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By Root 974 0

the total number of men involved, but they are all fighting troops.’ Alan Brooke was heard to say that he wished circumstances had placed the British on the right rather than the left of Eisenhower’s line. The British CIGS believed that opportunities existed in the south which Montgomery’s army could have exploited more effectively than the Americans. In this, he was assuredly wrong. His view reflected only a manifestation of mutual Anglo–American mistrust, which became more pronounced as each nation’s generals balefully examined the other’s failures and disappointments.

Stalin, curiously enough, displayed more enthusiasm for the Western contribution to the war that winter than at any previous period, despite the Allied tensions provoked by Russian refusal to aid the embattled Poles in their ill-judged Warsaw Uprising. ‘A new feature of the struggle against Hitler’s Germany in the past year,’ he told a Moscow Party conference on 6 November, ‘is the fact that the Red Army has not been fighting the Germans alone as was previously the case. The Tehran conference was not held in vain – its resolutions on the joint offensive against Germany from the west, east and south are being implemented with real conviction. There is no doubt that without the second front in Europe, which has engaged up to seventy-five German divisions, our forces would have been unable so quickly to break German resistance and expel Germany’s armies from the Soviet Union. Equally, without the Red Army’s powerful summer offensive, which engaged up to two hundred German divisions, our allies would have been unable so rapidly to throw the Germans out of central Italy, France and Belgium. The challenge, the key to victory, is to keep Germany in the grip of the two fronts.’

By December, when snow came, Eisenhower’s armies had resigned themselves to shivering through the winter, then resuming their offensive when conditions allowed. It is hard for civilians to comprehend the miseries of an outdoor existence week after week and month after month in such conditions. ‘With our tent and clothing wet and half-frozen,’ wrote American soldier George Neill, ‘I felt numb to the point of almost not caring what happened to me.’ In his foxhole in darkness, ‘the temperature moved well below freezing. The half-frozen slush in the bottom of the hole froze solid. We just lay there in a fetal position and swore to ourselves … My buddies and I agreed it would be impossible to exaggerate how hopeless, miserable and depressed we felt.’ Such was the normal condition of millions of men on both sides of the line between October 1944 and March 1945. Trench foot became endemic, especially in formations in which morale was low and thus hygiene discipline slack. Dysentery was commonplace. The working or malfunctioning of excretory processes became an obsession for millions of men deprived of control over their bowels. In battlefield conditions, many never made it to a latrine, or were unable even to lower their trousers before defecating.

If it was miserable to fight at all, it was more so in soiled clothing. Tank crews suffered special indignities. A German driver wrote: ‘Through my vision slit I saw many hilarious sights of brave soldiers, hanging on for dear life to the turret of a moving panzer with their trousers round their ankles and screwing up their faces in a desperate attempt to do the almost impossible.’ Infantryman Guy Sajer lost control of his bowels during the retreat from the Don, and grew accustomed, like all the fellow passengers in his truck, to jolting through the snow in a mess of his own excrement. Pfc Donald Schoo suffered the same miseries during the Bulge battle. After defecating on a wooden ammunition box, ‘your butt hurt too much to wipe so you just pulled up your pants and went back to your hole. No one said anything about how you smelt, because everyone smelled bad.’

Robert Kotlowitz was crouched in a foxhole in Alsace when his bowels suddenly exploded. He leapt forth, tore down his trousers and squatted. His buddy shouted, ‘Jesus Christ! Get back where