All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [367]
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