The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  A shell fragment could act as bullet, knife, cleaver, bludgeon. It could punch, shear, slice, crush. It could be surgical in its precision or make sadistic excess seem un-imaginative.104

  Tree or airbursts were particularly feared (“the worst,” according to William Manchester), producing blast and shrapnel against which foxholes and slit trenches offered little protection. Paul Fussell describes the effect of an airburst on a group of Germans:

  I came upon a perfectly preserved dead waxwork German squad.… that caused my mouth to open in wonder.… [It] consisted of five German soldiers spread out prone in a semicircular skirmish line. They were still staring forward, alert for signs of the Amis. Behind them, in the center of the semicircle, was an equally rigid German medic with his Red Cross armband who had been crawling forward to do his work. In his left hand, a roll of two-inch bandage; in his right, a pair of surgical scissors. I could infer a plausible narrative. One or more men in the group had been wounded, and as the medic crawled forward to do his duty, his intention was rudely frustrated by an unspeakably loud sharp crack overhead, and instantly the lights went out for all of them. The episode was doubtless a tribute to our proximity artillery fuse, an invaluable invention which arrived on the line that winter, enabling a shell to explode not when it struck something but when it came near to striking something. Here, it must have gone off five or ten yards above its victims. Or perhaps the damage had been done by the kind of artillery stunt called time-on-target—a showy mathematical technique of firing many guns from various places so that regardless of their varying distances from the target, the shells arrive all at the same time. The surprise is devastating, and the destruction immediate and unimaginable.…

  … It was so cold that the bodies didn’t smell, and they’d not begun visibly to decompose, but their open eyes were clouded, and snow had lodged in their ears and the openings in their clothes and the slits in their caps. Their flesh was whitish green. Although they were prone, their knees and elbows were bent, as if they were athletes terribly surprised while sprinting.105

  The effects of high explosive were not nearly so aesthetic. Donald Burgett “came upon a sloping hole in the ground used by a French farmer for watering his cattle. We walked down into it and found two dead Germans sitting upright against the wall. An artillery shell had landed in the center and the heat from the explosion had torn away their features. Their lips and ears were missing and the empty eye sockets looked black in the charred and wrinkled skin. The concussion had snapped their hands and feet off at the wrists and ankles.”106

  ABOUT A QUARTER of all casualties were caused by small-arms fire (compared with 30–40 percent in World War I and 90 percent in the American Civil War).107 And although artillery took more lives than small arms did, a soldier hit by a machine-gun round, for example, stood a 50 percent chance of dying, compared with 20 percent if hit by artillery. Of those hit by bullets, almost a quarter were killed, whereas slightly fewer than one-fifth of soldiers struck by artillery died, and only one in ten from mortars.108 The reason was quite simple. There was a great deal of artillery fire, and although it tended to be scattershot, there was enough of it to take the majority of lives lost in combat. There was less volume of small-arms fire, but what there was tended to be more lethal because it was, more or less, aimed. Surveys of infantrymen’s attitudes affirmed that artillery was most feared; machine guns ranked fourth (mortars third, dive bombers second). Yet studies during the war showed that the machine gun was the most deadly weapon—50 percent of the men hit would be killed.109

  The heavy machine gun, as in the previous world war, was lethal anywhere it could be installed defensively. The Germans were adept at hilltop defenses, particularly in the North African, Italian, and Normandy campaigns. At the end of the day it was the foot soldier who had to take the hill or cross the river, and the surest and most economical way to stop men climbing hills or crossing rivers was to spray them from a long distance with machine-gun fire. Crossing the Rapido River in Italy in 1944 was a catastrophe for the assaulting Americans. Sergeant Kirby of the Thirty-Sixth (Texas) Infantry Division describes the fearsome effect of heavy machine-gun fire: “We were under constant fire. I saw boats being hit all round me, and guys falling out and swimming.… When we got to the other side it was the only scene that I’d seen in the war that lived up to what you see in the movies. I’ve never seen so many bodies—our own guys. I remember this kid being hit by a machine gun; the bullets hitting him pushed his body along like a tin-can.… Just about everybody was hit. I didn’t have a single good friend in the company who wasn’t killed or wounded.”110

  A Canadian infantry officer, Lieutenant D. Pearce, recounted an attack on Bienen, Germany, in March 1945: “My platoon assaulted in a single extended wave. Ten tumbled down, nailed on the instant by fire from two or maybe three machine guns.… The Bren gunners put their weapons to their shoulders but never got a shot away. (I saw them after the battle, both dead, one still holding the aiming position).… A rifleman on my left took aim at a German weapon pit, and with a spasm collapsed on my arm. His face turned almost instantly a faint green, and bore a simple smile.”111

  In his novel, Vessel of Sadness (1969), based on his World War II combat experience, William Woodruff describes what happens when a machine gun catches a group of British soldiers near Anzio out in the open:

  It was then that it happened. In broad daylight they over-shot the turning to the right … and went smack into a machine-gun nest.… The … jeep shuddered to a halt as if struck by a hundred steel bars. Only then did they realize that the noise they had heard was a machine gun firing almost in their faces. Sarge called out, “Jump for it!” Those still able to jump for it did so. But their luck was out.… Of course they should have hit back: “The best defence is always rapid and well-directed fire.” Instead, they fled for their lives and were at the mercy of their instincts. They never saw the enemy or his gun.… The vegetation jumped and twitched before their eyes. The bullets hissed and splashed as they struck the little pools of water close to their faces. They were sick with fear. It was as if a madman had suddenly got loose and was running up and down the ditch lashing out with chains. When the unseen chain hit a man he just crumpled up or got to his knees and moaned. Sarge shouted, but every man was for himself. They were terrified of dying.112

  For infantrymen hit by small-arms and machine-gun fire, head shots were the most lethal. The soldier’s head, despite the protective helmet, is often the most exposed part of his anatomy: The head above a foxhole rim; lying prone, head toward the enemy; advancing in the infantryman’s characteristic head-down stooping run—all tended to make the most vulnerable part of the body also the most exposed.

  American infantrymen armed with the M-1 Garand took a high proportion of head wounds because their weapons, unlike those of the Japanese or Germans, were not smokeless and so attracted counterfire aimed at the muzzle flash, which, if the rifleman was holding the stock to the shoulder as he sighted down the barrel, greatly increased the chance of being shot in the head.113 As airborne trooper Donald Burgett puts it, “They [the Germans] used a smokeless powder and were hard to locate, whereas our weapons spewed out billows of smoke that gave our positions away and kept us moving to keep from getting our brains blown out.”114 But as the only semiautomatic rifle of World War II the Garand did give GIs a jump on the bolt-action rifles of the Germans and Japanese. It was rugged, and the eight-shot capability could save your life. Sidney Richess of the US Fortieth Infantry Division remembers: “During an encounter with an enemy force in a busy gully, an enemy rifleman fired at me at close range but missed. Knowing he was working his bolt … my runner … fired and wasted the guy.”115

  In a survey of American infantrymen, of those weapons they found most frightening and most lethal, the mortar ranked third after artillery (as represented by the much feared German 88-millimeter) and the dive-bomber.116 The noise a weapon generates has, throughout history, had an important impact on soldiers�
� morale—depressing or boosting, depending on which side of the receiving line one happened to be—and the mortar was probably more effective as a wounding rather than a killing weapon. Beyond a 15-yard radius the lethality of the exploding shell fell away sharply. Which was small comfort to the soldier hunkered down in his foxhole convinced that one of those tail-finned beauties was whistling merrily down to send him to Valhalla. But it wounded plenty. In fact, it has been estimated that mortars were responsible for about half the casualties suffered by Allied soldiers in the Pacific and northwest Europe.117

  Modern mortars are bargain-basement artillery—highly mobile, cheap to manufacture, and not particularly complicated to operate; all of which affords tactical flexibility and makes them a ubiquitous threat to the long-suffering infantryman. The Japanese, unable to make the relatively large investment demanded by full-scale artillery, churned out huge numbers of mortars, and one of the most famous was the nastily effective little “knee mortar” (actually more like a handheld grenade launcher braced against the ground), weighing only 11 pounds, firing a round of about 10½ pounds, and needing only one man to operate it.* Paul Sponaugle was the unappreciative focus of a knee-mortar attack on New Georgia in 1943:

  When I was gone my buddy was killed when a mortar shell hit his hole. My first sergeant called me over to his hole to tell me about my friend. I just got in the hole, took off my helmet, and two knee mortar shells struck that hole. No doubt the Japs saw me jump in. This hole was better than most and had logs and dirt on top. There were three of us in there and I was on top. The explosions were awful. They were right on top of us. The Japs used a knee mortar: a bigger one would have killed us. The first one caused the splinters and made a hole, the second one showered us with shrapnel. I knew I was hit right away. I was pelted with splinters from the logs on the back and had a leg full of shrapnel. At least I was smart enough to stay where I was. The other two were stupid and ran for another hole. That’s really asking for it during a mortar barrage. The chances are pretty slim of getting another direct hit. They were both hit in the open.118

  Light mortars like the US 60-millimeter, weighing in at just over 40 pounds and firing a 10- or 11-pound missile over 1,800 yards, needed two men, while heavies like the US 81-millimeter or the British 3-inch, which could fire a 10-pound shell over 2,500 yards, required three. The big mortars could pack a mighty wallop. John Masters, a British officer in Burma (later to find fame as a novelist and memoirist), sardonically recalls that if a shell (weighing 60 pounds) from a Japanese heavy mortar “landed on a weapon pit it saved the need for burying parties.”119

  William Manchester was unlucky enough to be on the naughty end of a Japanese “screaming meemie” (a.k.a. “flying sea-bag” or “boxcar Charlie”)—a huge 8-inch mortar shell:

  Early the next morning several of us were standing in a tomb courtyard when we heard the familiar shriek. We were on a reverse slope from the enemy; the chances of a shell clearing the top of the hill and landing on us were, we calculated, a thousand to one, and the Nips, as we now knew, had no way of controlling the flight of these missiles. I crept into the doorway of the tomb. I wasn’t actually safe there, but I had more protection than Izzy Levy and Rip Thorpe, who were cooking breakfast over hot boxes. The eight-incher beat the thousand to one odds. It landed in the exact center of the courtyard. Rip’s body absorbed most of the shock. It disintegrated, and his flesh, blood, brains, and intestines encompassed me. Izzy was blind. So was I—temporarily, though I didn’t know that until much later. There was a tremendous roaring inside my head, which was strange, because I was also deaf, both eardrums having been ruptured. My back and left side were pierced by chunks of shrapnel and fragments of Rip’s bones.120

  Mines, like mortars, are also cheap to manufacture, but they enjoy the added advantage of doing their stuff entirely on their own. They simply sit, tirelessly patient, calmly waiting for the victim to be his own executioner. They are a weapon of sublime economy, which is why they have been used with such obscene profusion. Perhaps it was just this passivity that prompted World War II soldiers to rank mines only seventh on the list of most-feared weapons. And yet they were a great killer of Allied foot soldiers, particularly in North Africa, Italy, and northwest Europe, where the Germans showed a certain genius for mine laying (and its close cousin, booby-trapping). Two were particularly notorious: the “Schu-mine,” a wooden box (cheap to make and difficult for mine detectors to locate) containing roughly a quarter-pound block of TNT, enough to blow off a soldier’s legs; and the much loathed and feared S-mine, or “Bouncing Betty.” S-mines could be set off either by treading on the activating prongs (about 15 pounds of pressure was enough) or by trip wire, whereupon a small charge lifted the bomb to 2 or 3 feet above the ground (roughly genital height) before detonating the main explosive to send hundreds of projectiles horizontally. It was a killer within 20 yards, and still dangerous at 200.

  Moving across ground suspected of being mined was done, remembered one soldier, with the wary step of someone gingerly navigating a field of cowpats. But even then, such caution could not guarantee a safe arrival. An American naval officer on Omaha Beach recalled: “Three of my officers were walking down the beaches, which were strewn with mines. They were walking in the wheel ruts of a truck. Twenty paces behind a soldier came by, stepping in the footprints made by the last naval officer. He set off the mine and was blown to pieces.”121 Roscoe C. Blunt Jr. remembered traversing a mined field on the border between Holland and Germany, on November 19, 1944:

  I saw a BAKER Company rifleman lying face down on the ground. As I ran toward him, I yelled, “C’mon. Let’s keep moving.” Then I saw one of his legs had been blown off below the knee and the bloody foot stump was on the ground several feet away. He was still alive. Shuddering at the sight, I yelled, “I’ll get you a medic,” and kept running.

  My heart jumped into my throat when it finally occurred to me I was running full tilt in a field infested with hundreds of wooden Schu mines. “Mines! Mines!” I screamed at the other GIs around me, but for the legless GI I had just passed, it was too late. I skidded to a stop and stared at the ground. Some were buried shallow, the rest just planted on the surface in no particular pattern.

  The fear I had not felt back in Palenburg almost paralyzed me now. I stood frozen, afraid even to put my foot down. Slowly, I inched my way forward, putting as little weight as possible on each step. At that moment, I realized for the first time the insidious psychological effect mines have on a soldier. It struck home. I would take my chances with small arms fire or even artillery rather than these silent, deadly devices.

  I was pushing my feet along the ground, not wanting to lift them, when an explosion about 100 feet to my left signaled another victim.… This man didn’t have to worry about being an amputee—both his legs and groin area had been blown away and he was dead before he hit the ground. I was instantly sickened when I shot a glance in his direction and saw his body still twitching on the ground, even in death. The sight of this second shattered body unnerved me. This was a rotten war, a stinking way to die.122

  As if the mines themselves were not bad enough, they might also bring down yet another world of harm. An officer of the US Twenty-Ninth Division in the Ruhr Valley described how “at the first sound of exploding mines, the Germans would lay down final protective fires with machine gun, mortars and artillery. If the men fell to earth to escape this fire, they might detonate more mines. Some elected to remain erect rather than risk falling on a mine.” 123

  FROM THEIR INTRODUCTION by the British on the Western Front in 1915, tanks have been held in terror by infantrymen. During the initial encounters with German armor in the early phase of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Russians found it almost impossible to stop men from panicking. Apart from the obvious danger of being shot by a tank’s machine guns or blasted by the main gun, tankers killed soldiers by running them down or crushing or burying them alive by wheeling and churning over their foxholes and slit
trenches—“ironing,” it was called, with that black humor the infantry of all armies affect. The Russians attempted to inoculate their infantry against this viral fear by training them to dig deep and narrow slit trenches that would not collapse when ironed. To prove the point, Russian commanders then had their own tanks run over the trenches. A Soviet junior officer was able to write to his family in late 1942: “The most important thing is that there is no more ‘tank fright’ that we saw so much of at the beginning of the war. Every soldier … knowingly digs deeper into the earth.”124

  Training or no training, enduring an ironing was a terrifying experience, and panic almost always got the soldier killed. Günter Koschorrek, a German machine gunner on the Russian front, went through it:

  The T-34 [the principal Russian battle tank of World War II] turns its turret towards our position and comes at us, its engine roaring. I pull my machine gun into the trench and throw myself down. Grommel and Weichert dash into the bunker. Swina is already lying behind me in the trench.

  A harsh metallic shot, and a tank shell explodes exactly where my machine gun once stood.… And there it is again—the rattle and the roaring as steel tank tracks grind squealing on their rollers. A deathly noise! I press myself like a worm on to the ground. In the trench everything goes dark: the steel monster is parked directly on top of me, blocking out the daylight.

  Now the sharp steel tracks are tearing up the edge of the trench. Frozen blocks of dirt fall on to my back and half cover me. Will the monster bury me alive? I remember soldiers telling me that tanks have turned on top of foxholes until the men below could no longer move and suffocated in the dirt. A hell of a way to die! …

  The T-34 is now shooting at will in the connecting trenches. He rolls over them and turns round, churning up the frozen ground and filling them. Two soldiers, frightened and desperate, jump up and try to flee the trench, but seconds later they are cut down by the tank’s machine gun. Another soldier bravely throws a hand grenade against the tank’s turret. It smashes against it like a snowball on a wall.…