All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [340]
Lt. Tony Finucane felt that the doctrine of reliance upon artillery and air support corroded proper infantry spirit. His own unit advanced, he said, ‘knowing that with the first burst of spandau everyone would go to ground and that would be it for the day. So much for dash, verve and pursuit – those who tried such antics were usually caught by our own 25-pdrs.’ Finucane believed responsibility for many of the problems properly rested with senior officers at brigade and divisional level, some of whom had no more experience of battle than did their men. ‘It was not necessarily the training of the army in UK which was wrong. Rather was it that many senior officers were inexperienced and may have viewed themselves as “above” training.’
It is hard to exaggerate the strain imposed upon every man by responsibility to join the spearhead of an attack. Ken Tout described the laborious progress of a typical armoured advance: ‘The front tanks are venturing slowly and agonisingly towards the first blank, savage corners. Their caution filters slowly back along the column, dictating a snail’s pace … The morning drags slowly by, the sluggish progress of the clock accentuated by our jolting, ten-yards-at-a time advance as we wriggle about in our tight coops, like battery hens, trying to restore circulation in legs, buttocks and shoulders.’ A Lancers officer edged his Sherman forward into a wood, ordering his squadron to follow him. The commander of the next tank forgot to switch off his set before speaking into the intercom, and thus the entire unit heard him order, ‘Driver left, driver left.’ The reply came, ‘But he’s gone right, sergeant.’ The tank commander said, ‘I know bloody well he’s gone right, but I’m not following that f—ing c—t, it’s too f—ing dangerous.’
‘It was a hell of a day,’ wrote a British company commander describing his unit’s experiences on 25 June with a frankness unusual among Allied soldiers:
The first shock was that this advance was supposed to be protected by smoke, but we were utterly exposed … Two members of the company couldn’t stand it and shot themselves in the foot in quick succession … Off we go, the blast from a shell knocks me over, but only one little flesh wound … Where are the boys? Not here. I go back – ‘Come on.’ Through the hedge again, still no boys. Back again – “COME ON.” They came, through more hedges … Bloody murder; people dropping dead. Hitlerjugend prisoners … During the attack one of my platoons ran away and was brought back at pistol-point by Tug Wilson, my second-in-command … We were being counterattacked by infantry and two tanks. The same platoon ran away again … Eventually it all died down. The enemy retired, leaving two knocked-out tanks and quite a lot of dead.
Soldiers who fought on foot and those who rode on tracks were almost unfailingly sceptical of each other’s tactics. ‘We discussed the forthcoming advance with the delicate, genteel bargaining that always took place between tank and infantry,’ wrote British infantryman Lt. Norman Craig of an exchange with an armoured officer. ‘Myself, hoping to persuade the tanks to go in front; he politely determined that they should not. The infantryman considered the tank an overpowering leviathan, which should be hurled indiscriminately into the assault; the tank man looked on the infantry as a convenient expendable mass, useful for neutralising anti-tank guns.’
Throughout the north-west Europe campaign, Allied senior officers