All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [366]
The Scheldt estuary was defended not by SS panzers or elite infantry formations, but by the 70th ‘White Bread’ Division, formed from medical cases, which a German naval officer described as ‘an apathetic, undisciplined mob’. Yet it required no great skill to fire machine-guns and mortars at attackers exposed in plain view: for weeks, these ailing Germans frustrated the best of the Canadian Army. The CO of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada wrote of ‘the utter misery of the conditions and the great courage required to do the simplest things. Attacks had to go on along dykes swept by enemy fire. To go through the polder meant wading, without possibility of concealment, in water that at times came up to the chest. Mortar fire, at which the Germans were masters, crashed at every rallying point … It was peculiarly a rifleman’s fight in that there were no great decisive battles, just a steady continuous struggle.’ Most attacks had to be conducted by platoon-sized forces, advancing on a one-man front. So deadly was German automatic fire that the proportion of fatalities to wounded men was 50 per cent higher than usual.
After a week fighting in the Breskens pocket, a single Canadian brigade had lost 533 men, including 111 killed. By the end of November, one division committed had suffered 2,077 casualties including 544 killed or missing, and the other lost 3,650 casualties in thirty-three days, 405 men from each of its rifle battalions. This represented a rate of loss almost as heavy as that the Canadian troops suffered in the November 1917 Passchendaele battle, generally regarded as one of the worst experiences of World War I. Even low-grade German defenders could a hold a line in country where armour could not operate, bunkers provided protection against all but direct hits, and the treeless landscape offered no scope for tactical subtlety.
The 1 November amphibious assault on Walcheren island was a messy and expensive business, and a week’s hard fighting was required before the Germans surrendered. The first Allied convoy to unload at Antwerp arrived only on 28 November. Given the decisive impact of supply problems on the Allied armies from late August onwards, and the miracle that Antwerp’s docks had been captured intact in September, failure to seize the Scheldt approaches proved the worst single mistake of the campaign. Responsibility stretched all the way down the Allied command chain from Eisenhower. But Montgomery was the man with operational responsibility, the general who considered himself a master of war, and he must bear principal blame. ‘By the winter Americans had ceased to regard Monty as amusing,’ said Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, ‘and in the cases of [Bedell] Smith and Bradley … contempt had grown into active hatred.’
The Western Allies lost a small chance of breaking into Germany in September – small, because probability suggests that they lacked sufficient combat power to win the war in 1944 – because they succumbed to the euphoria of victory in France. They lacked energy and imagination to improvise expedients to overcome their supply problems, as an advancing German army might have done. It is also arguable that the large resources committed to Pacific operations in 1944, in defiance of the ‘Germany First’ strategy, denied Eisenhower the margin of men and shipping which might just have enabled his armies to deliver a war-winning punch. Both the US and British armies were chronically short of infantry, and over-weighted with redundant anti-aircraft and anti-tank units. In Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, these absorbed 47,120 precious men, 7.1 per cent of total strength, while in Normandy only 82,000 of