Armageddon (87 page)
“The leading vehicle got knocked out sooner or later, and nobody enjoyed the ‘honour’ of leading the regiment,” Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Leakey of the British 5th Royal Tanks wrote wearily. Once, all four tanks of his point troop were knocked out approaching a German strongpoint. Their lieutenant rallied the men who bailed out of the stricken Shermans, and they stormed the enemy position with personal weapons. There was much resentment in the unit that no one received a “gong” for this notable display of determination. As Leakey’s tanks approached Bremen, “it was the same drill—keep going on the one road until the leading vehicle brewed up. Once, it was a scout car of recce troop, the crew killed, a young officer who’d joined three months before.” The road was mined, and the enemy had taken up positions on both sides: “The infantry got a bloody nose, lost a number of men and had to withdraw. The leading tank hit a mine and promptly brewed up. The crew was killed. At this stage of the war, nobody was very keen to earn medals.”
For men who had survived years of battle, it seemed especially cruel to meet death now. Lieutenant Kingsley Field’s entire troop of the King’s Own was destroyed by a single German tank in the space of a few minutes near Gock. “It seemed a stupid time to die,” wrote Flight-Lieutenant Richard Hough, an RAF Typhoon pilot. OKH in Berlin signalled to all army groups on 18 April: “On the Elbe front a weakish assault troop of ours without effort brought in 40 American prisoners. The Americans surrendered for the reason that they had no idea of letting themselves be shot dead so near the end of the war. This fact is to be notified to the troops . . . German actions must prove to [the Americans] that their campaign is no pleasure trip through Germany.”
In that final phase on the Western Front, the confrontation between reasonable men who aspired to behave in a reasonable way and unreasonable, often hysterical men and children willing to embrace death became more painful than ever. In the history of the Second World War, much has been written about the “fanatical” performance of the Japanese soldier. Yet Japan surrendered without fighting a battle for its homeland. It was Germans who fought to the last in the rubble of their own towns and villages, some of Hitler’s soldiers who displayed a fanaticism matching and perhaps surpassing that of the armies of Nippon. Kesselring sent a withering signal to LXXXII Corps on 18 April, alleging that its resistance around Nuremberg had been crippled by “a deficiency of leadership, initiative and resource, for which responsibility must be brought home to individuals.” This was a familiar Nazi figure of speech for selecting scapegoats for military failure to be shot.
Among the Allied armies, even in these days of victory, no man could assure himself of safety. Private Ralph Gordon of First Army’s 18th Infantry was vastly relieved that after the Hürtgen Forest nightmare he and his friend Pete were posted from a rifle company to the regimental supply column. On 31 March, Pete took forward a jeep-load of ammunition without troubling to put on his helmet. He was hit in the head by shrapnel and died of wounds a fortnight later. Gordon “felt like I could kill every Jerry left in the country.” Andy, a close friend of both men, appeased his rage by evicting the German occupants from the houses around their positions, telling them to sleep in the fields. A fortnight later, Gordon saw his old rifle company advancing in column up the road into the town of Hochstedt, among them an old buddy named Ben. “Take it easy, kid,” his friend called after him. C Company met Germans, and Ben was fatally hit in the chest. It was just three weeks before the end. In Lieutenant Howard Randall’s battalion of the 417th Infantry, a newly arrived lieutenant refused to risk his neck by going on patrol in the last days. This officer was transferred to Civil Affairs. Another lieutenant sought to diminish the risks of reconnaissance by placing German civilians in front of his own riflemen as they approached built-up areas.
As the advancing Allies entered German towns and villages thus far untouched by war, some sensitive men felt uncomfortable about their intrusion upon communities which looked close kin to their own, occupied by people who seemed not unlike those among whom they lived and worked back home. A squeamish Civil Affairs officer with the U.S. 30th Division complained in a report:
Consideration was not given to sick and elderly people, and mothers with very young children. The attitude of higher command seemed to be that these people . . . should be made to feel the full significance of war and what their troops had done to other people. There were many complaints as to looting by troops, and a number of rape cases . . . The taking of personal belongings was rampant. The turning-in of arms, cameras etc was conducted, in my opinion, in a thoroughly disorganized and disgraceful manner.
A German woman handed Corporal Werner Kleeman the dogtags of a GI she sought to report for raping her. Kleeman threw them away: “I didn’t want to get the boy into trouble.”
As men of the British 7th Somersets ran into a farmyard in the face of desultory German fire, weapons cocked and grenades in hand, a company sergeant-major kicked open a door and found himself confronted by some forty small German children, together with two teachers. They were all standing at attention, hands held high, staring fixedly ahead without even a tear on their frozen faces. After the first shock, the British soldiers and the German children gazed silently at each other for a few seconds, then the conquerors moved on. Lieutenant-Colonel Ferdinand Chesarek of the 28th Field Artillery drove up to an airfield where Germans were running briskly from plane to plane, throwing thermite bombs into the cockpits. “Christ almighty, what confusion—all those wagons, guns, troops, trucks and everything else. All these armed Germans mixed up with us. Everything was so crazy.” One night a British sentry woke Captain Andrew Wilson of the Buffs to report the capture of a prisoner who had stumbled into their tank leaguer. A torch beam revealed a German sergeant-major, who protested vehemently that he possessed a leave pass to proceed home and could not legitimately be detained.
A contemporary British report identified three causes for sluggish forward movement: enemy resistance; difficulty of supply and repair; and “the desire of soldiers to enjoy ‘the fruits of victory.’ ” Bing, one of 13 Para’s Alsatian dogs which had jumped at the Rhine in special harnesses, disappeared one morning and was found hopelessly drunk in a German wine cellar. Loot had become the chief preoccupation of some men. “Did he have a Luger? Did he have a Luger?” a captain in Private Charles Felix’s battalion demanded, almost jumping up and down with excitement, when he heard that his men had captured a German officer.
Lieutenant Howard Randall’s company commander invited him to ride into the neighbouring town, which they found deathly quiet, the house windows draped in white flags. Outside the timbered town hall, they left one man to guard the jeep while the other four Americans wandered inside, pistols drawn, and made their way to the mayor’s office. They met two white-haired men and an elderly woman, who pointed nervously to an immense heap of cameras, binoculars and weapons, obviously collected from the local population. The Americans kept pistols pointed at the Germans, who maintained an icy composure, while with their spare hands they delved into the hoard. “The captain suddenly spotted a handsome Leica camera and made a dive for it . . . Then I saw a nice blue-black pistol . . . I swooped down and grabbed it, and then some beautiful ceremonial knives. I grabbed them all and stuffed them hurriedly into my jacket pockets. The situation had become ludicrous. The three unruffled Germans never said a word, while the four of us were scrambling all over the floor.” After the Americans left, it was a week before the town was formally occupied. When they returned, they found that SS men had hanged the mayor for displaying white flags.
A frightened German woman approached the British lines with a pretty girl and said to an officer: “Please do not let your men rape my daughter.” Dr. David Tibbs drew himself up in the approved stance of an affronted English gentleman and said stiffly: “Madam, these are British soldiers.” Yet while nothing remotely resembling the Russian orgy took place on the Western Front, many Allied soldiers seized the opportunities granted to them for easy sexual intercourse, whether through rape or some marginally less brutal arrangement. During street fighting in Bremen, a young officer of the KOSB lost two men of his platoon. He found them reclining comfortably on bunks in a shelter by the railway station teeming with German civilians: “As though this was not enough, each had lying beside him his rifle . . . and a German
fräulein
. It was not clear whether fear or bribery with ration chocolate or cigarettes had induced these girls to submit to the Jocks.”
“The Germans were very hungry. The girls would get at my riflemen for a tin of sardines,” observed Major Bill Deedes. An officer of 52nd (Lowland) Division was shocked to come upon two German women “being shagged in relays by American soldiers.” A post-war U.S. Army report on military discipline concluded that in north-west Europe: “Rape became a large problem . . . A considerable percentage of offences is directly attributable to faulty unit leadership . . . [Men’s orientation for war] included propaganda of hatred towards the Germans. This made it easy for the soldier to justify looting, assault, burglary, robbery and even rape. The theory was that the fighting soldier must hate the enemy . . . Its application complicated the problem of military justice.” It seems an awkward reflection on the administration of justice in 1944–45 that more than 40 per cent of all death sentences passed in the ETO were imposed upon African-American soldiers, though these constituted a tiny proportion of U.S. Army strength.
Sergeant Colin McInnes gazed in awe at the shambles to which occupying troops had reduced a German house. “We were struck at once by the tremendous physical energy of the looters,” he wrote.
Furniture was upended and flung about in heaps in a way that made movement from room to room as difficult as rock-climbing. Anything of glass was smashed, walls had their paper torn from them or were splashed with ink, wood was gouged out of cupboards and tables, upholstery had been sliced open on the seats and arms of chairs and sofas, and curtains were ripped to tatters. It seemed that all this expressed a hatred of organized life, and a yearning for primitive chaos on as large a scale as possible.
A British war correspondent was bemused one morning to hear a ferocious din emerging from a house. He entered, and beheld a cluster of men manically smashing a grand piano with axes.
In “Red” Thompson’s platoon of the U.S. 346th Infantry, the last fatality of the war was caused by a mortar bomb which fell on the head of their most dedicated looter, a man who emptied the drawers of every house he entered. Some men refused to loot at all, not on moral grounds, but constrained by fear of German booby traps. A few men plundered systematically, in planned pursuit of objects of value. Fortunes were made in Germany in 1945, by men sufficiently cool and acquisitive to choose their plunder judiciously, and with the rank or transport facilities to carry it away. Some British Special Air Service groups, profiting from the latitude they were granted about their own movements, devoted the last days of the war to systematic safe-blowing. Most soldiers, however, merely grabbed any artefact to hand, in the manner of warriors since time immemorial. They groped for tangible compensation for having risked their lives, and cherished the licence granted by dispensation from the customary laws of property. The Anglo-Americans were a great deal less brutal than the Russians, but they seized enemy property with almost equal abandon.
Lieutenant Tom Flanagan of the British 4th KOSB was appalled to see one of his men snatch a blanket from an old woman, observing: “You’ll not be wanting that, missus.” The man then grabbed an eiderdown and a watch. The young platoon commander sought to intervene, but his sergeant said firmly: “You’ll be wanted at company headquarters, sir. I’ll deal with this.” Flanagan wrote: “I left . . . trying hard not to believe what I had just witnessed. Those men were behaving as I had always imagined German soldiers to behave, not like the image I held of ‘Tommy Atkins’ who was kind, tolerant, easily put upon, considerate to old folk and especially good with children. This conflict of fact and imagery confused me. My innocence had taken another blow.”
The French Army, and especially its colonial troops, behaved with savage indiscipline in Germany, in some places perpetrating excesses on an almost Soviet scale. The French were indulged in some degree, because their thirst for vengeance against the Germans seemed understandable. General de Gaulle had fiercely insisted upon the French right to enter Germany in arms, and Churchill persuaded Stalin to accede to de Gaulle’s demands for a designated occupation zone. French troops on the ground played out the role of victors with a ruthlessness which dismayed some of their allies.
The Americans and British behaved better than many victorious armies in history, but less well than the official record suggests. If rape was far less widespread than in the east, it was certainly not unknown. Looting was almost universal, mitigated only by spasms of bourgeois conscience on the part of the thieves. “Pitiable middle-aged lady in the house,” wrote Corporal Stan Proctor of 43rd (Wessex) Division in his diary for 26 April, describing his billet, “and we found a young man hiding in what was left of the loft. It was her son, a deserter from a Hitler Youth unit. We had to hand him over to our police. He was a good-looking and quiet young chap. There was a photo of him in his Hitler Youth uniform which I took with me as a reminder of what somebody like Hitler can do to people. We also took two nice wireless sets from the house. I suppose we looked on them as spoils of war, but the lady was upset. I was ashamed of what we did.” In 21st Army Group throughout the campaign, just seventy-two men faced disciplinary charges for looting, against 2,792 charged with being improperly dressed.
