Armageddon - Max Hastings [137]
Lieutenant Tony Moody joined the 112th Infantry in the Hürtgen late in November. “It was very cold and very wet, and I had lost my bedding roll.” He met his company commander for the first time in the middle of an incoming barrage, which frightened him considerably. He was then taken to meet his platoon: “Their morale was pretty bad. I’m sure we inflicted as many casualties on the Germans as they did on us, but somehow they didn’t seem to get as upset about them as we did. We lost quite a few combat fatigue cases.” Moody was a twenty-one-year-old graduate in architecture from Missouri, with ambitions to be an artist. His first hard test of leadership, he felt, came when a man returning from the latrines failed to hear a challenge and was shot dead by an American sentry. Writing to the man’s wife, Moody struggled to find words to make her husband’s death sound less ugly and futile.
Unglamorous jobs incurred inflated dangers. Prominent among these was that of signal wireman. It was critical to maintain communications between the forward positions and unit headquarters. Telephone lines were constantly severed by fire. Wiremen had to find the breaks and repair them, often while bombardment persisted. “Telephone wiremen were the first to die in every battle,” observed Captain Karl Godau of 10th SS Panzer. Private Ralph Gordon of the U.S. 18th Infantry was called out at 0300 one night: “It was so dark that it was impossible to see your hand in front of your face, and the only reason I knew where I was, was that I followed my wire line till I reached the breaks. I must have fallen down a dozen times, and one time my pistol fell from my belt when I walked into a trench. I spent 15 minutes feeling around in the dark trying to find the pistol, and during those minutes I cursed everyone that had anything to do with starting the war.”
Gordon and his unit emerged from the Hürtgen utterly traumatized by the experience: “We were thankful we were still alive, but for how long no one knew . . . The day after, a few fellows just couldn’t take the strain any more, just went psycho, shouting and running all around like madmen. They got these fellows out as soon as possible, as it was bad on the morale of the other men.” Wilmer Pruett, an eighteen-year-old from the woods of North Carolina serving with the 281st Combat Engineers observed again and again in the Hürtgen: “If there’s another war, the only way they get me is to burn the forest and sift the ashes.”
STRESSES OF BATTLE
BOTH THE AMERICAN and British armies pondered deeply the problem of combat fatigue, the cause of serious losses of fighting soldiers, above all infantrymen. In some units committed to the Hürtgen battle, combat fatigue reached epidemic proportions. A British medical report concluded that “the act of going sick, of giving in, is an all-or-nothing phenomenon, and is damaging to the personality.” Most men, it concluded, were less effective soldiers after returning to duty, as did more than 50 per cent. The same report observed the paradox that a soldier who ran away from the battlefield was treated as a criminal and harshly punished, while the man who reported sick with combat fatigue was sympathetically received, although “the physical escape of the deserters and the psychological escape of the hysteric were expressions of the same mechanism.” The report noted that the problem seemed much smaller in the German Army, “though precipitating trauma was obviously greater.” This was a polite way of suggesting that the German soldier, in defeat, was experiencing a tougher war than his Allied counterpart, on the road to victory. The report failed to remark the small but obvious point, however, that suspected Wehrmacht malingerers were shot. Although combat fatigue was recognized only with the utmost reluctance in the German Army, and not at all in Stalin’s formations,