All Hell Let Loose (89 page)

‘It was a hell of a day,’ wrote a British company commander describing his unit’s experiences on 25 June with a frankness unusual among Allied soldiers:

Soldiers who fought on foot and those who rode on tracks were almost unfailingly sceptical of each other’s tactics. ‘We discussed the forthcoming advance with the delicate, genteel bargaining that always took place between tank and infantry,’ wrote British infantryman Lt. Norman Craig of an exchange with an armoured officer. ‘Myself, hoping to persuade the tanks to go in front; he politely determined that they should not. The infantryman considered the tank an overpowering leviathan, which should be hurled indiscriminately into the assault; the tank man looked on the infantry as a convenient expendable mass, useful for neutralising anti-tank guns.’

Throughout the north-west Europe campaign, Allied senior officers vented frustration at infantrymen’s insistent thraldom to artillery. Forrest Pogue recorded some American commanders’ comments: ‘They kept saying that the infantry failed to take cover, failed to take advantage of artillery preparation, failed to advance boldly, failed to dig in properly. [Under heavy fire] it was digging in which saved them, yet in basic [training] we dug only one foxhole. Artillery is used very extensively. I have been in many [command posts] when somebody would say they saw two or three Germans several hundred yards away. 5–30 rounds were frequently dropped on them.’

Much depended on local junior leadership, and too many brave junior leaders died. ‘The spirit of human aggression has a magical tendency to evaporate as soon as the shooting starts,’ wrote Norman Craig, ‘and a man then responds to two influences only – the external discipline that binds him and the self-respect within him that drives him on … Courage is essentially competitive and imitative.’ The commanding officer of a British infantry battalion said: ‘On an average, in a platoon of twenty-five, five will do their best to fight … and fifteen will follow a lead. The rest will be useless. This applies to the whole infantry corps, and if the junior officers and NCOs will not go, the situation is pretty bad.’

Tank officer Michael Rathbone wrote: ‘I have drawn my revolver to halt fleeing infantrymen; they came running by my tank when we were repairing a track damaged by a mine. I prayed we should never have to fight again with the 59th Division.’ Likewise another armoured officer, Peter Selerie: ‘We were often critical of the infantry … I remember that an infantry battalion melted away after incredibly heavy mortaring together with “air burst” salvos. They had unfortunately neglected to dig in properly and had lost their officers and the bulk of their NCOs. The Kensingtons machine-gun battalion held the line supported by our tanks.’ Riflemen always suffered far heavier casualties than did tank crews, and well the riflemen knew this.

Most soldiers going into battle for the first time were less frightened than they became once they had experienced its reality. When American infantryman Royce Lapp landed in France, ‘None of us were too scared then, because we didn’t know what we were getting into.’ Likewise men of a US cavalry unit clustered curiously around the first corpse they saw, that of a German officer. Their commander Lt. Lyman Diercks, a twenty-eight-year-old postal worker from Bryant, Illinois, harangued his soldiers. ‘I told them it was very likely some of us wouldn’t survive the war. We had to be like a family. I didn’t expect them to be heroes, but if they became cowards they’d have to live with it all their lives. And while I was talking to them, I was really talking to myself.’

When a shell landed close to a Canadian sergeant in Normandy, he exclaimed, ‘Shit and shit some more!’ A newly arrived replacement asked if he was hit. The NCO said no, ‘he had just pissed his pants. He always pissed them, he said, when things started and then he was okay … Then I realized something wasn’t quite right with me, either. There was something warm down there and it seemed to be running down my leg. I felt, and it wasn’t blood. It was piss … I said, “Sarge, I’ve pissed too” … he grinned and said, “Welcome to the war.”’ Fear afflicted other men in other ways. A Canadian prisoner was led into a Waffen SS regimental headquarters, under intense Allied bombardment. To his amazement, the staff were sheltering under map tables while singing a rousing chorus of ‘O Beautiful German Rhine’ to the accompaniment of a mouth organ. The Canadian shook his head and mumbled in confusion, ‘War is a merry thing!’ Some unglamorous tasks imposed disproportionate risks: ‘The first men to die in most battles were the phone linesmen,’ said Waffen SS gunner Captain Karl Godau. Field telephone communications were vital when few units had tactical radios: linesmen were constantly obliged to expose themselves under fire to repair breaks caused by shelling or passing vehicles, and many were killed doing so.

A panzer staff-sergeant, captured by the Americans, offered his interrogators a comparison between the Eastern and Western Fronts: ‘The Russian won’t let you forget for one moment … that you are fighting on his soil, that you represent something he loathes. He will endure the greatest hardships … True, the average soldier lacks the resourcefulness of the American, but he makes up for it with a steadfastness I have never seen matched. If nine men get killed in an attempt to cut through wire, the tenth will still try – and succeed. You Americans are masters of your equipment, and your equipment is very good. But you lack the Russians’ tenacity.’

Yet if both sides suffered terribly in Normandy, German losses were worse, and irreplaceable. As early as 16 June Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division was weakened by 1,149 casualties and its tank strength was halved; during a briefing at his command post, Meyer wrote: ‘I see worried faces … Without talking about it openly we know we are approaching a catastrophe … Faced with the enemy’s enormous naval and air superiority, we can predict the breakdown of the defensive front … We are already surviving on subsistence level. Up to now we have received neither a single replacement for comrades wounded or killed, nor one tank or gun.’

SS panzergrenadier Fritz Zimmer recorded in his diary at the end of June that his company was reduced to eighteen men; a week later, on 8 July, he fought the last action of his own war:

By 22 July Luftwaffe paratrooper Martin Poppel lay in hospital, recovering from wounds inflicted in Normandy and increasingly fearful for the future of his nation’s cause. ‘How did the poor buggers at the front and the exhausted civilian population at home deserve to be so badly led? We have many anxious questions about the future and our prospects in this long war. Even the most confident among us have doubts.’ Another soldier wrote to his wife on 12 August: ‘My darling Irmi, it doesn’t look too good – that would be saying too much – but you know the cheerfulness with which I go about life … Man is a creature of habit. The roar of gunfire and explosion of bombs, which at first are hard on the nerves, lose their terrors after two or three days … The last three days we have had the most wonderful summer weather – sun, warmth and blue skies – so utterly at odds with everything else we see around us. Oh well, it will turn out all right in the end. Just have as much faith in my luck as I do and everything will look brighter, a thousand kisses to you, my darling Irmi and the children, your Ferd.’

A comrade wrote likewise to his family on 10 August: ‘My darling wife and darling children … the rumble of gunfire comes ever closer. When I hear it my thoughts wander back to you, my dearest, and the question of whether I shall ever see you again rises before me. The battle could reach me any time now. What will be my fate? … Last night I was with you in my dreams. Ah, how beautiful it was! Can you imagine, my darling, how it feels to wake from such an idyll to the thunder of guns? I carry your image in my heart. It is such a heavy feeling. I should like to fly home to you my dearest! What will be my fate? How good it was to be allowed a few wonderful days with you in Fallingbostel, my dear loyal wife!’ Both the letters quoted above were found by an American soldier on their authors’ corpses.

Through those summer months, the British and American peoples thought of little save their armies’ struggle in Normandy. But in Berlin, Hitler confronted an even graver threat: less than three weeks after the landings in France, in the east the Soviets launched Operation
Bagration
, the greatest offensive of the war and the last to be launched from Russian soil. Hitler’s refusal to allow a strategic retreat during the spring left his forces defending a 1,400-mile front, with few reserves. Two-thirds of the entire German army was still deployed against the Russians, but this was not enough to meet an assault by 2.4 million men and more than 5,000 tanks, deploying twice the firepower committed to the Soviets’ 1943 assaults.

Stalin said in a speech to his people on May Day 1944: ‘If we are to deliver our country and those of our allies from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast and deliver the final blow to him in his own lair.’ The Russian word for ‘lair’ is
berloga
. Thus, armoured crews painted on their tanks not ‘On to Berlin!’ but ‘On to
berloga
!’ On 22 June three Soviet
fronts
under Zhukov’s command struck at the 700,000 men of Army Group Centre. Simultaneously, a partisan offensive in the German rear almost severed Field Marshal Ernest Busch’s lines of communication. The Russians concentrated four hundred guns a mile for their preliminary bombardment, along a front of 350 miles. They had total air superiority, thanks in large measure to the Western Allies’ destruction of the Luftwaffe over Germany.

When Zhukov’s infantry and tanks stormed forward into the palls of smoke and dust shrouding the defenders’ positions, German phone lines were dead, command links broken. Busch’s formations were shattered where they stood, vainly attempting to execute Hitler’s demand for a rigid, no-retreat defence. Designated ‘fortresses’ at Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev and Bobruisk were ordered to hold out to the last man. The consequences were catastrophic. The Russians swept forward in an irresistible tide, bypassing the ‘fortresses’ and driving headlong westwards. On 28 June Model was hastily transferred to replace Busch, but the situation was irretrievable. Minsk fell on 4 July, while in the north the attackers thrust towards Riga on the Baltic, which was soon encircled.

The Red Army never displayed much tactical subtlety, save perhaps in harassing the enemy through the hours of darkness, a skill in which its men surpassed the Western Allies. A British analyst has written: ‘In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity … in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.’ Russian attacks emphasised massed artillery bombardment and sacrificial tank and infantry advances, often led by ‘staff battalions’ – penal units of political and military prisoners offered the possibility of reprieve in return for accepting the likelihood of extinction. Some 442,700 men served in them, and most died. The Russians continued to suffer higher casualties than did the Germans. If all soldiers find it hard to describe to civilians afterwards what they have endured, for Russians it was uniquely difficult. Even in the years of victory, 1943 to 1945, the Red Army’s assault units accepted losses of around 25 per cent in each action, a casualty rate the Anglo-American forces would never have accepted as a constant. Of 403,272 Russian soldiers who completed tank training in the course of the war, 310,000 died.

The poet David Samoilov noted, ‘This was the last Russian war in which most of the soldiers were peasants.’ Partly in consequence, Stalin’s soldiers were even more superstitious than most warriors. Some, for instance, thought it unlucky to curse while loading a weapon; many wore good-luck charms and crosses. If relatively few admitted a formal allegiance to banished Christianity, many crossed themselves before going into action. Song played a big part in the army’s culture. Men sang as they marched, and in the evenings around their fires – mostly ballads heavy with sentiment, lacking the cynicism of British soldiers’ favoured numbers. With so many
frontoviks
quickly wounded or killed, it was estimated that Russian soldiers spent an average of only three months together. But men said that inside a week they learned more about each other than in a year of civilian life. The Red Army offered its men neither sex education nor condoms. Those who developed venereal diseases were sometimes punished by the denial of medical treatment. Children sometimes marched with the regiments, because they had lost everything, and only the army offered them some hope of subsistence.