The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (13 page)

The conditions in which the men fought in the winter campaign were notoriously difficult. Above all, soldiers recall the cold they were forced to endure. Daytime

temperatures hovered near the freezing mark; at night they fell into the twenties and teens. Wind, snow, and rain prevailed.
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George Neill, posted in Belgium with the 99th Infantry Division, remembered that it snowed on November 9, 1944—the first snow of the season— and the snowfall “ushered in a condition of extreme discomfort that was to plague us for the next four months.” Fires were not allowed as they would attract enemy shelling. After just one night outdoors in below- freezing weather, “with our tent and clothing wet and half frozen, I felt numb to the point of almost not caring what happened to me.” After four days, he and his men were “cold, wet, dirty, and extremely fatigued,” and had already started to exhibit “the unforgettable blank look of infantrymen manning the front line.” The expo- sure to the cold was made worse by the soldier’s need to shelter in a foxhole. The foxhole was four to five feet in depth, usually difficult to dig because of the frozen topsoil, and invariably full of frozen water and mud. “As darkness descended,” Neill wrote, “the tempera- ture moved well below freezing. The half-frozen slush in the bottom of the hole froze solid.” Sleeping in such a place was almost impossible. “ We just lay there in a fetal position and shivered and swore to ourselves…. Words cannot convey the awfulness of this ordeal to the reader. My buddies and I agreed it would be impossible to exaggerate how hopeless, miserable and depressed

we felt.” Incredibly, the men had no winter equipment. “No earmuffs, no hood, no face covering, no scarf,” recalled Lieutenant George Wilson of the 4th Infantry Division. “Our hands also suffered with only wool fin- ger gloves. No mittens, no outer shells. Of course, none of our things were fur lined.” And on their heads they wore ice-cold steel helmets. American troops did not receive even rudimentary winter clothing until late January 1945. At the Bulge, they would fight wearing uniforms suitable for summertime.
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Prolonged exposure to such cold led directly to the trench foot crisis, which affected tens of thousands of soldiers along the western front. Standing in slush, snow, and ice in a foxhole for many hours while wear- ing wet leather boots had devastating effects on the soldiers’ feet. Rocky Blunt of the 84th Infantry Division recalled that one especially cold night, he fell asleep— lost consciousness is probably more apt—in his fox- hole with his feet in the slush. When he awoke, “my feet were encased in a block of ice up to my ankles in the bottom of the hole. Everett [a member of his unit] pounded on my legs but there was absolutely no feeling or movements. He and another nearby GI chipped away the ice with their bayonets, lifted me out of my hole and dragged me across the frozen ground…. When circu- lation returned to my legs, excruciating pain that had

been dulled by the numbness gradually became almost unbearable.” In a field hospital he almost had his feet amputated but was given a last-minute reprieve. “Both feet had been reduced to ugly, purplish-blue muta- tions with large blistering pieces of torn skin peeling off them.” The only way to deal with trench foot was to remove the wet boots and socks, rub the feet to restore circulation, and find dry socks and shoes—two very rare commodities. Sergeant John Babcock said that his men “learned to sit facing each other [in a foxhole] so as to hold and massage each other’s bare feet while heavy, leather combat boots dried out. That rubbing someone else’s stinking feet might be distasteful was overridden by sheer necessity.”
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Other illnesses beset the infantrymen. Donald Burgett of the 101st Airborne endured what he called “trench mouth.” After two months in combat in Holland, “pus oozed from my gums. My teeth became so loose that I could move them freely with my tongue, and blood would run out of my mouth from the light pressure of the razor when I shaved.” Dysentery was more com- mon. Charles MacDonald, after nine days at the front with virtually no sleep, “became conscious of pains in my stomach, and a wave of nausea came over me. I put my hand to my forehead and realized for the first time that I had a burning fever. I excused myself and

walked outside to climb the incline to the latrine. An intense cold had combined with the K-ration diet to give me a violent case of dysentery.” This condition af- flicted most front-line soldiers. “Since we rarely had hot water and soap for cleaning our mess gear, we used snow and ice water from the river,” writes George Neill. “ This did nothing to eliminate the grease accumulat- ing after each meal, which set us up for chronic diar- rhea.” Diarrhea made life in a foxhole difficult—Neill uses the apt word “torture”—not least because exiting the foxhole, undressing, defecating, re-dressing, and returning to the foxhole all had to be done in the dark and in total silence so as to avoid alerting the enemy to one’s presence. And this demeaning routine might have to be repeated many times each night. In combat, one might not be able to leave the foxhole at all. “ Trapped in a foxhole,” writes Rocky Blunt, “when a man had to defecate, he did it in his K-ration box and threw it over the side; when he had to urinate, he did it in a C-ration can or his helmet or in the bottom of his hole.” And of course these soldiers were unable to bathe, going for two months and more without a change of clothes or a shower. “Perhaps there’s a medical term” for the de- pressing effect of living in such awful conditions, wrote Lieutenant George Wilson, “but I think the word ‘mis- ery’ will do.”
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These cold and frequently ill men were also afraid. They feared death, of course, but even more they feared wounds—mostly in the abdomen, eyes, brain, or genitals. The German 88 mm artillery piece was widely considered the most frightening weapon, since it was astonishingly accurate and powerful, and a blast could instantly shred a human body. Fear induced physical effects such as an accelerated heart rate, muscular tension, dry mouth, and trembling. (And sometimes worse: one-fifth of the men in a division in the Pacific Theater acknowledged that, during combat, fear had led them to lose control of their bowels.) And seeing fear in other men tended to induce fear in the beholder. After the initial German breakthrough in the Ardennes, said Donald Burgett, “fear reigned. Once fear strikes, it spreads like an epidemic, faster than wildfire. Once the first man runs, others soon follow. Then it’s all over; soon there are hordes of men running, all of them wild- eyed and driven by fear.” Leaders were not immune: Captain MacDonald, facing a German counterattack, recalled that “the paroxysm of fear that gripped me left my body trembling. I was not so much afraid of what was happening as I was of the horrible visions my mind had dreamed up of what would happen should we fail to repulse the attack…. [He told himself:] Quit shak- ing, dammit. Stop trembling all over. Get control of yourself. Act like a soldier, goddammit! At least you can

impersonate an officer!” Most men felt terrible fear be- fore assaulting an enemy position. But once in the fight, the fear was overtaken by an instinct to survive. “I al- ways got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I started a running attack into frontal fire, knowing that at any moment an enemy bullet might tear through my body, face, or limbs…But once we started, there was no turning back. There was only one option as far as I was concerned: run forward and kill.”
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More even than filth, illness, and fear, men on the front line had to confront death, or to be more precise, dead bodies. These were daily, constant companions. In their first days in the battle zone, infantrymen found the presence of corpses difficult to take, and tried to avert their eyes. Charles MacDonald recalled seeing his first dead American: “I stumbled and looked down at my feet. An American soldier, fully clothed even to his helmet, lay on his back with glassy eyes turned skyward, his arms outstretched. His body was almost twice its normal size. I shuddered involuntarily. The shock of almost stepping upon the body before seeing it left me weak inside.” MacDonald also recounted that in the forests of the Ardennes, wild boars frequently made nocturnal forays into the battlefield, with ghastly results:

Long stopped us to call my attention to a man digging a foxhole to my left.

“ What do you think of that, Cap’n?” he asked.

I looked in the direction which he indicated. Five feet from the hole where the soldier dug indifferently lay a dead German, his chest and stomach bare and his stomach a mass of clotted blood and intestines.

“ The hogs have been eatin’ on him,” Long said.
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In a short time, dead bodies became simply part of the surreal landscape, and could be objects of perverse interest. Donald Burgett “found the remains of an American trooper who had been killed in the attack. During the night the tanks had run in single file over his body. Just by chance, while going to the truck to refill our canteens with water I noticed a dog tag pro- truding from the remains, which had been ground into the snow and dirt. I probed with my trench knife and fished out a crumpled pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes from among the flesh and splintered bone. I hung one of the dog tags on a limb near the body in hopes the medics would find it.” Soldiers saw so many dead men that they adopted a casual attitude toward corpses and indeed toward death. Rocky Blunt writes with shock-

ing indifference of seeing a GI take a direct hit from a German 88 mm artillery shell. “ The man disintegrat- ed, leaving only patches and puddles of flesh and bone spattered in the mud. Graves registration would never find this one, not even his dog tags. Another unknown soldier. I sat and ate my food. I had not known him.” After the Battle of the Bulge, Sergeant John Babcock discovered he had his limits. “I could tolerate view- ing a dead body, but found very unnerving the sight of parts—a hand, arm, headless torso, entrails, genitals, exposed bones, or the worst, an unidentifiable chunk of human flesh that resembled some kind of roast in a meat market display case.” Rocky Blunt, by contrast, found himself compelled to stare at a German soldier who, after an artillery barrage, “had been disembow- eled and his mouth, nose and jaw had been blown away. How, I don’t know, but he was still alive and as I stared at him, his eyes followed my every movement. With each breath, foamy blood drooled from his mouth onto what had once been his chest. Only a foot-wide gaping hole of bloody meat remain[ed] of what had been his upper chest and his intestinal tract lay stretched out on the gravel like long twisted links of sausage. I could not take my eyes off this macabre scene.”
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By their own accounts, infantrymen went through a process of psychological brutalization during this kind

of warfare. After a short time in combat, men became inured to killing and developed intense animosity to- ward the German soldiers. Young infantrymen spoke of going into battle as “stacking bodies,” or “putting meat on the table.” Hatred toward the German sol- dier increased with every long, bitter hellish day in the front lines. “’ Those god-damned Krauts,’” Don- ald Burgett muttered to himself. “’ Those dirty rotten god-damned Krauts. They’ve lost the damned war and they know it. Why don’t they give it up so we can all go home? The hard headed bastards. We’re going to have an ass-kicking party when we get up there and they are going to supply the ass.’” Sergeant Babcock disputed the idea that American soldiers did not demonstrate hatred toward the enemy. “A lot of combat reports in- dicate that our fine soldiers didn’t really hate the ene- my, nor really take personally the grim battles between our forces. Not so with what was left of A Company. We had grown to hate the Krauts with a vengeance. Each slaughtered comrade added to our venom.” And the re- sult of this hatred meant that soldiers adopted a “code” of behavior toward the enemy: “Kill. No half measures. Eliminate the enemy in any way possible. Shoot, blow up, bludgeon, stab, show no mercy. Just one mission: kill.”
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Some Americans mistreated German prisoners and

wounded. On the front line, wounded Germans were left to die, since there was often no medical care avail- able. Beatings and death threats, or deliberate expo- sure of the bare feet to snow, were techniques used to extract information from captured Germans. And after word got out that the Germans had killed 86 American POWs on a crossroads near Malmédy on December 17, “American feelings toward Germans hardened into vindictive hate. Chances of survival for newly caught German POWs diminished greatly.”
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When a German soldier surrendered to Donald Burgett, one of Bur- gett’s fellow GIs shot him in the belly anyway. Burgett then thought it “merciful” to finish off this unfortunate man. He “was in terrible pain and dying. I knew he wouldn’t recover. I knew he would die a horrible death. Lying gut shot and exposed in the woods at ten below zero. Another shot rang out and a bullet tore through his head. Bits of brains spattered the snow in a wide arc behind his body. Tiny puffs of steam drifted up from ev- ery spot where they had landed. The German was dead. It had been quick and merciful.”
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Most wartime mem- oirs mention that the shooting of POWs, while frowned upon, was common.
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So was the mutilation of corpses. According to Babcock, one dead German near his out- post was stripped of his watch “before he was cold. I had his little blackout flashlight. After a few days, someone looted his wedding ring by neatly snipping off his ring

finger.” Rocky Blunt came across a mutilated German corpse that had already been dismembered by another GI. “I sat and stared at it for a while and then, totally without provocation, sent the head skimming across the snow with a savage kick.” He then kicked it around the ice, “playing soccer. During the whole episode, I felt nothing but macabre elation. Eventually tiring of the sport…I sat down beside the mutilated remains of the German and ate a K-ration.”
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