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By Root 1223 0

several divisions, men who disappeared from their units to become scavengers, supporting themselves by lives of active or passive criminality. They became familiar flotsam in every urban area of western Europe. This teeming horde sustained a huge traffic in stolen military rations, fuel, equipment and even vehicles, feeding the black markets of impoverished France, Belgium—and Britain. In Brussels in December 1944, an average of seventy jeeps a day were being reported lost. A significant proportion of supplies destined for the armies was diverted into civilian hands. More than a few men in General Lee’s ComZ and its British counterpart did not desert but instead made their contribution to the war effort by selling stores which they were entrusted with moving to the front. Fortunes were made in those days, in those ways. In the British Army, concern about organized looting, black-marketeering and theft of military equipment became so widespread that a restriction was imposed on the value of postal money orders soldiers were permitted to send home. Disciplinary problems of all kinds were a serious issue. Eisenhower was driven to suggest the public execution of men convicted of rape.

The U.S. Army suffered severely in north-west Europe for the grave policy error it had made earlier in the war, of according a low priority to manning infantry formations and providing replacements for their casualties. “We are about to invade the continent,” General Marshall wrote to Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, in May 1944, “and have staked our success on our air superiority, on Soviet numerical preponderance, and on the high quality of our ground combat units.” Marshall might have added: “and on the willingness of the Soviets to accept the overwhelming burden of ground casualties.” It was also debatable whether the Chief of Staff had, indeed, given the emphasis he claimed to ensuring the quality of fighting manpower. The U.S. Army’s belief that quality personnel were wasted in ground combat units is readily demonstrated by the manner in which it allocated recruits after educational testing. Only 27.4 per cent of American infantry soldiers attained grades I or II in initial army testing, while 29 per cent were grade IIIs, and 43 per cent grades IV or V, which reflected “low intelligence and suitability for training.” The educational standard of men shipped to combat arms ranked far below that of those posted to administrative branches. For instance, 89.4 per cent of soldiers sent to the army’s Finance Department had achieved grades I or II, as had 35.3 per cent even of those sent to the military police. Many riflemen in the U.S. Army felt themselves abandoned by God and by their own country. Charles Felix’s unit was outraged to read in Stars & Stripes that men sentenced to imprisonment for rear-area disciplinary offences were being offered a transfer to infantry as an alternative: “So that’s what they really think of us!”—shades here of Hollywood’s The Dirty Dozen. To put the matter plainly, infantry—the core of every army’s fighting power—reposed at the bottom of the U.S. War Department barrel. For those who had to fight America’s battles in Europe, the cost of this monumental misjudgement was painful indeed.

“Replacements . . . are not satisfactory. They never have been,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel C. Ware, G-1 of the U.S. 1st Division. “It seems the infantry has been the last thing to be taken care of.” Orders to other commands to release men for infantry service were treated with shameless cynicism. One batch of 514 men released by the USAAF to the army was found to muster 231 court-martial convictions between them. In the words of the U.S. official historian, commanders “saw in the emergency retraining program an opportunity to rid their units of misfits and undesirables.” Senior officers remarked on the absurdity of maintaining 198 anti-aircraft units in the U.S. armies in north-west Europe, when the Luftwaffe was almost moribund. It was a measure of the scale of manpower waste that even a modest reduction to 146 AA battalions freed