Armageddon - Max Hastings [141]
They were in a village a few days later, on 11 December, when word came of Americans nearby. Pusch and his depleted unit were ordered to push the enemy back. The men, most of whom scarcely knew each other, trudged miserably forward. They occupied the first few houses, just as the Americans approached and opened fire. The Germans could see a score or more Shermans. A young lieutenant told Pusch: “Get a faust.” When the paratrooper seemed reluctant to comply, the officer ran for one himself, fired, and set the leading tank on fire before he staggered back into the porch of their house, hit in the legs. The other men dragged him in, then ceased firing and retired to the cellar.
They heard Americans closing in. Two Germans cautiously climbed the steps to meet them, hands held high. A torch probed down from the ground floor upon Pusch and his remaining comrades. An American voice told them to come out. They dumped their weapons and ascended into captivity. Their wounded officer still clutched his Schmeisser, doggedly determined to fight on. The other Germans removed the gun, laid him on a door and carried him out. Pusch felt moved by the care with which an American medic treated his friend from Hamburg, Werner Mittelstrauss, who was badly wounded in the legs. German shells were now falling around them. The paratrooper was slightly wounded by splinters in his lip and eye. Yet he was overwhelmed with gratitude that his war was over: “It was like a reprieve from cancer.” The following two years that he spent as a prisoner, initially working in a fertilizer factory at Norfolk, Virginia, were among the happiest of his life: “I was in heaven. I met no hostility in America.” His story is important, because it highlights the experience of a German soldier no more eager for glory than most of his Allied counterparts. Pusch embraced escape from the war.
THE AMERICANS at last inched out of the Hürtgen Forest in the first days of December. They had won their battle, at fearsome cost. The 4th Division suffered terribly—some 4,053 battle casualties, together with a further 2,000 cases of trench foot and combat fatigue. Some of the division’s companies were reduced to fifty men. Robert Sterling Rush writes of the 4th’s 22nd Infantry: “The soldiers of the regiment did not quit, but at the end there was no attack left in them. The soul of the regiment had been ripped out when it lost its experienced junior leaders, NCOs, platoon officers . . . Although the unit remained above 75 per cent strength through a constant influx of replacements, once all its veterans were lost, its effectiveness declined dramatically.” Meanwhile 1st Division, the “Big Red One,” had lost 3,993 casualties, 1,479 of these in the 26th Infantry Regiment, to advance four miles. On 29 November, in an attempt to take the town of Merode, just north-east of the Hürtgen, the regiment lost two companies cut off and almost wiped out.
At last, the way seemed open to the Roer plain. Yet at the head of its river stood the Roer dams. These offered the Germans scope to flood the low ground at will. Control of the dams was critical, and this had been understood by Allied intelligence staffs since the beginning of October. The obvious solution was to destroy the dams by bombing before the armies reached them. This task was delegated to the RAF, which had made much of its 1943 success in bursting the Möhne and Eder dams by precision attack. Unfortunately, the Roer dams—like the vital