Armageddon - Max Hastings [138]
A British analysis concluded: “Battle exhaustion cases occurred chiefly among men of poor type who, during training have constantly been guilty of petty crimes.” The U.S. Army rejected this thesis, and took the view that many good men succumbed to combat fatigue and could be rehabilitated for return to duty. In the course of the north-west Europe campaign, British Second Army recorded twelve men per thousand as psychoneurotic admissions to hospitals. Comparable American ETO figures were fifty-two men per thousand, a total of 102,989 cases. Some 8.9 per cent of all men who passed through the U.S. Army in the Second World War were recorded as suffering at some time from combat fatigue. Martin Van Creveld, writing of the “enormous number of psychiatric casualties” the U.S. Army suffered in that war, suggests that the condition was regarded by the ordinary soldier and his superior as “a legitimate, almost normal complaint.” The problem was especially prevalent among newly arrived replacements. Although combat fatigue was far less readily acknowledged in the German Army, the consulting psychiatrist at Second Panzer Army recorded in 1943 that it was especially common “among men who had not had time to form strong comradely ties with buddies.” Together with trench foot, which was invariably highest in units where morale was low, combat fatigue represented a huge drain on Allied fighting manpower. Twenty-six per cent of all those who served in combat formations in the ETO between June and November 1944 at some time reported sick in these terms. “Combat fatigue was one of the most important causes of non-effectiveness among combat troops,” concluded a U.S. Army post-war report. “News spread among the troops that they could avoid distasteful duty at least temporarily by getting into medical evacuation channels. It was very difficult under combat conditions to distinguish between malingering and mild combat exhaustion.”
Officers who succumbed were often treated more generously than enlisted men. Lieutenant Colonel Ferdinand Chesarek, commanding the 28th Field Artillery, relieved a major of his duties and sent him to the rear, with a report simply recommending that he should not again be employed forward of a corps command post: “The strain of battle in a field artillery CP is greater than he can undergo and still function efficiently . . . when the situation becomes involved, he works himself into such a state as to make impossible the continuation of his duties.”
In the winter of 1944, Allied fighting strength was further eroded by the loss of thousands of men who simply quit. “There were increasing signs of plummeting morale,” writes Carlo d’Este, “manifested by a rapidly rising desertion rate so serious that Eisenhower . . . became the first [U.S. commander] since Lincoln in the Civil War to order an American soldier executed for desertion.” No reliable figures are available for overall losses caused by desertion and absences without leave, but Martin Van Creveld suggests “several hundred thousand,” of whom a mere 2,854 were ever brought to trial. Available statistics show that the desertion rate in U.S. armies in Europe reached 45.2 per thousand in 1944 and 63 per thousand in 1945. On 1 January 1945, the U.S. provost-marshal acknowledged that more than 18,000 American deserters were roaming the ETO, while the British admitted to more than 10,000. A further 10,000 British soldiers were charged with the lesser offence of Absence Without Leave.
Unsurprisingly desertion, like combat fatigue, was overwhelmingly an issue in combat units. A sample of British offenders in north-west Europe revealed that more than 80 per cent of deserters had absconded from infantry rifle companies. This represented a serious haemorrhage of fighting manpower. The figures suggest that Eisenhower’s armies were deprived of the equivalent of