Armageddon - Max Hastings [135]
As an officer, he felt grateful that he had less time to be frightened than his men, because there was so much to do. The U.S. Army did not allow junior officers batmen—personal servants—as the British did, because it was thought demeaning to ask enlisted men to do such work. Omar Bradley was among those who deplored American scruples. He thought the British system militarily sensible, because overtaxed officers could do their jobs better if they did not also have to dig foxholes and prepare their own rations.
Devitt, like most young officers, learned a great deal from his veterans. His runner, a twenty-year-old from Indiana named Ernie Elliott, wounded in Normandy, put him wise to the shirkers: “Lieutenant, I wouldn’t be too soft on so-and-so—he’s always been a gold-bricker and will do whatever it takes to duck real work.” Yet Devitt found it hard to learn how to rally men subjected to the strain of incoming barrages. He recorded a shouted conversation in the Hürtgen as German shells smashed into the trees around his platoon’s foxholes:
“Lieutenant, will you come over here.”
“Yeah, what d’ya want?”
“It’s Smith. Can you talk to him?”
“Okay, just a second.”
He found the man huddled in a foxhole, weeping uncontrollably.
“Smith, just take it easy. You’ll be all right.”
“Lieutenant, I just can’t take it any more. I’ve just got to get out of here.”
“Well, Smith, we all want to get out of here, but we can’t. It’ll let up soon.”
After half an hour or so, the man recovered himself, and gave no more trouble. When a shell wounded two of his platoon, Devitt found himself struggling to put a field dressing on a large hole in one man’s chest as it smoked in the icy air, giving off a stink of burning flesh. The other wounded man said: “Lieutenant, he won’t make it. Come and help me.” Sure enough, a few moments later as the stretcher-bearers lifted the chest case, he shuddered and was dead.
A new officer arrived to take over a neighbouring platoon, where his sergeant, Haney, urged him to dig his foxhole deeper. The lieutenant ignored this suggestion. Soon afterwards a near-miss gave him a slight shrapnel wound in the hand. The officer leaped up, yelling to his NCO: “Look, Haney, that’s my ticket home! Talk about a million-dollar wound, this is it. Call the medic to put on a bandage, then it’s the rear for me. I’ve had enough of this place.” Devitt’s company suffered thirty-six casualties in a single week in the Hürtgen, without achieving anything of significance.
A MAJOR AMERICAN offensive began early in the afternoon of 16 November with an attempt to push eastwards from a start line north of the Hürtgen, along the so-called Hamich Corridor towards Cologne. Nothing did more to boost the precarious morale of the American attackers than the spectacle of their own fighter-bombers pounding the Germans. “It was a beautiful sight to us,” wrote a U.S. infantryman watching a P-47 strike. “We could see the tracers bouncing off their targets, then they would dig down and let their bombs go. For a second or two, it would look as if they were duds; then a grey geyser of dirt and smoke would erupt.” Inevitably, however, there were mistakes, and mistakes in wars cost lives. Again and again, especially amid the confusion of the woodlands, friendly aircraft strafed Allied positions, causing much bitterness and—more serious—corroding trust among units which had been hit, making them reluctant again to summon air support.