All Hell Let Loose (61 page)

All the combatant nations deployed women as nurses, a role many found rewarding. Dorothy Beavers was twenty-two in 1942, daughter of an Ohio small farmer whose mother still drove a horse and buggy, with no phone at home. She worked in a little local hospital, and suggested to her father that she should join the army medical branch. Her two brothers had already gone to the service, and after some thought he said, ‘Maybe you should go and take care of them.’ She married an army doctor in Winchester, England, the night before sailing for France in June 1944, and landed on Utah Beach still clutching her bridal bouquet. ‘The job came naturally to me,’ she said. But it was a revelation to find herself treating eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds who had lost not only limbs, but sometimes their buttocks or ‘whole chunks of their hips’. No one could call Lt. Beavers and her kind publicity-seekers, but they all appreciated recognition back home. She was thrilled when a little paragraph about herself and a photograph appeared in the
Ohio State Journal
.

The Russians and Yugoslav partisans were the only fighting peoples to deploy women for combat functions. The British dispatched a small number of female agents to occupied territories under the orders of SOE, and women fulfilled vital administrative and support functions for Allied and Axis armed forces. They were treated with condescension by most senior officers, born into the nineteenth century. Western Allied commanders, if not their Soviet counterparts, deplored the intrusion into service relationships of sexual temptations and tensions, actual or potential. Nimitz, at Pearl Harbor, declined to accept any female on his staff. Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command said, ‘I always believed that women in uniform should either be so beautiful that they felt no possible threat to themselves from any other woman, or so old and ugly that they were past it.’

The RAF employed some German-speaking women to monitor enemy voice-radio transmissions. Most enthusiastically embraced the role, though a few displayed genteel scruples. Air Vice-Marshal Edward Addison, commanding the RAF’s electronic counter-measures group, received a protest visit from a WAAF, daughter of a pre-war bank manager in Hamburg, who recoiled from the demands of eavesdropping on Luftwaffe night-fighter conversation. She said she was embarrassed by the obscenities, common to aircrew of all nationalities, that echoed across the airwaves. Most women were more robust. Working alongside combat personnel, or in the various branches of civil defence, they adapted to both the disciplines and the horrors. RAF pilot Ken Owen dismissed sentimental stereotypes about the relationship between crews and female ground staff at bomber stations: ‘It’s bloody rubbish all that stuff about the WAAFs waving us off and so on. They became as callous and phlegmatic as we were.’

For some girls, war proved as much of an adventure as it was for eager young male warriors: daily life acquired an exciting urgency. German aristocrat Eleonore von Joest said, ‘I was young, I found it really interesting. I thought, “All this is life.”’ After von Joest, then aged nineteen, took part in the horrific 1945 mass exodus from East Prussia, her mother declared sardonically, ‘My daughter even managed to have fun on the trek.’ The barriers of sexual licence were dramatically extended. Many women of all nationalities felt a sentimentality, even a duty, towards fighting men on the brink of the grave. British land girl Muriel Green wrote one day in 1941 about her newly discovered passion for a French Canadian soldier: ‘I am … almost in love! Or is it in love with love? What it is to be young and foolish! It certainly is good for morale in wartime to be made love to! … He is lonely and so am I. We are both away from home and friends … I am not quite sure whether I promised to go back to Canada with him or not! I will be his friend anyway! I blame the war for this.’ A few weeks later she described how she unwillingly allowed a Scottish soldier embarking for overseas to kiss her on their last date: ‘I did not want to really … but they were going away … and I may be the last girl he will kiss before he goes, maybe the last girl he will ever kiss. Bless him. He is too nice to be killed.’

Green, who was twenty-two, expressed deep unhappiness early in the war, as quoted above, but exulted in pleasures she later discovered, romance notable among them. She looked back on 1944 as ‘one of the happiest [years] of my life. I have had good health, good friends, good working conditions with money to spend (if there had been anything to buy) and a jolly time. The war has progressed and left many scars. I am one of the lucky devils who have no scars … Hostel life has changed nearly all the girls here to wife-pinchers … Eligible bachelors are so short … We all blame the war and go on enjoying life as it comes which in this place is life with other women’s husbands.’

The reverse of the coin, of course, was that men serving overseas were troubled by fears about the fidelity of their loved ones at home. S/Sgt Harold Fennema wrote from Europe to his wife in Wisconsin, ‘Honey, it’s pitiful the number of times you hear fellows say that their last letter mentioned someone back home who is having a baby, and her husband has been overseas for a year or more. Unfaithfulness is probably the soldier’s biggest cause for worry.’ Captain Pavel Kovalenko of the Red Army wrote in similar vein in July 1943: ‘The war has shaken all family values. Everything has gone to the dogs. Everyone lives for today. One needs a lot of strength and endurance to resist human temptations, to remain unstained. I have to resist, the honour of one’s marriage is sacred.’

Few husbands were as strong-minded as Kovalenko, amid the sexual opportunities of war, and the strains of long absences from home. As for wives and daughters, those in occupied countries who succumbed sexually to their invaders, whether voluntarily or under duress, almost invariably experienced social ostracism in their communities if they survived until the liberation. If some women enjoyed new freedoms, responsibilities and rewards, many more suffered grievously and were exploited mercilessly. The pregnant wife of an Italian in hiding described the misery of her daily existence in 1943: ‘I would sometimes queue from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon … I had to take my two small children with me. I found a place selling “
sanguinaccio
” [blood sausage], which I found disgusting but my little girl ate. I had boils on my legs which I was told were caused by lack of vitamins. My husband was desperate for cigarettes and I found a tobacconist who supplied me. When I got home exhausted, all my husband wanted to do was make love. He would jump on me while I still held the shopping bag. When I refused, he accused me of having a lover.’ Some young warriors discovered compensations in conflict – adventure and a test of manhood – denied to most women, who recognised only its miseries and horrors. If the war dramatically expanded women’s opportunities and responsibilities in some societies, it also intensified their exploitation, above all sexual, in a world arbitrated by force.

Even when the United States dispatched troops to the Mediterranean theatre, by the end of 1942 the Western Allies had deployed only sixteen divisions for ground operations against the Germans and Italians. The critical factors in the struggle against Hitler that year were Russia’s survival and resurgence, matched by soaring American weapons production. On land, at sea and in the air, Allied forces began to receive the fruits of the United States’s prodigious industrial efforts, with tanks and aircraft reaching the theatres of war in unparalleled numbers. America built almost 48,000 aircraft and 25,000 tanks in 1942, against Germany’s 15,400 planes and 9,200 tanks. In 1939, just twenty-nine shipyards were building for the US Navy; by 1942 there were 322, which would deliver over 100,000 new ships and small craft to the US Navy and Maritime Commission before VJ-Day came.

For the rest of the war, Western Allied operations were powerfully influenced by the need to concentrate appropriate shipping to land armies on hostile shores under fire in both the Pacific and European theatres. To achieve this, huge numbers of specialised, shallow-draught vessels were designed and built. The British led the way with the creation of LSTs – Landing Ships, Tank – capable of making an ocean passage, then offloading twenty tanks and up to a hundred other vehicles through their bow doors. The US adopted the 2,286-ton model, larger than most destroyers, and built 1,573 by the end of the war. The construction of smaller vessels was dominated by the flamboyant, tough-talking, hard-drinking New Orleans boatbuilder Andrew Higgins, who styled himself ‘Mr Landing Craft’. Born in Nebraska in 1886, he offered his first design, the Eureka, to the US Marine Corps in 1938. Its key features, conceived a decade earlier for Higgins’s inshore craft used by rum-runners, revenue agents, oil drillers and trappers, were a propeller recessed in a semi-tunnel and a ‘spoon-bill’ bow. Its limitation was that troops disembarked over the sides. Higgins was then shown a photograph of a Japanese vessel with a bow ramp, used in China. He immediately telephoned his chief engineer and gave instructions for a prototype to be built, which was successfully tested on Lake Pontchartrain a month later. The Higgins boats – designated as LCVPs, Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel – were ordered in large numbers. The population of New Orleans grew by 20 per cent in 1942, largely because of the influx of workers needed to build his boats, for which his company received orders worth $700 million. Higgins became a legendary figure in wartime industry, turning out some 20,000 craft. But he was financially reckless, and his company went broke soon after the conflict ended.

Experience under fire in North Africa showed that wooden vessels were highly vulnerable. Steel variants were introduced, many of them assembled by a Florida farm-machinery contractor, which between 1943 and 1945 carried millions of Allied troops and tens of thousands of vehicles into battle. The Americans built a total of 42,000 such small craft, the British 3,000; the US also made 22,000 DUKW (‘duck’) amphibious trucks and amtracs, the latter used almost exclusively in the Pacific. Yet even this vast inventory – what Americans christened the ‘[alli]gator navy’ – never satisfied demand: 2,470 small craft were required merely for the initial phase of D-Day in Normandy.

Shortage of assault shipping was a chronic constraint on Allied strategy, and Churchill frequently lamented British dependence on US bottoms. No amphibious operation could be mounted unless Washington willed it. Britain’s forces also called upon Lend-Lease for a growing proportion of their weapons requirements. Britain’s production of tanks fell from 8,600 in 1942 to 4,600 in 1944, of artillery pieces from 43,000 to 16,000. The US eventually provided 47 per cent of the British Empire’s armour, 21 per cent of small arms, 38 per cent of landing ships and landing craft, 18 per cent of combat planes and 60 per cent of transport aircraft. So great became American capacity that deliveries to Britain amounted to only 11.5 per cent of US 1943–44 production: 13.5 per cent of aircraft, 5 per cent of food, 8.8 per cent of guns and ammunition. British industry meanwhile focused on heavy bombers – the strategic air offensive engaged around one-third of national output, which does much to explain why Britain attached such importance to its achievements and shortcomings.

After Pearl Harbor, there was an interval of thirty months – a long time in the context of a seventy-one-month war – before America’s military and industrial mobilisation translated into large armies deployed on European battlefields, though US air and maritime power impacted sooner. Most of the soldiers who later fought in north-west Europe enjoyed the luxury – and endured the boredom – of more than two years’ training before being committed to action: the majority of US formations did not see their first battlefield until 1944. In 1942 the United States sent most of its Marine Corps and a few army divisions to the Pacific, and tens of thousands more soldiers to Iceland and Northern Ireland.

Americans began to descend on Britain in large numbers. Some warmed to the quaintness of Churchill’s battered islands, but many questioned their inhabitants’ commitment both to the mid-twentieth century and to waging war effectively. ‘The English were kind to us, especially when they got to know us,’ wrote an armoured officer, Haynes Dugan. ‘There were some wonderful parties, although supplies were low.’ Dugan never forgot one such gathering, at which a young Welsh paratroop officer sang in his own language. The American was bemused to discover that, amid the national clothing shortage, a woman guest was wearing a dress made from her own curtains. He recorded, ‘The shopkeepers had a favorite saying: “It isn’t rationed, old boy, we simply can’t get it!”’

Airman Bob Raymond, from Kansas City, came to Britain to serve first with the RAF, later the USAAF. He wrote home in May 1942: ‘The force of tradition and precedent is so strong that thinking in politics, business, religion, etc. seems to have congealed. They are the most economically backward people I’ve ever encountered. Labor-saving devices and shortcut, direct business methods are heartily resisted … Too much tea-drinking, Friday-to-Monday weekends, holidays etc.’ A US government survey of domestic opinion on 25 March 1942 reported: ‘Americans have a greater confidence in the intensity of the Russian war effort than in the intensity of the British war effort; they feel that Russians are putting our Lend-Lease supplies to better use … Lack of confidence in British war effort has become more strongly marked since the fall of Singapore.’ The British were under no illusions about their low standing: ‘The Americans … know us chiefly as a nation suffering from a slow decay,’ asserted a January 1943 War Office report, ‘a nation of superior, unfriendly, discourteous people, set in the old ways of inefficiency, clinging to old dreams of a greatness which we cannot perpetuate … We deceive ourselves if we think the soil is clean. The seeds of distrust and dislike lie dormant in it.’

Throughout 1942 Britain continued the relentless naval struggle to hold open its global supply lines. The RAF’s offensive against Germany slowly gathered momentum, joined by some USAAF bomb groups. A weak, predominantly Indian army confronted the Japanese on the Burmese frontier. The US chiefs of staff were impatient to land in France, offering a token troop contribution to what would have been an overwhelmingly British forlorn hope. Churchill dismissed this idea out of hand, and convinced Roosevelt that the Allies should instead pursue the attainable objective of securing victory in the Mediterranean. North Africa thus persisted as the only theatre in which substantial British ground forces fought the Axis. In the desert, the men of Eighth Army girded themselves for new efforts in a wilderness where neither side had the smallest emotional stake. British officer Keith Douglas wrote:

Neither Churchill nor his people doubted the dominant importance of the struggle in Russia, but North African operations mattered much to British self-respect. In the winter of 1942–43, these also offered an important, probably indispensable opportunity for some US formations to gain combat experience, and for curbing the hubris of their generals. During much of the preceding year, however, it seemed doubtful that the British could even hold Egypt. MP Harold Nicolson wrote: ‘A whisper is going round that our troops do not fight well … Our men cannot stand up to punishment. And yet they are the same men as man the merchant ships and who won the Battle of Britain. There is something deeply wrong with the whole morale of our Army.’ Churchill told a secret session of the Commons debating the desert campaign: ‘The conduct of our large army … does not seem to have been in harmony with the past or present spirit of our forces.’ Following the ignominious surrender of Tobruk on 21 June, Auchinleck dismissed Ritchie, his field commander, and took personal charge of Eighth Army. But at the end of the month, beaten at Mersa Matruh, his battered formations retreated yet again, to the El Alamein line inside Egypt.

British fortunes were at their lowest ebb. It was widely agreed that desert generalship and tactics in the first six months of 1942 had been deplorable, the Gazala battles scandalously mishandled. Morale was wretched. It seemed plausible to both sides that Rommel might reach Cairo, and Egypt be lost to the Allies. The strategic impact of such a blow would have been limited, because the Axis lacked resources for exploitation. But the cost to British prestige, already badly tarnished, would have been appalling. Panic swept Egypt, and the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet quit Alexandria. Lt. Pietro Ostellino wrote exultantly to his wife on 2 July 1942, in a letter that emphasised residual fascist enthusiasm among some Italians who clung to hopes of military success: ‘Things here get better and better. As you will have heard from the radio and newspapers, the English and their allies are taking such a beating that they will find it difficult to raise their heads again. They deserve it! Our soldiers are simply marvellous. We cannot fail to be victorious now.’

Washington agreed. The leaders of the US Army believed, and continued to assume until late autumn, that the British campaign was lost; that Eighth Army had shown itself fatally inferior to the Afrika Korps, which was destined to sweep onward and seize the Nile Delta. During July, gloom suffused the British in Cairo, matched by visible exultation among Egyptians. On the notorious ‘Ash Wednesday’, Middle East headquarters conducted bonfires of secret documents and many families fled to Palestine. To the shame of the Mandate authorities there, several hundred Jews fleeing Egypt who applied for sanctuary, including some working for the British, were refused entry visas. Officials asserted blandly that they were unable to breach immigration quotas.

Yet the British predicament was not as bad as they themselves supposed. Some civilians, even in occupied Europe, made shrewder deductions from meagre and deceitful Nazi bulletins than did Allied soldiers on the battlefield. Victor Klemperer, the great Dresden Jewish diarist, wrote on 8 July 1942: ‘I assume that England and Russia exaggerate by 100 per cent, Goebbels and Co by 200 per cent … In Russia Hitler’s victories are killing him; in Egypt he really could win. But … Rommel appears to have been brought up short before Alexandria.’ Klemperer was right: Rommel’s condition was unenviable. The outnumbered Axis army stood at the end of a tenuous 1,500-mile supply line. Allocations of fuel and weapons from Germany were always inadequate. Empowered by Ultra decrypts, the Royal Navy and the RAF began to inflict heavy attrition on fuel, tank and ammunition shipments across the Mediterranean.

The RAF in North Africa gained strength, while the Luftwaffe weakened; the first American Grant tanks, almost a match for Rommel’s panzers, reached Eighth Army. Strategically, it would have profited the Germans to withdraw to a line inside Libya, easing their own supply difficulties and increasing those of the British. Whatever delusions Rommel’s soldiers cherished, his army lacked strength to make a final push for Alexandria with a realistic prospect of success. But vanity and ambition often caused ‘the Desert Fox’ to overreach himself, and Hitler urged ill-judged aggression upon the Afrika Korps even more insistently than Churchill pressed his own commanders.

Auchinleck was well placed to frustrate Axis purposes, merely by holding his ground. American and British forces were to land at the opposite end of North Africa in November – Operation
Torch
– and this made it unnecessary for Eighth Army to take risks. Once the Allies established themselves in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, Rommel’s position in Egypt would become untenable. But as autumn approached, the success of
Torch
seemed ill-assured, especially in Washington. For the British, there was also the imperative of national prestige. Since 1939 Churchill’s armies had suffered repeated defeats – indeed humiliations – often by smaller enemy forces. Spirits at home were low. Churchill’s people had grown morbidly sensitive about the contrast between the heroic struggle waged by the Russians and their own nation’s feeble battlefield showing. A British victory was desperately needed, and only in the desert was this attainable. The defeat of the Afrika Korps in Egypt was scarcely relevant to the war’s outcome, but had become an issue of the highest moral importance, and perceived as such by the prime minister.

On 1 July, when the Germans attacked again, they were repulsed in what became known as the First Battle of El Alamein. In the encounters which followed, neither side gained a decisive advantage. But what mattered was that Rommel was denied a breakthrough – although, given the opposing forces’ respective strengths and detailed Allied foreknowledge of German intentions, it would have been disgraceful had he achieved one. In the first days of August Churchill arrived in Cairo with Alan Brooke, to see for himself how things stood. He sacked Auchinleck, who was replaced as Eighth Army commander by Brooke’s nominee, Lt. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery, and as Middle East C-in-C by Gen. Sir Harold Alexander. A month later, on 30 August, Rommel attacked at Alam Halfa. Montgomery, provided by Ultra with full details of German plans, drove him back. The general then addressed himself to training Britain’s troops for his own offensive. He had the critical advantages that large US tank reinforcements were arriving, and the Desert Air Force had gained dominance of the sky.