All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [371]
‘Fear reigned,’ wrote Donald Burgett. His formation, the 101st Airborne, played a critical part in stabilising the front, while watching soldiers of some other units flee for their lives. ‘Once fear strikes, it spreads like an epidemic, faster than wildfire. Once the first man runs, others soon follow. Then, it’s all over; soon there are hordes of men running, all of them wild-eyed and driven by fear.’ Pfc Harold Lindstrom from Alexandria, Minnesota, became so desperate in his misery that he found himself gazing with envy at German corpses. ‘They looked peaceful. The war was over for them. They weren’t cold any more.’ He even felt pangs of envy towards comrades desperate enough to maim themselves: ‘No one would ever know how many accidents were genuine and how many self-made.’ An infantry company commander wrote of an action at Stoumont on the 21st: ‘It was so foggy that one of our men found himself ten yards from a German machine-gun before he knew it … Everyone had been pushed about as far as he could be. Nerves were being broken on men whom one would have thought would never weaken.’
A young infantryman described his predicament one late December day when his foxhole buddy was hit: ‘Gordon got ripped by a machine-gun from roughly the left thigh through the right waist. He … told me he was hit through the stomach as well … We were cut off … We were in foxholes by ourselves, so we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine. We couldn’t ease [the pain] so I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked it as hard as I could, because he wanted to be put out. That didn’t work, so I hit him up by the head with a helmet and that didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly froze to death, he bled to death.’
Belgian civilians suffered terribly at the hands of both sides. The Germans, during their brief reoccupation of liberated towns and villages, found time to execute scores of civilians either deemed guilty of resistance activity, or more often murdered merely as examples to others. The savagery of some of Model’s men reflected a venom characteristic of 1944–45: if they themselves were doomed to lose the war and probably to die, they were bent upon depriving as many enemies as possible of the joys of survival and liberation. Allied bombing and shelling compounded civilians’ plight: in the small town of Houffalize, for instance, 192 people died, all but eight of them from Allied bombing. Twenty-seven of the victims were younger than fifteen, and the survivors were left with ruins and destitution. Twenty inhabitants of the village of Sainlez near Bastogne were killed by bombardment that reduced every home to a shell; among them were eight members of one family named Didier: Joseph, forty-six; Marie-Angèle, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renée, thirteen; Lucille, eleven; Bernadette, nine; Lucien, eight; and Noël, six. Throughout the battle areas of Belgium and Luxembourg there was wholesale looting by Allied as well as German troops.
Model’s panzers were exultant in the wake of their early successes, while Allied commanders were stunned and appalled. German deployment of small numbers of English-speaking commandos in American uniforms, led by Otto Skorzeny, inspired an epidemic of ‘fifth-column fever’ that prompted the Americans to execute every such disguised enemy soldier they captured. A New Year’s Day air assault on Allied airfields cost the Luftwaffe three hundred aircraft, to achieve the destruction of 156 American and British planes which were easily replaced. The raids further rattled Eisenhower’s commanders, but in truth the strategic predicament of the Anglo-American armies was never as bad as those in the eye of the storm at first convinced themselves. They had mass, while the Germans were desperately short of tanks, aircraft, fuel and quality manpower. Behind the formidable SS panzer divisions were infantry quite