Armageddon - Max Hastings [116]
The gulf was almost unimaginably wide, between the life of the front-line soldier and that of hundreds of thousands of supporting troops, manning heavy gun batteries, maintenance depots, post offices, mobile laundries, rear headquarters, signal centres, field hospitals, who faced negligible peril and much lesser discomforts. Staff-Sergeant Harold Fennema from Wisconsin, serving with the U.S. 66th Signal Battalion, wrote to his wife: “I don’t think this outfit will ever go anywhere that might be dangerous. I’m not at all sorry about it, because I want to come home in one piece.” Stan Proctor, a brigade headquarters wireless-operator with 43rd (Wessex) Division, wrote in his diary, at a time when bitter fighting was taking place further forward: “A very pleasant day. Signals Office duty in the morning, and an afternoon relaxing with the Heynens girls . . . sold 250 cigarettes for 25 guilders . . . to see Bing Crosby in Going My Way.” Proctor was disconcerted to be told that his services were required with an infantry battalion. He protested vociferously, pointing out that while he had already served time with a line unit, others had served continuously at headquarters since D-Day: “I had by this time lost the wish for the comradeship with the infantryman . . . My time at Brigade had been during some of the quieter spells. Now that things were going to hot up, I was to go back. I objected—to the extent of offering back my stripe, but it made no difference.”
When front-line soldiers escaped from imminent peril for a few hours, their desires were usually pathetically simple. Soldiers talk much about women, but on the battlefield their private cravings are seldom sexual. A British officer described his men’s priorities as “char, wad, flick and kip”—tea, food, a movie and sleep. “We thought about girls much less than about food and sleep in a bed,” said Edwin Bramall. Once out of the line for a time, however, women and alcohol became obvious magnets for many men. Visiting a brothel offered the most realistic prospect of sexual congress. A post-war U.S. Army report on the disciplinary difficulties of controlling rape deplored the fact that brothels were officially off-limits to GIs. The same establishments which had serviced the German Army during its occupation now welcomed the Allies. Green crosses by day and green lights by night guided soldiers to condom-issuing stations, which did not prevent the U.S. Third Army from achieving an average monthly VD rate of 12.41 per 1,000, comfortably exceeded by the Canadian score of 54.6 per 1,000. In a nice exercise of official hypocrisy by the British Army, it was adjudged a moral bridge too far for medical officers to undertake inspections of prostitutes. The incidence of venereal disease among all troops rose sharply after the liberation of France and Belgium where, as a disciplinary report observed sardonically, “the civil population accorded the army a comprehensive welcome.”
AS THE RELENTLESS rain of autumn gave way to winter ice and snow, it was hard for British officers, as well as their men, to escape despondency. Far from ending the war in 1944, there were now fears that the Germans might be capable of protracting their resistance through 1945, a shocking prospect. “There is a feeling of optimism at SHAEF,” Montgomery wrote to Brooke on 21 November. “There are no grounds for such optimism.” A gloomy 21st Army Group assessment on 24 November emphasized the steady arrival of German reinforcements, and the natural strength of many hostile terrain features: “Let us therefore face a situation in which the enemy gets stronger every day. His strategic reserve is very limited, and he is in doubt where to use it first.” Two days later, Montgomery’s staff estimated German strength in the west at seventy-one weak divisions, equivalent