The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  This posed problems and caused apprehension, but it had a certain advantage. According to Pvt. Carl Weast of the U.S. 5th Ranger Battalion, “A veteran infantryman is a terrified infantryman.”8 Sgt. Carwood Lipton of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) of the 101st Airborne commented, “I took chances on D-Day I would never have taken later in the war.”9

  In Wartime, Paul Fussell writes that men in combat go through two stages of rationalization followed by one of perception. Considering the possibility of a severe wound or death, the average soldier’s first rationalization is: “It can’t happen to me. I am too clever/agile/well-trained/good-looking/beloved/tightly laced, etc.” The second rationalization is: “It can happen to me, and I’d better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by watching more prudently the way I take cover/dig in/expose my position by firing my weapon/keep extra alert at all times, etc.” Finally, the realization is “It is going to happen to me, and only my not being there is going to prevent it.”10

  For a direct frontal assault on a prepared enemy position, men who have not seen what a bullet or a land mine or an exploding mortar round can do to a human body are preferable to men who have seen the carnage. Men in their late teens or early twenties have a feeling of invulnerability, as seen in the remark of Charles East of the 29th Division. Told by his commanding officer on the eve of D-Day that nine out of ten would become casualties in the ensuing campaign, East looked at the man to his left, then at the man to his right, and thought to himself, You poor bastards.11

  Men like Sergeant Lipton and Private East—and there were thousands of them in the American army—could overcome the problem of inexperience with their zeal and daredevil attitude.

  The ordinary infantry divisions of the British army were another matter. They had been in barracks since the British Expeditionary Force retreated from the Continent in June 1940. The ordinary soldier was not as well educated or as physically fit as his American counterpart. Superficial discipline—dress, saluting, etc.—was much better than among the GIs, but real discipline, taking and executing orders, was slack. The British War Office had been afraid to impose discipline too strictly in a democratic army on the odd notion that it might dampen the fighting spirit of the men in the ranks.

  Those British soldiers who were veterans had been badly beaten by the Wehrmacht in 1940; their overseas mates had surrendered to an inferior Japanese army in Singapore in February 1941, to an inferior German army in Tobruk, Libya, in June 1942, and again to an inferior German force on the Greek island of Leros in November 1943. The one British victory in the war, at El Alamein in November 1942, had been won over an undersupplied, outgunned, and outmanned Afrika Korps. In pursuing the defeated Afrika Korps into Tunisia, as in the ensuing campaigns in Sicily and Italy, the British Eighth Army had not displayed much of a killer instinct.

  The Germans who fought against the British often expressed their surprise at the way in which British troops would do only what was expected of them, no more. They found it remarkable that the British would abandon a pursuit to brew up their tea, and even more remarkable that British troops would surrender when their ammunition ran low, when their fuel ran out, or when they were encircled. Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of the Eighth Army, wrote his superior, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Alan Brooke: “The trouble with our British lads is that they are not killers by nature.”12

  One reason for the shortcomings of the World War II British army was inferior weaponry. British tanks, trucks, artillery, and small arms were not as good as those of their enemies, or of their American partners. Another reason was the way in which the poison of pacifism had eaten into the souls of British youth after the catastrophes of the Somme, Flanders, and elsewhere in World War I. In addition, senior officers were survivors of the trenches. They had nightmares from the experience. They mistrusted offensive action in general, direct frontal assaults even more. What their generals had ordered them to do, charge across no-man’s-land, they would not. They knew it was stupid, futile, suicidal. Their mistake was in thinking that the lessons of World War I applied to all offensive action.

  On the eve of the invasion, General Montgomery visited D Company, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, a gliderborne outfit in the 6th Airborne Division. Its commanding officer was Maj. John Howard. D Company had a special mission. It was composed of volunteers, had excellent junior officers, was well trained and primed to go. It was an outstanding rifle company. Montgomery’s parting words to Howard were, “Bring back as many of the chaps as you can.”13

  Montgomery’s approach to the launching of an offensive was markedly different from that of Field Marshal Douglas Haig in World War I, and certainly far more commendable. And yet those were strange words to say to the commander of an elite force undertaking an absolutely critical task. One might have thought something like “John, whatever else, get the job done” would have been more appropriate.

  In part, Montgomery’s caution was simple realism. Britain had reached her manpower limits. The British army could not afford heavy losses; there was no way to make them up. But it was precisely this point that infuriated Americans. In their view, the way to minimize casualties was to take risks to win the war as soon as possible, not to exercise caution in an offensive action.

  Something else irritated the Americans—the supercilious contempt for all things American that some British officers could not help displaying, and the assumed superiority of British techniques, methods, tactics, and leadership that almost all British officers shared and many of them displayed. Put directly, most British officers regarded the Americans as neophytes in war who were blessed with great equipment in massive quantities and superbly conditioned but inexperienced enlisted men. Such officers felt it was their duty, their destiny, to train and teach the Yanks. Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander wrote to Brooke from Tunisia about the Americans: “They simply do not know their job as soldiers and this is the case from the highest to the lowest, from the general to the private soldier. Perhaps the weakest link of all is the junior leader, who just does not lead, with the result that their men don’t really fight.”14

  Another major problem the Allies faced at the end of 1943 was precisely the fact that they were allies. “Give me allies to fight against,” said Napoleon, pointing to an obvious truth. The Yanks got on British nerves; the Limeys got on American nerves. This was exacerbated by proximity; as the American army in Britain began to grow in anticipation of the invasion, the friction increased. According to the British, the trouble with the Yanks was that they were “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” The GIs responded that the trouble with the Limeys was they were underpaid (which was true) and undersexed, which tended to be true as British girls naturally gravitated to the GIs, who had money to throw around and were billeted in villages rather than segregated in isolated barracks.

  In Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy the Tommies and the GIs had fought side by side, but there had been too much friction, too little functioning as a team. If they were going to penetrate the Atlantic Wall, they were going to have to learn to work together. One indication that they could do so was the designation of the force. Back in 1917, when members of the American Expeditionary Force were asked what AEF stood for, the Yanks replied, “After England Failed.” But in 1943 AEF stood for Allied Expeditionary Force.

  • •

  As against the untested, cocky, “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead” American army and the war-weary, too cautious British army, the Germans could put into the battle troops who (as described by Max Hastings) “possessed an historic reputation as formidable soldiers. Under Hitler their army attained its zenith.” Hastings asserts: “Throughout the Second World War, wherever British or American troops met the Germans in anything like equal strength, the Germans prevailed.”15

  Hastings’s judgment has become popular among military historians a half-century after the war. The German soldier in World War II has assumed a mythical quality as t
he best fighting man not only in that war but in almost any war ever fought.

  The judgment is wrong. The Wehrmacht had many fine units, and many outstanding soldiers, but they were not supermen. Not even the Waffen-SS elite troops of 1944–45 were much, if any, better than ordinary Allied troops. And the Allied elite units, the airborne and Rangers and Commandos, were better than anything the Germans put into the field.

  What made the Germans look so good, what so impressed Hastings and others, was the kill ratio. It was almost two-to-one in favor of the Wehrmacht, sometimes higher. But that criterion ignores a basic fact: the Wehrmacht vs. the Anglo-American armies was almost always fighting on the defensive behind prepared positions or fixed fortifications, such as the Mareth Line in Tunisia, the Winter Line in Italy, the Atlantic Wall in France, the West Wall in the final defense of Germany’s borders. Even then, the Germans never did manage to hold a position—they were always driven back. Of course, the argument is that they were driven back by overwhelming firepower, that the Allies won because they outproduced the Germans, not because they outfought them. There is truth to that.

  But the only time in World War II that the Wehrmacht undertook a genuine offensive against American troops, it was soundly whipped. In the Ardennes, in December 1944, the Germans had the manpower and firepower advantage. At Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne was encircled, it was almost a ten-to-one advantage. Allied control of the air was useless for the first week of the battle, due to miserable weather. The Germans were close to their supply dumps, even to their manufacturing sites—tanks rolling out of factories in the Rhine-Ruhr region could start firing almost as they left the factory gate. The Germans had some of their best Waffen-SS and panzer divisions in the attack. They had ample artillery support. But the lightly armed 101st, cut off from its supplies, cold, hungry, unable to properly care for its wounded, running low on or even out of ammunition, with little artillery support, held off desperate German attacks for more than a week.

  The American elite unit prevailed over the elite German units. Elsewhere in the Ardennes the same pattern prevailed. Once they had recovered from their surprise, the American regular infantry units gave an excellent account of themselves.

  In 1980, Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey asked Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the wartime commander of the 101st Airborne, to assess the performance of the American soldiers under his command in World War II. There were many problems at first, Taylor said, but by December 1944 there were companies in his division “that were better than anything anywhere. The men were hardened, the officers tested, their equipment upgraded and they had that wonderful flexibility and self-confidence imparted by a democratic society. No other system could produce soldiers like that, but it did take some time.”16

  So although the German army contained some very good units, it just won’t do to call that army as a whole the best in the war. It would be more accurate to say that after 1941 the side on the defensive almost always gave a better account of itself.

  • •

  Neither were the Germans superior to the Allies on the technological front. True, their infantry weapons tended to be better, and they had some innovative gadgets, such as the V-1 pilotless bomber, and some genuine breakthroughs, such as the snorkel submarine and the V-2 ballistic missile. But they had fallen badly behind in the quality and design of fighter and bomber aircraft (except for the too-late ME 262), they were not even in the atomicbomb race, their encoding system, the Enigma machine, had been hopelessly compromised, and—strangely enough for a country that had Mercedes and Volkswagen—they were badly outclassed in motor transport.

  The British were outstanding in science and technology. The proximity fuse, radar, and sonar were British innovations, as was penicillin. Much of the basic work on the atomic bomb was done by British physicists. The British were inventive. For example, they were working on special tanks, called “Hobart’s Funnies” after Gen. Percy Hobart of the 79th Armoured Division. In March 1943, Hobart had been given the job of figuring out how to get armored support onto and over the beaches, to breach the concrete and minefields of the Atlantic Wall. He came up with swimming tanks. Duplex drive (DD), they were called, after their twin propellers working off the main engine. They had a waterproof, air-filled canvas screen all round the hull, giving the DD the appearance of a baby carriage. The inflatable screen was dropped when the tank reached the shore.

  Another of Hobart’s Funnies carried a forty-foot box-girder bridge for crossing antitank ditches. The “Crab” had a rotating drum in front of the tank; as it turned it thrashed the ground in front with steel chains, safely detonating mines in its path. There were others.

  Even more astonishing than swimming tanks was the idea of towing prefabricated ports across the Channel. By the end of 1943 thousands of British workers were helping to construct the artificial ports (code name Mulberries) and the breakwaters to shelter them. The “docks” consisted of floating piers connected by treadway to the beach. The piers were devised so that the platform, or roadway, could slide up and down with the tide on four posts that rested on the sea bottom. The breakwater (code name Phoenix) combined hollow, floating concrete caissons about six stories high with old merchant ships. Lined up end to end off the French coast, the ships and Phoenixes were sunk by opening their sea cocks. The result: an instant breakwater protecting instant port facilities, in place and ready to go on D-Day plus one.II

  • •

  There were many other British triumphs. One of the most important was Ultra. Ultra was the code name for the system of breaking the German Enigma encoding machine. From 1941 onward, the British were reading significant portions of German radio traffic, giving the Allies a generally accurate, and occasionally exact and total, picture of the enemy order of battle. As that is the most basic and priceless of all intelligence in war—where are the enemy units? in what strength? with what capabilities?—Ultra gave the Allies an immense advantage.

  When the Ultra secret was finally revealed in the early 1970s, people asked, “If we were reading German radio traffic right through the war, how come we didn’t win the war sooner?” The answer is, we did.

  The intelligence advantage was even greater thanks to the British Double Cross System and to German conceit. In 1940, the British had managed to arrest all German spies in the United Kingdom. They were “turned,” persuaded at the point of a gun to operate as double agents. For the next three years they sent information to their controllers in Hamburg via Morse code, information carefully selected by the British. It was always accurate, as the aim of the operation was to build Abwehr (the German security service) trust in the agents, but was always either insignificant or too late to be of any use.17

  Sometimes the information passed on could prove disconcerting to the Allied forces preparing for the invasion. Sgt. Gordon Carson of the U.S. 101st was stationed in Aldbourne, west of London, late in 1943. He liked to listen to “Axis Sally” on the radio. Sally, known to the men as the “Bitch of Berlin,” was Midge Gillars, an Ohio girl who had wanted to be an actress but had become a Parisian fashion model. There she met Max Otto Koischwitz, married him, and moved to Berlin. When the war came, she became a disc jockey. She was popular with the American troops because of her accent and her sweet, sexy voice and because she played the latest hits, interspersed with crude propaganda (Why fight for the communists? Why fight for the Jews? etc.) that gave the men a laugh.

  But they did not laugh when Sally interspersed her commentary with remarks that sent chills up the spines of her listeners, such as: “Hello to the men of Company E, 506th PIR, 101st A/B in Aldbourne. Hope you boys enjoyed your passes to London last weekend. Oh, by the way, please tell the town officials that the clock on the church is three minutes slow.”18

  Axis Sally had her facts straight and hundreds of GIs and Tommies tell stories similar to Carson’s about the clock. Fifty years later, the veterans still shake their heads and wonder, “How the hell did she know that?” She knew because the Double Cr
oss System had given her the information.III

  The receipt of so much information from their agents reinforced the German conceit that they had the best set of spies in the world. That added to their conviction that Enigma was the best encoding machine, absolutely unbreakable, and made them think that they had the best intelligence and counterintelligence systems in the world.

  Fooling the Germans about Allied capabilities and intentions was the negative side of the espionage struggle. The positive side was gathering information on the German order of battle. Of course, Ultra was making a priceless contribution here; to supplement Ultra, the Allies had two sources that, at the end of 1943, they were ready to put into full action. The first was air reconnaissance. With the Luftwaffe fighting on the defensive, mostly inside Germany, the Americans and British were free to fly over France and take all the photographs they wished.

  But tank and artillery parks could be hidden in woods, field emplacements camouflaged, which brought into play the second Allied source, the French Resistance. Partly to keep the economy producing at full capacity, partly because in France the German occupiers tried to act in a decent fashion in order to make friends, French civilians were not evacuated from the coastal areas. They could see where the Germans were positioning their guns, hiding their tanks, placing their mines. When the time came, they had ways of getting that information over to England, primarily by working with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a part of the vast British intelligence gathering/covert operations network that was one of the great British accomplishments in the war.

  • •

  It is far too simple to say that the marriage of British brains and American brawn sealed the fate of Nazi Germany in the West. The British contributed considerable brawn, for one thing, and the Americans contributed considerable brains. Still, there is some truth in it. If the British miracles of World War II included Hobart’s Funnies, Mulberries, Ultra, and the Double Cross System, the American miracles included production of war matériel such as the world had never seen.