vast majority of those who served in every army did not think of themselves as soldiers. They were civilians, who strove even upon the battlefield to secrete a part of themselves from their military superiors and soldierly functions, from all the horrors around them. Even as they saluted, fired weapons or sheltered from bombardment, in their innermost selves most cherished the conviction that these horrors did not represent reality, that real life remained the small town or great city from which they had come; their loved ones; the civilian jobs they prayed desperately to survive to return to. Corporal Iolo Lewis said: “The whole experience didn’t seem real to me. It was something big going on, that I was just a tiny part of. We knew so little about what was happening—our field of vision was so small.” Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger of the U.S. 84th Division observed drily: “I cannot say that digging foxholes or carrying a heavy pack was my idea of fun. It’s not what you’re brought up to do, as a nice middle-class Jewish boy. But, for me, it was the way I got to know America.”

Some American soldiers enjoyed the chance granted to them by the war to see the world, especially if they were not required to earn their passage by service with infantry or armour. “For my generation,” wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who served in France with America’s intelligence service the OSS, “the Second World War was the supreme experience. And for many not killed or maimed, it was a liberating experience, annulling routine expectations, providing new contexts and challenges, testing abilities, widening horizons and opportunities, nourishing honesty, individuality, complexity, irony, stoicism. Above all, war was a reminder of the savagery of life.” Private Rueben Cohen came from the lower east side of New York. He enjoyed a much harsher and less glamorous war than Schlesinger, yet as he travelled from North Africa through Sicily into France as a field artilleryman with the 1st Division, his thoughts often veered along the same path as those of the historian, albeit expressed in less elegant language: “Gee, I’ll have something to talk about if I get through the war.” But Cohen was a mature man of thirty-one, whom the boys of his battery called “Pop.” Most soldiers were at least a decade younger, naive and innocent.

Like millions of young Americans, twenty-year-old Corporal Roy Ferlazzo from Jersey City found Europe a bewildering place. He was disgusted by primitive French notions of hygiene, and by his first sight of a bidet. A teetotaller, he felt no urge to join off-duty drinking orgies, nor for that matter to chase girls: “Very few of us were sexually active.” Where some men became ambitious looters of cameras, pistols, binoculars, Ferlazzo’s simple tastes confined him to pipes—the smoking kind—of which he amassed an impressive collection by the end of the campaign. From being a confused, frightened, very homesick young soldier at the outset, he learned to accept the army, and the war, without deep commitment, but also without much complaint. He simply lived each day as it came, and did the job he was asked to do, in the manner of millions of other young Americans shipped to Europe. Even the ubiquitous destruction of villages and cities made little impact on him: “I guess it was the same in the Crusades with swords and shields.” His unit was lucky. It suffered a few casualties from shrapnel, but lost not a single man killed. Like most soldiers in the Western allied armies who were spared the whitest heat of combat, he traversed Europe amid the grimmest events of the twentieth century without being significantly touched by them.

An American officer combing abandoned Belgian houses for furniture for the mess was embarrassed to come upon a girl of seven, living with her three-year-old sister and eighty-year-old grandmother “in indescribably cold and dirty conditions.” He sought consoling words for them only to be cut short by a Belgian. “They are collaborationists,” he said dismissively. Few soldiers engaged in any meaningful fashion with the local civilians who clung to their ruins in the middle of the battlefield. The passing warriors merely drove or fought their way past them, throwing occasional gum or candy. Most men regarded local people with little more interest than exhibits glimpsed through the bars of a foreign zoo, unless they were young, female and pretty.

The American and British armies contained a few eager warriors, from Patton downwards, who embraced the experience of combat. “I remember wondering what life after the war would be like,” wrote Brigadier Michael Carver, a professional soldier commanding a British armoured brigade. “Would I miss the intensity of an active life, lived to the full close to nature, as life on the battlefield, for all its fears and frightfulness at times, undoubtedly was? I was afraid I might.” By contrast, the vast majority of those who fought in infantry or tanks simply yearned desperately for the war, and their own exposure to risk, to be over. Most men who thought at all—and many did not—felt quietly conscious of the justice of the Allied cause. “We were absolutely certain we were right,” said Captain Lord Carrington, a future British foreign secretary. “It made a lot of difference.”

Yet a critical divide persisted between the Eastern and Western Fronts in the Second World War: most American and British soldiers did not share the bitter hatred for their enemy which prevailed among the Russians. GIs or Tommies were subject to flashes of passion and rage when they were frightened, or when their unit was suffering heavy losses. But, once the adrenaline rush of battle slowed even a little, it was striking how little ill-will Allied soldiers, and especially Americans, sustained towards the Germans. “Hate them?” said nineteen-year-old Private Tony Carullo. “No, no, we respected them. Even if you captured them, they’d look you in the face and ask: ‘What are you people doing here?’ It was the French we didn’t care for.” RAF Squadron Leader Tony Mann said: “I never hated the Germans as I hated the Japanese.” Mann had flown Hurricanes in Burma before being transferred to north-west Europe.

This was a view shared by Corporal Roy Ferlazzo. “The Germans were just soldiers like us.” He found it impossible to regard them with the same hostility as the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. “I never hated the Germans—I just wanted to beat them,” said “Dim” Robbins. “Once we’d won a battle, I never liked shooting Germans just for the hell of it.” Over the sights of his Bren gun, Sergeant Reg Romain of the 5th Wiltshires watched a badly wounded German crawling away from the wreckage of a half-track near Westerbreek: “I let him go, because it was plain his fighting days were over.” “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans,” sang the great English actor and writer Noël Coward, master of the drawing-room comedy. With hindsight, it is interesting that Coward’s words found favour even as satire, in the midst of a bloody contest of arms. Yet, until the revelation of the concentration camps, many Allied soldiers fought their battles with remarkably little passion, save the desire to survive.

American and British historians have expended immense energy in recent years arguing the issue of whether the German soldier was superior to his Allied counterpart. To all save the most dogged nationalists, it must be plain that Hitler’s armies performed far more professionally and fought with much greater determination than Eisenhower’s men. Allied generals were constantly hampered by the fact that, even when they advanced bold and imaginative plans, these were often incapable of execution by conscientious but never fanatical civilian soldiers, opposed by the most professionally skilful army of modern times. Yet it seems wrong to leave the matter there. There is a vital corollary. If American and British soldiers had been imbued with the ethos which enabled Hitler’s soldiers to do what they did, the purpose for which the war was being fought would have been set at naught. All soldiers are in some measure brutalized by the experience of conflict. Some lapses and breaches of humanity on the part of Allied soldiers are recorded in these pages. To an impressive degree, however, the American and British armies preserved in battle the values and decencies, the civilized inhibitions of their societies. It seems appropriate for an historian to offer military judgements upon the failures and shortcomings of the Allies in 1944–45, which were many and various. But there is every reason to cherish and to respect the values that pervaded Eisenhower’s armies.

Many individual German soldiers were likewise unwilling warriors, men born and raised with the same instinctive humanity as their Allied counterparts. But they fought within the framework of an army which was institutionally brutalized. Hitler and his generals demanded of Germany’s soldiers, on pain of savage punishment, far more than the Western allies expected from their men. American and British officers knew that their citizen soldiers were attempting to fulfil tasks which ran profoundly against the grain of their societies’ culture. The Germans and Russians in the Second World War showed themselves better warriors, but worse human beings. This is not a cultural conceit, but a moral truth of the utmost importance to understanding what took place on the battlefield.

Such observations lead in turn, however, to a consideration which might dissuade the democracies from celebrating their own humanity too extravagantly. Western allied scruples made the Americans and British dependent upon the ferocity of their Soviet allies to do the main business of destroying Hitler’s armies. If the Russians had not accepted the casualties necessary to inflict a war-winning level of attrition on the Wehrmacht, the Western allies would have had to pay a far higher price, and the struggle would have continued for much longer.

AACHEN, ON THE Belgian border just forty miles west of Cologne and the Rhine, became the first major German city to fall to the Allies. Hodges’s First Army began its slow, methodical operations to encircle the town in heavy rain on 1 October, after four days’ artillery bombardment of German positions, on a scale that echoed the barrages of the First World War. The first American objective was to breach the West Wall north of the city. Initial air strikes failed. Not merely did they inflict little damage upon the Germans, but a navigational error caused the bombers to kill thirty-four Belgian civilians in a town twenty-seven miles from the target area. The mud made movement tough for infantry and tougher still for tanks. By 7 October, however, the northern arm of the American operation had done its business, piercing the West Wall. 1st Division began to push up behind Aachen from the south. Yet, in the days that followed, repeated German counter-attacks on the American flanks caused grief and delay. Several exposed units of the attacking formation were cut off and destroyed piecemeal.

“Remember those happy days when you stepped out with your best girl ‘going places’?” inquired a propaganda pamphlet of which thousands were fired into the American lines by German artillery. “What is left of all this? Nothing! Nothing but days and nights of the heaviest fighting and for many of you NOTHING BUT A PLAIN WOODEN CROSS IN FOREIGN SOIL!” The Germans daubed a painted message across a house front in one of the villages through which the Americans advanced: “MANY OF YOU WHO COME UP THIS ROAD WON’T BE COMING BACK.”

Huebner, commander of 1st Division, the “Big Red One,” visited one of his regimental colonels. He found this officer in near despair about losses from shellfire: “General,” said the hapless infantryman, “if we don’t get some help pretty soon, the 16th Infantry is just going to cease to exist.” Huebner puffed a pipe with his usual unshakeable calm. “Freddy,” he said finally, “if higher authority has decided that this is the place and the time that the 1st Division is going to cease to exist, then I guess this is where we cease to exist.”

The advance ground painfully on. It was a familiar story: the enemy’s forces were small, but their fierce energy convinced American units of the need for caution. Corlett’s XIX Corps made slow progress. The 30th Division took nine days to advance the last three miles to link up with 1st Division on 16 October. The entire operation cost the 30th some 3,100 casualties, about 20 per cent of its strength. So irked were Bradley and Hodges by XIX Corps’s sluggishness that they sacked Corlett. The emotional Leland Hobbs, commanding 30th Division, burst into tears on hearing the news. He felt that if his men had been able to move faster on the north axis Corlett would not have lost his job.

When the German garrison of Aachen rejected a demand for its surrender, the Americans launched an intense air and artillery bombardment, then committed infantry and tanks. On the evening of 21 October, resistance ended in the devastated city. The operation had exhausted the men of 1st and 30th Divisions. Bradley acknowledged that they would have to be reinforced and rested before they could do more. Allied intelligence estimated that German strength in the west had trebled in the seven weeks since the beginning of September. It is valid to speculate about what might have happened if 30th Division had pressed on eastwards towards the Roer river after piercing the West Wall, as Corlett had suggested to Hodges, instead of pivoting to encircle Aachen. The German garrison of the city presented no significant threat to the Allied advance. The enemy lacked mobility and could have been mopped up at leisure. Once again, vital momentum had been lost for the dogged and doubtful purpose of seizing a landmark.

Just as Montgomery was surely right to bypass the German garrisons of the Channel ports during his dash east in August, so Patton might have left Metz to rot, and Hodges might have driven on eastwards beyond Aachen. Allied operations reflected an unimaginative commitment to winning ground, tidying lines on the map, eliminating ugly bulges and pockets. Commanders sought to gain terrain yard by yard, rather than focus upon the aim of all great generals throughout history—the concentration of combat power for the breaking of the enemy’s main front. On 22 October, Marshall in Washington urged Eisenhower to examine the chances of launching an all-out offensive to end the war by Christmas. Yet by that date realistic prospects of a swift victory had perished. They slipped away when First Army failed to make good its penetration of the West Wall before the enemy and the weather foreclosed the options. Now, Germans were dug deep into the wooded hills that zig-zagged across their frontier with Belgium and Luxembourg. While the Allies retained superiority, the overwhelming dominance of autumn had been lost. The pain that lay ahead for First Army in its winter battles caused many thoughtful officers to lament the opportunity that might have been seized in September, with more imaginative leadership and without the drain of fuel and supplies to Market Garden, Lorraine and Brest.

One further point is worth making. If Germany’s generals had followed the logic of their own fears about what the Russians would do to Germany, they might have saved their own people untold misery by engineering a surrender or even a tactical collapse in the west, to give passage to the Western allies. Of course, they did not do so, and sustained fierce resistance on both fronts. Only in the last weeks of the war did the Wehrmacht in the west give way, while still fighting fiercely in the east. The autumn failure to break into Germany was a mere disappointment for the Americans and British. For the German people, however, it augured disaster. Their fate in 1945 was to prove infinitely more terrible than it would have been had they lost the war in the west in 1944.