Armageddon - Max Hastings [113]
It is sometimes supposed that Allied problems of supply disappeared once Antwerp was opened. In reality, severe difficulties persisted until late January 1945. Though Antwerp possessed a discharge capacity of at least 80,000 tons a day, for months stores moved from the dockside to the armies at a much slower rate. Even in early January, only 10,500 tons a day were being cleared off the quays. The Germans maintained a ferocious V-weapon barrage—between September 1944 and May 1945 nearly 7,000 rockets and flying bombs landed in the city and port, inflicting more than 10,000 casualties, most of them civilian. There was a strike among Belgian dockworkers in January, in pursuit of more rations and better working conditions. As for the rail system, it was easy enough to replace track, but far more difficult and time-consuming to repair French bridges and tunnels systematically destroyed by the air forces before and after D-Day. The Allies burdened themselves with supply requirements which were wildly extravagant by German or Russian standards, but deemed essential to sustain the armies of the democracies. In the autumn and winter of 1944, some U.S. divisions were diverted on their transatlantic passage to holding camps in Britain because the means to support them on the continent were lacking. Vast logjams of rail cars persisted east of Paris, and supply-stock record-keeping remained deplorable. Confidence among the fighting commanders in General Lee’s handling of the supply system, which was widely deemed a scandal, remained at rock-bottom. Still Eisenhower would not sack him.
There was a marked contrast in the outlook, background and behaviour of different British regiments. The old county infantry units did their business quietly and without fuss or illusions. They looked askance at aggressively smart cavalrymen like the 13th/18th Hussars, whose commanding officer Lord Feversham, a portly Yorkshire landowner, slept in blue silk pyjamas, and displayed an unaffected reluctance to wake up in the morning. As Feversham fought his way through Holland, he was considering an alternative offer of employment as governor of Madras. His officers’ mess was famous for its addiction to high-stakes roulette and chemin-de-fer. General James Gavin remarked of some British units led by professional soldiers: “They seemed to be much more relaxed about the war than we were, and made themselves as comfortable as they could whenever they could . . . At times, they seemed to enjoy the war.” The attitude noted by Gavin partly reflected a familiar, studied British upper-class nonchalance in adverse circumstances. Yet it is perhaps true that some British soldiers resented the war less than their American counterparts. Brigadier Michael Carver of 4th Armoured Brigade observed: “I just accepted how long it took to finish the business—I was fairly cynical then. This was life for me—it was what I did.”
Carver was a professional soldier wholly intolerant of amateurishness or inadequacy in others. He had risen to command an armoured brigade at the age of twenty-seven. He said later: “You couldn’t afford to let a man remain in command if he had ‘lost it.’ I got rid of the CO of the Sharpshooters, who had a DSO and two MCs, when I found him cowering behind a tank, shaking under shellfire. His regiment had become scruffy and idle.” To some, it seemed remarkable that an officer as abrasive in addressing superiors and subordinates escaped dismissal. Carver said unapologetically: