The Anglo-Americans failed to convert a big victory into a decisive one, and paid the price in the months of fighting that followed. Wacht, the German Nineteenth Army’s newspaper, wrote on 1 October: ‘The English, and even more the Americans, have throughout this war sought to avoid a very large sacrifice of lives … They still shrink from total commitment, the true soldierly sacrifice … American infantry only attack with a great armoured spearhead, and only launch an assault after a great hail of shells and bombs. If, then, they still meet German resistance, they break off the attack immediately and try again next day with their heavy firepower.’ If this view was self-serving, it was not wholly invalid.
The winter of 1944 proved one of the wettest for decades in western Europe. From October onwards, the weather reinforced the Germans, imposing stagnation across the front. ‘Dear General,’ Eisenhower wrote to Marshall on 11 November, ‘I am getting exceedingly tired of weather.’ If conditions were wretched for all the combatants, they hurt the Allies most, because they were trying to keep moving. Waterlogged ground rendered rapid off-road advances impossible, tanks and vehicles thrashed and flailed in mud up to their track guards and wheel hubs, air operations were drastically constricted, and the Germans exploited every water obstacle. The British had become casualty-conscious as their armies shrank amid the exhaustion of national manpower reserves; they spent the winter advancing slowly through eastern Holland, sometimes making no headway for weeks. Nijmegen stands barely thirty-five miles west of Wesel, but the Reichswald forest lay in between; six months intervened between the capture of the former town on 20 September 1944, and the British crossing of the Rhine at Wesel on 23 March 1945.
For all Patton’s celebrity, his army made slow progress through Alsace-Lorraine, eventually reaching the German border in mid-December. On his right, Gen. Jake Devers’ 6th Army Group met bitter resistance from Germans defending a perimeter on the west bank of the upper Rhine, the so-called Colmar pocket. Private William Tsuchida, a medical aidman in the Vosges, wrote to his parents:
What a mess this whole business is. My mind is one confused conglomeration of incidents, the basic fears of night, and the waiting for daylight. The rest of it I would just as soon forget because it is so rotten. I hope everybody with the soft war jobs realises the horrible days and nights the line company men have to spend out here … I get in such a daze sometimes that I force myself to read something when I can, like a magazine or old letter. What it amounts to is you wonder whether you should eat now or later and hope you have a dry place to sleep tonight and hope that casualties will slow down. Everything is hope, hope.
Airborne soldier Pfc Bill True was intensely moved when, one evening in the midst of the Dutch battles, a little girl approached the foxhole occupied by himself and another man, and handed them two pillows. Here was a tiny, innocent gesture towards decencies of civilisation which otherwise seemed immeasurably remote.
Allied supply difficulties persisted, even when ships began to unload at Antwerp. Anglo-American soldiers required far larger quantities of food and comforts than their enemies deemed necessary, and expended prodigious quantities of ammunition to secure even modest local objectives. Eisenhower’s troops advancing across Europe behaved much better than the Russians, but almost all soldiers living in fear of their lives display a cruel indifference towards the property of others. A Dutch doctor described his disgust on seeing the village of Venray, just behind the front line in Holland, after it had been occupied by British soldiers: ‘Words cannot describe how appalled I was when I saw how the town had been pillaged and destroyed. I spoke to an elderly English officer whose words speak for themselves: “I’m very sorry and deeply ashamed, the Army has lost its reputation here.”’
The killing of prisoners was never institutionalised, as on the Eastern Front, but Eisenhower’s men committed their share of excesses. A Canadian soldier described his experience of a patrol in Holland, in which his unit captured eight dismounted German tankers attempting to get back to their own lines. Their officer spoke good English, and the enemies chatted for some minutes about the cold, and how they would like to light a fire. They had just passed a farmhouse, he said, where there might be schnapps and a pig. Could they roast it? The Canadian said later, ‘The war was over for him, and I guess he was glad.’ Then, suddenly, the lieutenant leading the patrol turned to his Bren-gunner and said, ‘Shoot them.’ The German officer who had been making jokes ‘sort of made a little run forward and put his arms across his chest and said something and the guy with the Bren just cut loose … There were two, I think, still flopping like gaffed salmon, and this guy we called Whitey from Cape Breton – we called him Whitey because he was always boasting how good a coalminer he was – he shot those two with a pistol … It probably went into our history, I guess, as a German patrol wiped out. None of us really thought too much about it … But I’ll tell you this, a year before, if I’d been there, I’d have been puking up my guts.’
Allied forces edged towards the German border yard by painful yard. During a November attack in Alsace, within seconds of encountering devastating German machine-gun fire Private Robert Kotlowitz found himself the only unwounded survivor of his platoon.
I remember from that moment, when mass disorientation began to set in, the glob-smell of mud in my nostrils … the sudden drying-up of saliva in my mouth and the instant dehydration it produced; the powerful feel of my own body, as though I was carrying it as a burden; my skinny, attenuated frame, lying there on the ground, waiting; the heavy presence of limbs extending from it; my helmeted skull, quivering torso, and vulnerable crotch. The tender genitals curled dead-center at my pelvis; and my swollen bladder, burning … The noise of small-arms and machine-gun fire, of men’s voices calling for help or screaming in pain or terror – our own men’s voices, unrecognizable at first, weird in pitch and timbre. And the hum inside my own head, trying to drown out the sounds coming from all around me.
Kotlowitz lay motionless until nightfall, when he was evacuated by medics to become a combat-fatigue case. He never served in the line again. British Lt. Tony Finucane described a battalion ‘advance to contact’ in Holland: ‘We strung out across the flatland in what looked and felt like a casual stroll in the afternoon sunshine. Suddenly nearing the objective, and with men feeling for their shovels to get well dug in before nightfall, we saw a hundred yards ahead of us lots of men in grey advance in a similar formation. Imagine it! Two battalions head on in the open! Within moments a real infantry small arms battle – and pandemonium – started. We had no supporting fire, the enemy (usually referred to by ourselves as “the wily Hun”) opened up with what looked like a 20mm ack-ack gun. But in the event, with odds about evens we were better at it than they were. They backed off about half a mile.’
But each such small encounter, victorious or no, imposed a loss of momentum, and irreplaceable British losses. By the time Finucane found himself at Cleve in December, his platoon was reduced from thirty-five men to eleven. When his Brigadier visited the forward positions and was told of the battalion’s depleted rifle strength, he said with a sigh, ‘That’s what I keep telling the general. The casualties don’t look much considering the total number of men involved, but they are all fighting troops.’ Alan Brooke was heard to say that he wished circumstances had placed the British on the right rather than the left of Eisenhower’s line. The British CIGS believed that opportunities existed in the south which Montgomery’s army could have exploited more effectively than the Americans. In this, he was assuredly wrong. His view reflected only a manifestation of mutual Anglo–American mistrust, which became more pronounced as each nation’s generals balefully examined the other’s failures and disappointments.
Stalin, curiously enough, displayed more enthusiasm for the Western contribution to the war that winter than at any previous period, despite the Allied tensions provoked by Russian refusal to aid the embattled Poles in their ill-judged Warsaw Uprising. ‘A new feature of the struggle against Hitler’s
Germany in the past year,’ he told a Moscow Party conference on 6 November, ‘is the fact that the Red Army has not been fighting the Germans alone as was previously the case. The Tehran conference was not held in vain – its resolutions on the joint offensive against Germany from the west, east and south are being implemented with real conviction. There is no doubt that without the second front in Europe, which has engaged up to seventy-five German divisions, our forces would have been unable so quickly to break German resistance and expel Germany’s armies from the Soviet Union. Equally, without the Red Army’s powerful summer offensive, which engaged up to two hundred German divisions, our allies would have been unable so rapidly to throw the Germans out of central Italy, France and Belgium. The challenge, the key to victory, is to keep Germany in the grip of the two fronts.’
By December, when snow came, Eisenhower’s armies had resigned themselves to shivering through the winter, then resuming their offensive when conditions allowed. It is hard for civilians to comprehend the miseries of an outdoor existence week after week and month after month in such conditions. ‘With our tent and clothing wet and half-frozen,’ wrote American soldier George Neill, ‘I felt numb to the point of almost not caring what happened to me.’ In his foxhole in darkness, ‘the temperature moved well below freezing. The half-frozen slush in the bottom of the hole froze solid. We just lay there in a fetal position and swore to ourselves … My buddies and I agreed it would be impossible to exaggerate how hopeless, miserable and depressed we felt.’ Such was the normal condition of millions of men on both sides of the line between October 1944 and March 1945. Trench foot became endemic, especially in formations in which morale was low and thus hygiene discipline slack. Dysentery was commonplace. The working or malfunctioning of excretory processes became an obsession for millions of men deprived of control over their bowels. In battlefield conditions, many never made it to a latrine, or were unable even to lower their trousers before defecating.
If it was miserable to fight at all, it was more so in soiled clothing. Tank crews suffered special indignities. A German driver wrote: ‘Through my vision slit I saw many hilarious sights of brave soldiers, hanging on for dear life to the turret of a moving panzer with their trousers round their ankles and screwing up their faces in a desperate attempt to do the almost impossible.’ Infantryman Guy Sajer lost control of his bowels during the retreat from the Don, and grew accustomed, like all the fellow passengers in his truck, to jolting through the snow in a mess of his own excrement. Pfc Donald Schoo suffered the same miseries during the Bulge battle. After defecating on a wooden ammunition box, ‘your butt hurt too much to wipe so you just pulled up your pants and went back to your hole. No one said anything about how you smelt, because everyone smelled bad.’
Robert Kotlowitz was crouched in a foxhole in Alsace when his bowels suddenly exploded. He leapt forth, tore down his trousers and squatted. His buddy shouted, ‘Jesus Christ! Get back where you belong!’ Kotlowitz, preoccupied with the demands of his body, looked on him pityingly.
Then there was the strange assaultive sound of a rifle shot nearby, and a bullet hit the ground a few feet behind me, plowing the dirt … I looked ahead from my squatting position, shielding my eyes with the flat of my hand. I could see a German soldier, visible from the waist up … a couple of hundred yards away … he was laughing. All this was very clear to me: his laughter, the details of his clothing, the padded shoulders, the high collar, the bare head. I even thought that I could see his teeth … Then there was another shot and another clear miss. The dirt flew again. But this time I was on my feet, holding onto my pants, and in another second was in our foxhole … I believe the son of a bitch deliberately chose to miss me … he just wanted a little afternoon sport to relieve the general tedium, and I happened to be it.
Vastly worse indignities were visited on those who suffered intestinal wounds. US Army nurse Dorothy Beavers noted that some patients in her field hospital bore the loss of limbs with outward stoicism, while those who had undergone colostomies often ‘burst into tears at the sight of their own faeces in a bag’. There were no limits to the miseries imposed by bullets, high explosives, sickness and vulnerability to the elements.
In the winter of 1944, Hitler knew he faced another looming Soviet offensive. Dismissing the constraints imposed by the weather and his shrunken resources, he determined to make a crippling thrust at Eisenhower’s armies before turning to meet this. Against the impassioned opposition of his generals, he launched a western offensive in the worst season of the year, at the place the Allies least expected it – the Ardennes forest, on the frontiers of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. The objective was to reach Antwerp, splitting the Allied front. To execute it, two new panzer armies were created, thirty divisions assembled, reserves of precious fuel stockpiled. ‘If you are brave, diligent and resourceful,’ an order of the day told shivering Volksgrenadiers on 16 December, ‘you will ride in American vehicles and eat good American food. If, however, you are stupid, cowardly and supine, you will walk cold and hungry all the way to the Channel.’
Two days later, on the 18th, Operation Autumn Mist was launched against the weakest sector of Hodges’ First US Army. It achieved absolute tactical and strategic surprise, a breakthrough on a forty-mile-wide front as panic-stricken American troops broke and fled in disarray in the path of the SS panzers; because of thick fog, the Allied air forces were impotent to intervene. Within two days, German troops were pouring through a gaping hole – ‘the bulge’ – in the American line. Eisenhower’s British chief of intelligence, Maj. Gen. Kenneth Strong, bore a substantial share of responsibility for failing to recognise the significance of the German build-up in the Ardennes, flagged by Ultra. Strong told the Supreme Commander that German formations identified in the area were merely resting and refitting. The fundamental failure, in which many senior American and British officers were complicit, was that they were convinced of their own mastery of the campaign, and thus discounted the possibility of a major German thrust.
Lt. Tony Moody was one of a host of young Americans who found themselves overwhelmed by the experience of retreat. ‘I wasn’t scared at the beginning – I got more scared: it was the uncertainty; we had no mission, we didn’t know where the Germans were. We were so tired, out of rations, low on ammo. There was panic, there was chaos. If you feel you’re surrounded by overwhelming forces, you get the hell out of it. I was demoralized, sick as a dog. I had frostbite. I felt pretty bad about it. I kept thinking “oh my God, what I have got into? How much of this can I take?” I suddenly found myself quite alone, and wandered off. I stumbled into a battalion aid station and I just collapsed … slept twenty-four hours. The mind washes out a lot of images, but you remember the feeling of hopelessness, despair. You just want to die. We felt the Germans were much better trained, better equipped, a better fighting machine than us.’
‘Fear reigned,’ wrote Donald Burgett. His formation, the 101st Airborne, played a critical part in stabilising the front, while watching soldiers of some other units flee for their lives. ‘Once fear strikes, it spreads like an epidemic, faster than wildfire. Once the first man runs, others soon follow. Then, it’s all over; soon there are hordes of men running, all of them wild-eyed and driven by fear.’ Pfc Harold Lindstrom from Alexandria, Minnesota, became so desperate in his misery that he found himself gazing with envy at German corpses. ‘They looked peaceful. The war was over for them. They weren’t cold any more.’ He even felt pangs of envy towards comrades desperate enough to maim themselves: ‘No one would ever know how many accidents were genuine and how many self-made.’ An infantry company commander wrote of an action at Stoumont on the 21st: ‘It was so foggy that one of our men found himself ten yards from a German machine-gun before he knew it … Everyone had been pushed about as far as he could be. Nerves were being broken on men whom one would have thought would never weaken.’
A young infantryman described his predicament one late December day when his foxhole buddy was hit: ‘G
ordon got ripped by a machine-gun from roughly the left thigh through the right waist. He … told me he was hit through the stomach as well … We were cut off … We were in foxholes by ourselves, so we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine. We couldn’t ease [the pain] so I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked it as hard as I could, because he wanted to be put out. That didn’t work, so I hit him up by the head with a helmet and that didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly froze to death, he bled to death.’
Belgian civilians suffered terribly at the hands of both sides. The Germans, during their brief reoccupation of liberated towns and villages, found time to execute scores of civilians either deemed guilty of resistance activity, or more often murdered merely as examples to others. The savagery of some of Model’s men reflected a venom characteristic of 1944–45: if they themselves were doomed to lose the war and probably to die, they were bent upon depriving as many enemies as possible of the joys of survival and liberation. Allied bombing and shelling compounded civilians’ plight: in the small town of Houffalize, for instance, 192 people died, all but eight of them from Allied bombing. Twenty-seven of the victims were younger than fifteen, and the survivors were left with ruins and destitution. Twenty inhabitants of the village of Sainlez near Bastogne were killed by bombardment that reduced every home to a shell; among them were eight members of one family named Didier: Joseph, forty-six; Marie-Angèle, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renée, thirteen; Lucille, eleven; Bernadette, nine; Lucien, eight; and Noël, six. Throughout the battle areas of Belgium and Luxembourg there was wholesale looting by Allied as well as German troops.
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