All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [368]
The killing of prisoners was never institutionalised, as on the Eastern Front, but Eisenhower’s men committed their share of excesses. A Canadian soldier described his experience of a patrol in Holland, in which his unit captured eight dismounted German tankers attempting to get back to their own lines. Their officer spoke good English, and the enemies chatted for some minutes about the cold, and how they would like to light a fire. They had just passed a farmhouse, he said, where there might be schnapps and a pig. Could they roast it? The Canadian said later, ‘The war was over for him, and I guess he was glad.’ Then, suddenly, the lieutenant leading the patrol turned to his Bren-gunner and said, ‘Shoot them.’ The German officer who had been making jokes ‘sort of made a little run forward and put his arms across his chest and said something and the guy with the Bren just cut loose … There were two, I think, still flopping like gaffed salmon, and this guy we called Whitey from Cape Breton – we called him Whitey because he was always boasting how good a coalminer he was – he shot those two with a pistol … It probably went into our history, I guess, as a German patrol wiped out. None of us really thought too much about it … But I’ll tell you this, a year before, if I’d been there, I’d have been puking up my guts.’
Allied forces edged towards the German border yard by painful yard. During a November attack in Alsace, within seconds of encountering devastating German machine-gun fire Private Robert Kotlowitz found himself the only unwounded survivor of his platoon.
I remember from that moment, when mass disorientation began to set in, the glob-smell of mud in my nostrils … the sudden drying-up of saliva in my mouth and the instant dehydration it produced; the powerful feel of my own body, as though I was carrying it as a burden; my skinny, attenuated frame, lying there on the ground, waiting; the heavy presence of limbs extending from it; my helmeted skull, quivering torso, and vulnerable crotch. The tender genitals curled dead-center at my pelvis; and my swollen bladder, burning … The noise of small-arms and machine-gun fire, of men’s voices calling for help or screaming in pain or terror – our own men’s voices, unrecognizable at first, weird in pitch and timbre. And the hum inside my own head, trying to drown out the sounds coming from all around me.
Kotlowitz lay motionless until nightfall, when he was evacuated by medics to become a combat-fatigue case. He never served in the line again. British Lt. Tony Finucane described a battalion ‘advance to contact’ in Holland: ‘We strung out across the flatland in what looked and felt like a casual stroll in the afternoon sunshine. Suddenly nearing the objective, and with men feeling for their shovels to get well dug in before nightfall, we saw a hundred yards ahead of us lots of men in grey advance in a similar formation. Imagine it! Two battalions head on in the open! Within moments a real infantry small arms battle – and pandemonium – started. We had no supporting fire, the enemy (usually referred to by ourselves as “the wily Hun”) opened up with what looked like a 20mm ack-ack gun. But in the event, with odds about evens we were better at it than they were. They backed off about half a mile.’
But each such small encounter, victorious or no, imposed a loss of momentum, and irreplaceable British losses. By the time Finucane found himself at Cleve in December, his platoon was reduced from thirty-five men to eleven. When his Brigadier visited the forward positions and was told of the battalion’s depleted rifle strength, he said with a sigh, ‘That’s what I keep telling the general. The casualties don’t look much considering