How I Won the War

by Patrick Ryan

  “But if we did that,” I said, “we’d just get beaten by the Germans and that …”

  “We should have been beaten by the Germans already,” he broke in, “if we hadn’t been so dead lucky as to have Hitler on their side. It’s only the way little old Adolf keeps on interfering with his generals that saves us from paying for the botchery of our own…. What’s the biggest battle going on in France right now?”

  “Er … the Battle of the Reichswald?”

  “Wrong…. The battle between Montgomery and Bradley. For the history book title of ‘The Man Who Won the War.’ If they spent as much time out-scheming the Boche as they do at circumventing each other, we’d all be in Berlin by now. Poor old Eisenhower can barely get a clear weekend on the golf course without being called off the fifteenth to separate them. They were steamed up fit for personal fisticuffs during the Battle of the Bulge. If von Runstedt had been smart enough to withdraw sharply from between them, they’d have smacked together and had it out there and then, boot and bare knuckle in the Ardennes…. Generals! … Phwtt! …” He spat metaphorically. “Prestige-chasers! … Megalomania-mongers! … Thank God for Hitler!”

  The Duty Officer’s Orders gave no guidance as to the action to be taken against defeatist talk on the high seas, but I felt obliged to speak up for our gallant generals.

  “You exaggerate,” I said. “Our generals are fine, responsible men. Someone has to have the courage to make tremendous decisions. Someone has to make mistakes …”

  “Too true, boy,” he broke in, “but there’s no call to make a way of life out of mismanagement. Did you see them bomb the abbey at Cassino?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just an example. Fourth Indian were up there on Snakes-head Ridge ordered to attack straight after the bombardment was done. They fixed the date. They fixed the time. They told the Fourth Indian … then they decided to bomb a day earlier. They dropped leaflets on the monastery telling the monks when they were going to bomb it … They told the Italians, they told the Germans, they told the generals … they told everybody except Fourth Indian up there on the ridge. And the first they knew about the time going forward a day was when bombs landed on them instead of Cassino. Even Hitler couldn’t save them from that.”

  He poured himself some more gin at the memory and took a restoring swig.

  “But they were lucky the Air Force was operating normally and kept its usual quota of bombs outside the immediate target area. God knows if they hit any Germans in Cassino, but they knocked hell out of Venafro, fifteen miles away, and wrote off a hundred and forty civilians. They straddled Eighth Army Headquarters which wasn’t a bad thing to do, bashed our own gun lines and killed forty-four artillerymen, and blew up a Moroccan hospital to knock off forty patients…. When they have a count-up after this war I reckon they’ll find the Allied Air Forces dropped more bloody bombs on us than they did on the enemy.”

  “Really,” I said, “you are quite unfair …”

  “Am I indeed?” He wobbled upright in offence and poured more gin over my boots. “Souk-el-Arba. What about that? … Miles behind the lines, and blasted to hell by bombers sent to hit Kasserine. Hundred miles off target that time, and Eisenhower paid fifty thousand quid compensation…. And remember those yellow identification triangles? You had them, didn’t you? In North Africa, tied under your chin like a bib. When approached by Allied aircraft, they said, hold the points of the triangle at arms length to establish your identity. And what happened if you ever did that thing?” He fixed me with an accusing finger. “What happened when you stood out like a nit with your little yellow flag? Answer me that, matey.”

  “They machine-gunned us,” I said. “But that was just an isolated mistake …”

  “So was I. God knows how many poor trusting bastards met their Maker standing in the middle of the road extending those yellow triangles. They were good for only one thing. Making tops for nurses’ bikinis. And then the dye used to run in salt water and turn their busts bright yellow. Indelible it was too and never came off. I know because my brother, Conrad, married a North African, yellow-breasted, nursing sister twelve months ago and he can still wake up wondering if he’s in the top half of a Chinese brothel…. Do you know my brother, Conrad?”

  “No,” I said. “Hadn’t you better get below now, it’s gone half past twelve.”

  “Must tell you about my brother, Conrad. Another little drink, another little talk …” He was rambling drunk by now but his tongue never seemed to falter. “My brother, Conrad, won the Battle of Alamein. Now you tell me, Mr. Musketeer, what was Alamein?”

  “It was,” I said patiently, “a famous victory.”

  “It was,” he levelled the gin bottle like a cannon, “one bloody great mistake.”

  “Nonsense. We won it magnificently.”

  “One bloody great mistake. From beginning to end. But the benevolent God Mighty in Battle, the Christian monopoly of British brass battery, reached down the hand he uses on wandering babies and drunken sailors and saw us safely through. Him and my brother, Conrad…. Very clever chap is Conrad. Very important staff chap back down in Cairo. Never came out of Cairo on account of his maps. Had a warehouse big as Buckingham Palace full of maps. He had hundreds and thousands of maps all over Africa. Whatever happened on the Dark Continent, it could never take my brother, Conrad, by surprise. You want to fight a war anywhere in Africa, beat up the Boers in Bloemfontein or conquer the cannibals up the Congo, you only had to ask my brother, Conrad, and he’d let you have the maps in a jiffy. A wonderful filing system he had to keep all those maps straight, especially when the map numbers keep repeating themselves every hundred sheets. And with half the desert maps a blank sheet of nothing it was a tricky job making sure you picked them from the right hemisphere. Conrad was a marvel at map selection and he never made a mistake till Alamein. What with Montgomery abolishing the back-to-Palestine plan and calling up his getaway truck, Conrad’s nerves were in a terrible state when Eighth Army Headquarters sent down their requisition. He went to pieces and met it from the wrong shelf. He sent them up sheets with the right numbers on but from the wrong set, a hundred or so sheets to the south. He found out his mistake mind you, a fortnight later when he was taking stock, but by then the battle was joined and there was nothing anyone could do about it.”

  “You’re not trying to tell me,” I said, “that Montgomery fought the Battle of Alamein off the wrong maps.”

  He drew up his shoulders in tipsy dignity.

  “My brother, Conrad, sent them to him. There was buggerall on half of them, but flat sand and one contour. Just the Kidney Feature to break the forty-mile monotony and a bit of a dip down by the Qattara Depression. So they marked up their start lines and their axes and their bounds and fought their chinagraph battle quite happily on the sheets that Conrad gave them. While the troops were fighting on the sands of El Alamein, Eighth Army Headquarters were conducting their paper battle a thousand miles to the south on a bare bit of lower Libyan desert two hundred miles northwest of Khartoum.”

  “But yet,” I said swiftly, “we still won the battle.”

  “My brother, Conrad, won the battle. If he’d sent them up the right maps to work off they’d probably have lost it. Got to finding out where the troops really were and interfering with them. They appreciated it too, you know, because they gave my brother, Conrad, a medal. They gave him the M.B.E. for meritorious issue of maps in Cairo. And you don’t get medals for nowt, do you?”

  “No,” I said, “of course you don’t.”

  “You get medals, old cock, for pulling the general’s chestnuts out of the fire. Medals are issued pro rata to the magnitude of the blunder made by the higher command. You can’t fight against impossible odds unless some bloody brass hat is incompetent enough to land you up against impossible odds. You can’t conduct an heroic last-man, last-round defence unless some red-tabbed genius has bungled his battle and left you on your tod…. The bigger the boob, the more the medals. The number of gon
gs given after an action increases in direct proportion to the number of casualties. In lauding the decorated living, we overlook the wasted dead. Our attention focused on the gallantry of the survivors we forget the top-level botchery that caused the casualties…. Ten thousand killed today, sir! Strike up the band! Lob out the V.C.’s! And make me a Field Marshal!”

  He tipped up the bottle and poured the last of the gin into his glass.

  “Medals …” he said, lurching in his chair. “Do you know the one thing you got to have to get medals?”

  “Courage?”

  “Wrong again. You’re wrong every time, Mr. Musketeer. There’s plenty of courage about. Plenty of blokes too stupid to take cover. Plenty of blokes got no imagination, too dull to know the danger, too dumb to run away. Plenty of blokes, half-crazy, half-animal, best they can think to do is to lower the horns and charge…. Just being brave don’t get no medals. There’s a thousand heroes every day but no laurels go to the unsung … you get no garlands if nobody hears what you’ve done. And the biggest medals don’t go to the biggest heroes … they go to the ones with the best reports…. It’s the reports, cocky, that win the medals, the citations that capture the gongs…. Brave man—good citation—big medal!”

  He banged his chest like Tarzan and knocked himself off the chair. “Bravest man in the world—poor citation—no medal! That’s the way of it, boy. If you want to get medals, you want a literate C.O. And a lousy general to make the boobs…. You want a colonel like I had, boy, lead writer for a national daily, every word a masterpiece, every syllable hitting them in the heart…. The Hemingway of the war diary…. The Dostoeyevsky of the dispatch….”

  I got my hands under his shoulders and lugged him to his feet.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s nearly one o’clock. You’d better get to bed.”

  “Where’s my bottle?” he grumbled. “Who stole my bottle?”

  He lit a cigarette lighter and swung it like a torch.

  “Ah! There it is.”

  “Put that light out,” I said. “There might be ships watching us.”

  “What ships?”

  “Enemy ships.”

  He held the bottle to his eye like a telescope.

  “I see no ships,” he said. “Stand the sea at ease.” He swung back his jerkin as he turned wobbling towards the companionway. It was then that I saw he had a V.C., two D.S.O.’s and three rows of variegated ribbon.

  It really was a most disturbing experience, and I would have made a special security report to O.C. Ship had I not been fully extended for the rest of the voyage in that interminable naval game of lugging the rifles and kitbags out of whichever hold they happened to be in and dropping them momentarily in another.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By now enemy resistance west of the Rhine had fallen into confusion…. From Dusseldorf to Coblenz a score of heavy bridges collapsed into the Rhine as crews touched off their demolitions. Although eager to secure a Rhine river bridgehead we had despaired of taking a bridge intact…. Suddenly my phone rang. It was Hodges calling from Spa.

  “Brad,” Courtney called … “Brad, we’ve gotten a bridge.”

  “A bridge? You mean you’ve gotten one intact on the Rhine?”

  “Yep …”

  “Hot dog, Courtney,” I said, “this will bust him wide open….”

  GEN. OMAR BRADLEY A Soldier’s Story

  WHEN TWELVE PLATOON JOINED the Allied Forces in Western Europe the forward troops were closing up on the Rhine. I was most gratified to find that we were in time to take part in the greatest opposed river-crossing of the War because, in spite of all the rivers we met in Italy, we were never lucky enough to cross any of them before the enemy had pulled out. An opposed river crossing is one of the most interesting maneuvers a military commander can be called upon to undertake and I was sorry, in so river-racked a land as Italy, not to have sampled its complexities.

  Progress from Rimini to Bologna had been something of an aquatic Grand National. Water jumps appeared at regular intervals—Conca, Marrechia, Savio, Ronco, Montone, and the rest—and only the tooth-stumps of blown bridges remained to help us over. It wasn’t due to lack of trying that Twelve Platoon never crossed a river till someone had built a bridge. It was just an infernal sequence of bad luck.

  We were all set for watermanship on the Marrechia and they sent us up six inflatable rubber boats. It was depressing to find on pumping them up that each had suffered a two-inch slit en route.

  “Must have been a chisel or something sticking out in the truck the engineers brought them in,” said Corporal Dooley. “Terrible careless with their tools they are. We’ll not be getting over in these, sir. A great disappointment it is, too, with the men all raring to go.”

  “Don’t give up,” I said. “We can still make the assault. Get the puncture outfit from the fifteen-hundredweight and we’ll mend the holes.”

  It took most of the night to get the little patches built up along the slits. When we finally had the boats airtight again, Corporal Hink, overly eager for the fray, treadled the pump with such astonishing vigour that it shot out from under his boot like a football and disappeared into the muddy torrent of the Marrechia. By fixing a piece of gas tubing over the valve and lining up the platoon for relay balloon blowing, I managed to rouse the flaccid black rubber to the wrinkled inflation of a Zulu grandmother’s bosom. But though the chaps gallantly puffed themselves blue-faced and thyroid-eye-balled, we never got a boat to a state of buoyancy. And by the time Major Arkdust had sent us up a new pump the Boche had withdrawn and the engineers could build in peace.

  When we were faced by the flooded reaches of the Ronco they sent us up canvas assault boats which collapsed flat for transport and opened up on an ingenious wooden framework. We taped the launching routes over the mud flats, rehearsed the landing, and hid the boats in the bushes. At Z minus 15 we erected the craft—to find that they collapsed immediately under our hands. The main struts at bow and stern were cut completely through and there was no way of changing the spineless bag of canvas into a navigable craft.

  “It looks like sabotage,” I said. “These are saw marks. Perhaps a German swam across during the night.”

  Sergeant Transom looked expertly at the severed pieces of wood.

  “These ain’t saw marks, sir. They’ve been gnawed through. It’ll be the water rats that done it.”

  “But do water rats eat wood?”

  “Round here they do, sir. All the time. The giant Italian wood-eating water rat. That’s what done in those assault boats, sir, and a real danger to other river crossing parties they might well be. We were lucky ours were hungry ones and chewed right through. If they’d had full stomachs and stopped halfway through, the frame could have collapsed out there in the middle and drowned the lot of us.”

  I deemed it in the best general interest to write a report for Major Arkdust there and then on the dangers of the giant Italian wood-eating water rat, accompanied by sketches of a suggested metal assault boat framework which would be resistant to rodent teeth. By the time I had finished and the pioneer corporal had come up to repair the struts, the Germans had once again gone away and we were able to cross the Ronco in daylight and dry-shod.

  Our advance halted by the Montone, they sent forward wagon loads of kapok-bridging—buoyant lozenges about five feet by two which could be laid like floatable railway sleepers to support a duckboard track. Sappers stood waist-deep all one night knitting a floating bridge of the right length. It lay anchored by day among the reed forest against our bank. We set off to tow it across the following night and as it snaked clear of the bullrushes and into the current it broke at every joint and the individual portions of kapok went zipping down the river like big, black dominoes.

  “All the lashings have broken away,” I said.

  “It’s them blasted Italian water rats again,” said Sergeant Transom.

  “But I thought they ate wood?”

  “That was down on the Ronco. Up her
e on the Montone they eat rope as well.”

  The sapper sergeant got very excited as his bridge disappeared piecemeal downstream and threatened to sue somebody about it. He dived in and collected up pieces of rat-cut rope and was waving them excitedly in my face when Corporal Globe unfortunately slipped on the mudbank and hit him across the back of the head with the thick end of his antitank rifle. We had to send him back unconscious to the F.D.S., and I took the opportunity to send with the driver to Major Arkdust an addendum to my earlier Water Rat Report explaining the rope appetite of the Montone mutation.

  Brought up short by the Lamone they pushed up to us an ingenious engineer with a rocket, cable, and pulley wheels. It was the plan to shoot over a line in shipwreck fashion and, if no enemy ill feeling arose, to dispatch a swimming patrol to secure it. Our end would then be fixed to a higher purchase and we would each in turn roll gently across in a breeches buoy.

  “When,” asked Corporal Hink, after I had explained the technique to my order group, “are they sending up the roundabouts and coconut shies? Where do they reckon we are? Butlin’s flipping Holiday Camp?”

  That afternoon the rocketeer mounted his giant firework on its special tripods and made abstruse calculations to set the elevation and line of fire. It was unfortunate that all my N.C.O.’s were still non-swimmers and I had, therefore, to lead the swimming patrol myself. Sergeant Transom was giving me a final coating of used engine oil, just before midnight, when the engineer went through the countdown and fired his rocket. It fizzed quietly on the trestle for a few moments … gave a sudden whoosh of smoke … grew to a driving roar as one leg of the front tripod pulled away … the whole device fell sideways and the rocket blasted off at right angles to the river … turned back over our heads for two hundred yards, hit the front window of the Company Headquarters farmhouse … crashed straight through and out the back, threading the needle with the cable as it went.