The Last Full Measure (42 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
In the last six months of 1944, the battle losses far exceeded the US planners’ expectations, with 12,000–18,000 GIs killed in each of those months and 40,000–60,000 wounded. The upshot
was that young men who had initially been allocated to the logistical tail to take up relatively safe duties of an administrative nature, thanks to their higher intelligence-test scores, now found themselves on the front line. Death in combat had suddenly become a whole lot more democratic.
WHAT INSTRUMENTS KILLED
soldiers in World War II? Although there had been improvements in all branches of weaponry since the First World War, nothing fundamentally new had emerged. There were sophistications and, crucially, there was more of it, but the underlying architecture of weaponry was not too far removed from that of World War I. Artillery and other kinds of infantry-delivered bombs such as mortars, grenades, and mines (as against aircraft- or ship-delivered munitions) took the heaviest toll. In the US Army, about fifty thousand died by explosive devices of one kind or another, compared with just more than thirty thousand killed by small arms and machine guns.
94
Although this overall picture is accurate, sometimes the individual cause of death could be elusive.
In one of the very few studies of the causes of death for men killed outright in action (one thousand US bodies were examined between April and November 1944 at the US military cemetery at Monte Beni, Italy), a medical team reported:
A man killed in battle will be seen to fall only by his comrades who cannot know with certainty what type of missile caused a man’s death. They may know that a man was hit by machinegun or rifle fire or that he encountered a mine, but they cannot state with accuracy the caliber of a high explosive shell which has been fired at them. In any event, even if accurate information regarding missiles is known to a man’s
comrades, it does not often find its way to the EMT’s [emergency medical tags] which are filled in by company aidmen or other medical personnel who arrive on the scene after the action has occurred. Those who actually see the death occur are seldom present when the body is tagged. Ballistic data on EMT’s cannot therefore be depended upon since it is not known which ones are accurate. The best method of obtaining accurate information of this type is to perform an autopsy [but] … it became evident that the performance of an autopsy in every case was impracticable because of the time required for such a procedure. The first body autopsied in this project was thoroughly dissected in search of the missile. After a period of 3 hours, the missile had still not been found, and the search for it was abandoned.
95
Nevertheless, the majority of men (87.1 percent) in this sample were found to have been killed by “fragment-producing weapons” (artillery and mortar fire), while 10.9 percent were hit by small arms. Only a tiny fraction were killed by hand grenades (0.1 percent) or land mines (1.9 percent).
96
No wonder, then, that artillery gripped soldiers with the most intense dread. The poet Louis Simpson, a trooper in the 101st Airborne, explains: “Being shelled is the real work of an infantry soldier, which no one talks about. Everyone has his own way of going about it. In general, it means lying face down and contracting your body into as small a space as possible. In novels you read about soldiers, at such moments, fouling themselves. The opposite is true. As all your parts are contracting, you are more likely to be constipated.”
97
Writing to his family from northwest Europe, Raymond Gantter described artillery’s monumental malevolence:
You ask which is more frightening … rifle and machine guns versus artillery? If I
have
to make a choice, I’ll take
small-arms fire. Rifles and machine guns are bad medicine, but they carry this small sugar-coating: a hole in the ground, a hollow, even a tiny hummock of earth, offers reasonable protection against their bullets. Chances are you won’t get hurt so long as you lie there. That is, not by small-arms fire. Shrapnel cannot be denied by a hole in the ground, a hollow, or a little mound of dirt. You hear the shell screaming through the air, you estimate where it will fall and tense yourself. Then it hits, the earth bounds under you, trying to push you up, and the air is filled with the buzzing of maddened bumblebees. The hell with Ry-crisp or lettuce-and-lemon diets—for ladies who would be swanlike I recommend a few hours under an artillery barrage.
98
David Kenyon Webster remembered how shells sought him out:
Three more shells came in, low and angry, and burst in the orchard.
“They’re walking ’em toward us,” I whispered.
I felt as if a giant with exploding iron fingers were looking for me, tearing up the ground as he came. I wanted to strike at him, to kill him, to stop him before he ripped into me, but I could do nothing. Sit and take it, sit and take it. The giant raked the orchard and tore up the roads and stumbled toward us in a terrible blind wrath as we sat in our hole with our heads between our legs and curses on our lips.
99
For a British soldier, shells seemed somehow willfully directed by some divine malevolence:
We hit the earth with one thud where we had stood. I could feel the exact spot in the small of my defenceless back (I
wish to God we had packs on, I thought … not because they’re any
use
but it feels better) where the pointed nose of the shell would pierce skin and gristle and bone and explode the charge that would make me feel as if I had a splitting headache all over for a fiftieth of a second before I was spread minutely over the earth and hung up in trees. I held my breath and tried to press deeper into the earth and tensed every muscle as though by sheer will power I could abate the force of that disintegrating shock, cheat death, defy God (O God have mercy on me, please, please,
please
dear God, don’t let me die).
100
To stay or to run? Either decision could bring death or salvation:
“Anti-tank guns!” yells Dorka, thunderstruck, and crosses himself.
At the same moment a second shell hits the mound.… Dorka yells and clutches his throat. He looks dumbstruck at his bloody hand and presses it against his wound. Panic-stricken, he jumps out of the hole and runs up the field towards the village. Right behind him another round explodes and rips off both his legs. His backside is thrown into the air and falls, covered in blood, on to the ground. Only seconds have passed, and as I again look towards the front another flash comes from a gun barrel. The shells hit in the mound in front of my position at full force and covers half my hole with dirt. I pull my legs out of the dirt and press myself tightly down on to it. Then the next round explodes immediately in front of me and sends a glowing splinter towards me. I feel a heavy impact on my upper right arm and some light splinters hitting my chest. Blood immediately starts running warm down my arm and dripping out
of my sleeve. For a moment I am numb; then I feel a burning sensation, and pain.
You will bleed to death here in this hole! I think, and then I am gripped with a terrible fear. Just get away from here! The fright drives me out of my hole. I press my left hand over my wound and dash away. Instinctively, I do not go the obvious way—up to the houses—but, propelled by terror, I run to the right.… I know that the direct-fire gunners [like Webster, he is being shelled by an antitank gun deployed against infantry] must first physically shift their aim in order to pick up a new one—in this case me. The shells start to land around me only after I have been running for a bit. They are firing at me as they would at a rabbit—so I behave like one, by constantly zigzagging. I carry on like this, to force the gunners to adjust their sights all the time.
But I am running out of steam. My lungs are heaving like a pair of bellows and I sense a light dizzy feeling. I can’t stop the bleeding with my hand.… Wheezing, I keep on running in zigzag fashion, running for dear life, afraid of being blown to bits by the next shell.… Well out of breath, I run further into the woodland then fall to the ground.
I am safe.
101
The gods could be almost playfully malicious:
Strung out in a long, scattered single file, our battalion made its way up the hills, moving at a steady pace. Captain Kessler knelt with his subordinate leaders and studied his maps for a moment, waving the rest of the company on.
“Keep moving,” he said in his gravelly voice. “Keep moving.”
He was about twenty feet ahead of me to the left of the narrow path we were following. Suddenly he grunted and
rolled over on his left side.… One of the men he had been kneeling with looked at his eyes. He was dead. A tiny piece of shrapnel from one of the enemy shells exploding in the valley below had struck him in the right side of his head, just under the rim of his helmet.… It was a one-in-a-million chance that a piece of shrapnel would travel that distance but it had, and a good company commander was dead as a result of it.
102
Death could also come with terrifying logic: “The first shell landed a safe distance away, but the second came in only 150 yards from where two engineers, the platoon sergeant, another noncom, and myself were working. We hit the ground—and we feared the shells would fall in a ‘ladder’ pattern: an artillery design in which the successive shells ‘search out’ the target as though moving up the rungs of a ladder.”
103
Shrapnel had a way of shredding whatever sangfroid the infantryman might attempt to hide behind:
At first I tried being casual about artillery fire. Shells would hit in the distance then move in, and it seemed humiliating to rush for cover, so I took my time getting out of the way, waiting almost for the warmth of the blast before jumping into my slit trench. It didn’t take long to find out what shrapnel could do and then I hit the ground sooner than later, not worried about looking foolish.
A shell fragment could act as bullet, knife, cleaver, bludgeon. It could punch, shear, slice, crush. It could be surgical in its precision or make sadistic excess seem un-imaginative.
104
Tree or airbursts were particularly feared (“the worst,” according to William Manchester), producing blast and shrapnel against
which foxholes and slit trenches offered little protection. Paul Fussell describes the effect of an airburst on a group of Germans:
I came upon a perfectly preserved dead waxwork German squad.… that caused my mouth to open in wonder.… [It] consisted of five German soldiers spread out prone in a semicircular skirmish line. They were still staring forward, alert for signs of the Amis. Behind them, in the center of the semicircle, was an equally rigid German medic with his Red Cross armband who had been crawling forward to do his work. In his left hand, a roll of two-inch bandage; in his right, a pair of surgical scissors. I could infer a plausible narrative. One or more men in the group had been wounded, and as the medic crawled forward to do his duty, his intention was rudely frustrated by an unspeakably loud sharp crack overhead, and instantly the lights went out for all of them. The episode was doubtless a tribute to our proximity artillery fuse, an invaluable invention which arrived on the line that winter, enabling a shell to explode not when it struck something but when it came near to striking something. Here, it must have gone off five or ten yards above its victims. Or perhaps the damage had been done by the kind of artillery stunt called time-on-target—a showy mathematical technique of firing many guns from various places so that regardless of their varying distances from the target, the shells arrive all at the same time. The surprise is devastating, and the destruction immediate and unimaginable.…
… It was so cold that the bodies didn’t smell, and they’d not begun visibly to decompose, but their open eyes were clouded, and snow had lodged in their ears and the openings in their clothes and the slits in their caps. Their flesh was whitish green. Although they were prone, their knees and
elbows were bent, as if they were athletes terribly surprised while sprinting.
105
The effects of high explosive were not nearly so aesthetic. Donald Burgett “came upon a sloping hole in the ground used by a French farmer for watering his cattle. We walked down into it and found two dead Germans sitting upright against the wall. An artillery shell had landed in the center and the heat from the explosion had torn away their features. Their lips and ears were missing and the empty eye sockets looked black in the charred and wrinkled skin. The concussion had snapped their hands and feet off at the wrists and ankles.”
106
