Armageddon - Max Hastings [133]
A significant number of U.S. soldiers appointed to Civil Affairs were themselves former refugees, picked for their language skills. Corporal Werner Kleeman had been born in Bavaria twenty-five years earlier. A Jew, he spent some months in Dachau concentration camp before achieving the extraordinary good fortune of a passport to England, and thence to America. He found life very tough as an infantry trainee: “Most NCOs were hill-billies who thought Jews wore horns. They had never seen a Jew. They liked to say: ‘Latrine duty for the refugee!’ ” But then Kleeman was posted to Civil Affairs on the strength of his knowledge of German. He cherished the sensation that he was taking a small personal part in the destruction of Hitler’s empire. The former refugee once found himself interrogating a shot-down Luftwaffe pilot who hailed from a Bavarian village three miles from his own. Yet sometimes Kleeman’s American superiors expected more than he could deliver. Colonel Charles Lanham, the flamboyant officer commanding the 22nd Infantry, told the interpreter one day: “Now we’re in Germany, the velvet gloves come off. These cows on the roads are getting in the way of my vehicles.” Kleeman wondered if the colonel expected him to harangue the cows in German.
One of his colleagues was Sergeant J. D. Salinger. “In those days, he was very normal,” Kleeman said of the novelist, “except that he would never let anybody read his letters home, and always forged the signature of a censoring officer.” Sometimes Salinger would say: “Let’s go look up Papa.” They would head for the press camp where Ernest Hemingway was ensconced, asserting that he was hiding from his wife, Martha Gellhorn. Both Hemingways were serving as war correspondents. Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne somehow found leisure to conduct a brief affair with Ms. Gellhorn, which involved playing a lot of gin rummy in bed. Salinger and Kleeman admired Ernest Hemingway’s unflinching enthusiasm for getting up front. The novelist had formed a close friendship with Colonel Lanham of the 22nd Infantry, a moody, self-consciously heroic figure who was by no means displeased to find himself the object of Hemingway’s admiration in print. Lanham, who “led from the front, even to the point of foolhardiness,” was now to find himself and his regiment, along with a substantial part of the U.S. First Army, plunged into fighting more painful than any which they had known since Normandy.
“THE STAGNATION OF the war weighs heavily,” the Dresden Jewish academic Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on 2 November. “Another winter, that is a dreadful thought.” So it seemed also to the Allied generals. At Eisenhower’s strategic planning conference in Brussels on 18 October 1944, it was acknowledged that the British would be unable to launch a major thrust into Germany before winter. Montgomery’s hopes of spearheading a breakthrough had died at Arnhem and on the Scheldt. If there was now to be a dramatic advance, it would have to be achieved by Bradley’s men. It was agreed that Hodges’s First Army should push towards Cologne, while Ninth Army attacked on the left, between Hodges and the British. Patton’s Third Army was placed lowest in the queue for support and supply. Alan Brooke wrote gloomily in his diary on 8 November: “I do not like the layout of the coming offensive, and doubt whether we [will] even reach the Rhine, it is highly improbable that we should cross over before the end of the year.” Brooke had become so desperate to see a land force commander appointed in place of Eisenhower, “[who] is detached and by himself with his lady chauffeur on the golf links at Rheims,” that the sharp, brusque Ulsterman now favoured giving the job to Bradley, with Montgomery commanding all Allied troops north of the Ardennes, and Patton doing the same job in the south. “[Eisenhower] quite incapable of understanding real strategy . . . Among other things discovered