Armageddon (17 page)

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

F
OR 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.