The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  Formations disintegrated. Some pilots flipped off their belly lights and tried to thread a path along the shore between fire from the ships and fire from the beach. Others fled for Africa, chased by tracers for thirty miles. Half a dozen planes were hit as paratroopers struggled to get out the door. “Planes tumbled out of the air like burning crosses.… Others stopped like a bird shot in flight.” … Men died in their planes, men died descending in their parachutes, and at least four were shot dead on the ground by comrades convinced they were Germans.78

  Putting the parachutist on target was, for the pilot of the aircraft or glider, a hugely complex business. Speed and altitude were obviously critical, and navigation was, to put it mildly, a challenge (especially at night and in fog and low cloud as prevailed on D-Day). Because the planes were forced to come in on relatively low trajectories they were highly vulnerable to flak. An observer on the USS Quincy on D-Day records the horror when “a yellow ball would start glowing out in the middle of a field of red tracers. This yellow ball would slowly start to fall, forming a tail. Eventually, it would smash into the black loom of land, causing a great sheet of light to flare against the low clouds. Sometimes the yellow ball would explode in mid-air, sending out streamers of burning gasoline. This tableau always brought the same reactions from us sky control observers: a sharp sucking-in of the breath and a muttered ‘Poor goddamn bastards.’ ”79

  There was much accusation that pilots had cravenly sacrificed paratroopers in order to save their own skins. Donald Burgett of the 101st fumed:

  I saw vague, shadowy figures of troopers plunging downward. Their chutes were pulling out of their pack trays and just starting to unfurl when they hit the ground. Seventeen men hit the ground before their chutes had time to open. They made a sound like ripe pumpkins being thrown down to burst against the ground.

  “That dirty son of a bitch of a pilot,” I swore to myself, “he’s hedgehopping and killing a bunch of troopers just to save his own ass. I hope he gets shot down in the Channel and drowns real slow.”

  There wasn’t any sense in going to those men.… If by some miracle one of them were still alive, he would be better off to be left alone to die as quickly as possible.80

  Many historians echoed this notion, accusing Troop Carrier Command pilots of not only releasing men too low but also increasing airspeed in order to avoid flak, and thereby pitching the troopers out to suffer terrific prop blast and ferocious shock when their canopies opened. The truth, however, was that the planes themselves were grossly overloaded, which forced the drop speed to be increased in order to prevent stalling. Low cloud cover and wind gusts of up to 30 knots (a safe limit over a drop zone is about 13 knots) also contributed to increased casualties.81

  Glider-borne delivery was equally, if differently, hazardous. The very notion of taking a fragile plane (British gliders were hardly more than flying wardrobes; in fact they were made of wood and fabricated in furniture-making factories) and intentionally crashing it is so counterintuitive as to appear positively deranged—a point not missed on the would-be glider-borne troops, who failed to volunteer in droves. In fact, so unattractive was the prospect of intentional self-destruction that they had to be conscripted, the inducement of a monthly bonus notwithstanding.82

  Even before landing, there was a very real danger that if the glider failed to fly either higher than or lower than the tug (“High-Tow” or “Low-Tow”), it could be shaken to destruction by the turbulence of the tug’s slipstream.83 Landing was a nerve-wracking crapshoot conducted in such congestion, and with such little means to maneuver, that a main cause of death to crew and soldiers was collision with other gliders. Clinton Riddle of the Eighty-Second Airborne saw the remains of a crashed glider in Normandy and remembered: “You could almost step on the bodies from one to the other.”84

  THERE WERE SO many ways a soldier could get killed. GI Raymond Gantter pondered the possible fate of his foxhole buddy, Chesty, who disappeared without a trace: “I wonder what did become of him. It’s possible that he wandered up to the front that night and was killed, perhaps so mangled that he was unrecognizable and his dog tags lost. Or a German sniper or straggler may have killed him and concealed his body in Hurtgen Forest … or he may have stumbled on a mine or booby trap … or perhaps he’s spent the night in a dugout that collapsed on him burying him alive.”85

  Despite the emphasis on mechanized warfare with the thrilling promise of blitzkriegian speed and finality, much of the fighting followed the much more prosaic tradition of “infantry performing its role with rifles, hand grenades, machine guns, and mortars and using tactics unchanged since the First World War and even the Civil War.”86 Combat in Europe was often drawn out and dogged. The Normandy front was static for two months following D-Day, Monte Cassino lasted six months, the siege of Leningrad lasted two and a half years, and El Alamein has been described as a classic First World War battle, with huge preliminary bombardment, creeping barrages, and infantry break-ins designed to crumble the enemy’s fortified line.87 And in the Pacific much of the fighting was a classic infantry slugfest against entrenched defenders: “Contrary to the common impression that Second World War battles were easy, fast-moving and decisive affairs we find that they were in reality protracted, gruelling, nerve-racking and costly. There were more dangers to counter than there had been in the battles of a quarter century before; and it took a higher level of training and morale to overcome them. The tight-rope on which front-line soldiers walked had become thinner and less stable, reflected in higher levels of accidents, ‘psychiatric casualties’ and the general destruction of lives and property. War had become inexorably nastier.”88

  For the infantryman, the war was fought amid an unremitting exposure to danger. General Omar Bradley described its extraordinary brutality: “The rifleman fights without promise of either reward or relief. Behind every river there’s another hill—and behind that hill, another river. After weeks or months in the line only a wound can offer him the comfort of safety, shelter and a bed. Those who are left to fight, fight on, evading death but knowing that with each day of evasion they have exhausted one more chance for survival. Sooner or later, unless victory comes this chase must end on the litter or in the grave.”89 As a veteran American infantryman put it: “Nobody gets out of a rifle company. It’s a door that only opens one way, in. You leave when they carry you out, if you’re unlucky, dead, or if you’re lucky, wounded. But nobody just walks away. That was the unwritten law.”90

  Without the prospect of rotation out of the combat zone, the grave became a likely destination. For Americans, the last fourteen months of the war saw the heaviest casualties. In October 1942, only 1 in 1,000 US Army members became a casualty. In November, it rose to 4 per 1,000, reflecting the fighting in North Africa, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea. By June 1944, it had soared to 50 per 1,000, hitting its peak in January 1945 with about 56 per 1,000.91

  As a snapshot the statistics are interesting but hide a much grimmer picture. The rate per thousand is a percentage of the whole army. Unlike World War I, where a much larger proportion of the total armed services was exposed to combat, in World War II the logistical tail was fat and long and comparatively safe. The combat soldiers formed the small arrowhead that carried combat to the enemy, and their chances of being killed or wounded were, of course, considerably greater. Of the roughly 10 million men in the US Army by the war’s end, only about 2 million, or 1 in 5, were in the 90 combat divisions (of which 68 were infantry divisions), and of these, about 700,000 were in the infantry: 1 in 14 for the whole Army but absorbing 70 percent of the casualties.92 Frank Nisi, an infantryman with the Third Infantry Division, described that exclusive club in a letter to his father:

  I would venture to say that only a very small percentage really know what war is all about. By that I mean that of the millions … only the Infantry and certain attachments, such as tanks and TDs [tank destroyers], were ever close enough to hear a shot fired in anger. Then that could be broken down still
further to exclude the Reg’t. Hq. Service Company etc. It gets down to the man with the rifle who has to live in the ground … or any place he possibly can, then go without sleep for several days and get up and fight, hike, run, creep, or crawl 25 miles or so. During this time the echelons in rear of him move up in vehicles, get their night’s sleep and wait for him to advance again.93

  In the last six months of 1944, the battle losses far exceeded the US planners’ expectations, with 12,000–18,000 GIs killed in each of those months and 40,000–60,000 wounded. The upshot was that young men who had initially been allocated to the logistical tail to take up relatively safe duties of an administrative nature, thanks to their higher intelligence-test scores, now found themselves on the front line. Death in combat had suddenly become a whole lot more democratic.

  WHAT INSTRUMENTS KILLED soldiers in World War II? Although there had been improvements in all branches of weaponry since the First World War, nothing fundamentally new had emerged. There were sophistications and, crucially, there was more of it, but the underlying architecture of weaponry was not too far removed from that of World War I. Artillery and other kinds of infantry-delivered bombs such as mortars, grenades, and mines (as against aircraft- or ship-delivered munitions) took the heaviest toll. In the US Army, about fifty thousand died by explosive devices of one kind or another, compared with just more than thirty thousand killed by small arms and machine guns.94 Although this overall picture is accurate, sometimes the individual cause of death could be elusive.

  In one of the very few studies of the causes of death for men killed outright in action (one thousand US bodies were examined between April and November 1944 at the US military cemetery at Monte Beni, Italy), a medical team reported:

  A man killed in battle will be seen to fall only by his comrades who cannot know with certainty what type of missile caused a man’s death. They may know that a man was hit by machinegun or rifle fire or that he encountered a mine, but they cannot state with accuracy the caliber of a high explosive shell which has been fired at them. In any event, even if accurate information regarding missiles is known to a man’s comrades, it does not often find its way to the EMT’s [emergency medical tags] which are filled in by company aidmen or other medical personnel who arrive on the scene after the action has occurred. Those who actually see the death occur are seldom present when the body is tagged. Ballistic data on EMT’s cannot therefore be depended upon since it is not known which ones are accurate. The best method of obtaining accurate information of this type is to perform an autopsy [but] … it became evident that the performance of an autopsy in every case was impracticable because of the time required for such a procedure. The first body autopsied in this project was thoroughly dissected in search of the missile. After a period of 3 hours, the missile had still not been found, and the search for it was abandoned.95

  Nevertheless, the majority of men (87.1 percent) in this sample were found to have been killed by “fragment-producing weapons” (artillery and mortar fire), while 10.9 percent were hit by small arms. Only a tiny fraction were killed by hand grenades (0.1 percent) or land mines (1.9 percent).96

  No wonder, then, that artillery gripped soldiers with the most intense dread. The poet Louis Simpson, a trooper in the 101st Airborne, explains: “Being shelled is the real work of an infantry soldier, which no one talks about. Everyone has his own way of going about it. In general, it means lying face down and contracting your body into as small a space as possible. In novels you read about soldiers, at such moments, fouling themselves. The opposite is true. As all your parts are contracting, you are more likely to be constipated.”97

  Writing to his family from northwest Europe, Raymond Gantter described artillery’s monumental malevolence:

  You ask which is more frightening … rifle and machine guns versus artillery? If I have to make a choice, I’ll take small-arms fire. Rifles and machine guns are bad medicine, but they carry this small sugar-coating: a hole in the ground, a hollow, even a tiny hummock of earth, offers reasonable protection against their bullets. Chances are you won’t get hurt so long as you lie there. That is, not by small-arms fire. Shrapnel cannot be denied by a hole in the ground, a hollow, or a little mound of dirt. You hear the shell screaming through the air, you estimate where it will fall and tense yourself. Then it hits, the earth bounds under you, trying to push you up, and the air is filled with the buzzing of maddened bumblebees. The hell with Ry-crisp or lettuce-and-lemon diets—for ladies who would be swanlike I recommend a few hours under an artillery barrage.98

  David Kenyon Webster remembered how shells sought him out:

  Three more shells came in, low and angry, and burst in the orchard.

  “They’re walking ’em toward us,” I whispered.

  I felt as if a giant with exploding iron fingers were looking for me, tearing up the ground as he came. I wanted to strike at him, to kill him, to stop him before he ripped into me, but I could do nothing. Sit and take it, sit and take it. The giant raked the orchard and tore up the roads and stumbled toward us in a terrible blind wrath as we sat in our hole with our heads between our legs and curses on our lips.99

  For a British soldier, shells seemed somehow willfully directed by some divine malevolence:

  We hit the earth with one thud where we had stood. I could feel the exact spot in the small of my defenceless back (I wish to God we had packs on, I thought … not because they’re any use but it feels better) where the pointed nose of the shell would pierce skin and gristle and bone and explode the charge that would make me feel as if I had a splitting headache all over for a fiftieth of a second before I was spread minutely over the earth and hung up in trees. I held my breath and tried to press deeper into the earth and tensed every muscle as though by sheer will power I could abate the force of that disintegrating shock, cheat death, defy God (O God have mercy on me, please, please, please dear God, don’t let me die).100

  To stay or to run? Either decision could bring death or salvation:

  “Anti-tank guns!” yells Dorka, thunderstruck, and crosses himself.

  At the same moment a second shell hits the mound.… Dorka yells and clutches his throat. He looks dumbstruck at his bloody hand and presses it against his wound. Panic-stricken, he jumps out of the hole and runs up the field towards the village. Right behind him another round explodes and rips off both his legs. His backside is thrown into the air and falls, covered in blood, on to the ground. Only seconds have passed, and as I again look towards the front another flash comes from a gun barrel. The shells hit in the mound in front of my position at full force and covers half my hole with dirt. I pull my legs out of the dirt and press myself tightly down on to it. Then the next round explodes immediately in front of me and sends a glowing splinter towards me. I feel a heavy impact on my upper right arm and some light splinters hitting my chest. Blood immediately starts running warm down my arm and dripping out of my sleeve. For a moment I am numb; then I feel a burning sensation, and pain.

  You will bleed to death here in this hole! I think, and then I am gripped with a terrible fear. Just get away from here! The fright drives me out of my hole. I press my left hand over my wound and dash away. Instinctively, I do not go the obvious way—up to the houses—but, propelled by terror, I run to the right.… I know that the direct-fire gunners [like Webster, he is being shelled by an antitank gun deployed against infantry] must first physically shift their aim in order to pick up a new one—in this case me. The shells start to land around me only after I have been running for a bit. They are firing at me as they would at a rabbit—so I behave like one, by constantly zigzagging. I carry on like this, to force the gunners to adjust their sights all the time.

  But I am running out of steam. My lungs are heaving like a pair of bellows and I sense a light dizzy feeling. I can’t stop the bleeding with my hand.… Wheezing, I keep on running in zigzag fashion, running for dear life, afraid of being blown to bits by the next shell.… Well out of breath, I run further into the wo
odland then fall to the ground.

  I am safe.101

  The gods could be almost playfully malicious:

  Strung out in a long, scattered single file, our battalion made its way up the hills, moving at a steady pace. Captain Kessler knelt with his subordinate leaders and studied his maps for a moment, waving the rest of the company on.

  “Keep moving,” he said in his gravelly voice. “Keep moving.”

  He was about twenty feet ahead of me to the left of the narrow path we were following. Suddenly he grunted and rolled over on his left side.… One of the men he had been kneeling with looked at his eyes. He was dead. A tiny piece of shrapnel from one of the enemy shells exploding in the valley below had struck him in the right side of his head, just under the rim of his helmet.… It was a one-in-a-million chance that a piece of shrapnel would travel that distance but it had, and a good company commander was dead as a result of it.102

  Death could also come with terrifying logic: “The first shell landed a safe distance away, but the second came in only 150 yards from where two engineers, the platoon sergeant, another noncom, and myself were working. We hit the ground—and we feared the shells would fall in a ‘ladder’ pattern: an artillery design in which the successive shells ‘search out’ the target as though moving up the rungs of a ladder.”103

  Shrapnel had a way of shredding whatever sangfroid the infantryman might attempt to hide behind:

  At first I tried being casual about artillery fire. Shells would hit in the distance then move in, and it seemed humiliating to rush for cover, so I took my time getting out of the way, waiting almost for the warmth of the blast before jumping into my slit trench. It didn’t take long to find out what shrapnel could do and then I hit the ground sooner than later, not worried about looking foolish.