Armageddon - Max Hastings [140]
Yet the root cause of Eisenhower’s chronic manpower difficulties was an earlier Washington policy decision. The U.S. had created a ground army far smaller than its population would have allowed because the War Department woefully underestimated the size of the force that would be needed to defeat Hitler. Millions of potential recruits were rejected by medical boards, which were encouraged to set high standards. It was true that America needed a much bigger navy than Germany. The U.S. Navy’s outstanding performance made it probably the most impressive of America’s three wartime services. The U.S. decision to create a huge air force represented a rational exploitation of the nation’s technological brilliance. But it remains astonishing that only eighty-nine U.S. Army divisions were deployed for active service. It may be argued that, given the difficulties of supplying America’s armies in Europe, the commitment of more ground soldiers would merely have compounded these. Yet, even among the five million men drafted to the U.S. Army, only two million served in combat roles, in the loosest interpretation of that phrase. Barely 300,000 men were available in north-west Europe even in 1945 to confront direct German fire, as members of rifle companies or armoured units. It remains insufficiently understood that, while overall casualty rates on the Western Front in the Second World War were vastly lower than those of the First World War, a rifleman’s prospects of surviving the entire campaign unwounded were not much better than those of his father in Flanders. The campaign could have been won more quickly, and Allied forces might have advanced much further east, if Eisenhower had been given more soldiers, and especially more infantrymen.
BOGGED DOWN
THE GERMAN SOLDIER found the experience of the Hürtgen Forest battle every inch as unpleasant as his American counterpart. “It’s Sunday, my God, it’s Sunday,” wrote a German infantry medic of the 1058th Regiment. “With dawn, the whole of our front receives a barrage. The earth trembles. The concussions take our breath away . . . We go forward to counter-attack. The captain is leading it himself. We cannot go far. Our people are dropping like tired flies. Suddenly, the artillery begins its monstrous song again . . . If only we had the munitions and heavy weapons the American has, we would have sent him to hell a long time ago.”
The same man noted on 26 February, near Grosshau: “Two wounded are brought to my hole, one with a torn-up arm, the other with both hands shot off. I am considering whether or not to cut off the rest of the arm. I’ll leave it on. How brave those two are. I hope to God all this is not in vain. When the Ami really attacks again, then he has got to break through. I can’t believe that this ground can be held any longer. Many of our boys just ran away, can’t find them, and have to hold out with this small group.” The U.S. 22nd Infantry noted that between 16 November and 3 December it captured 764 Germans, against some thirty-seven of its own men taken prisoner. The figures highlighted the reluctance of many of the defenders to fight to the last.
Willi Pusch, an eighteen-year-old soldier of the German 3rd Parachute Division, had seen his company reduced from eighty men to fifteen in Normandy, from which he emerged convinced that the war was lost. After two months refitting the unit in Holland, on 22 November they were committed