Armageddon - Max Hastings [15]
Meanwhile American sensitivity about the relative feebleness of the British contribution was growing. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana complained in Congress: “It is hard for me to understand why we, with the biggest army in the world, should find it necessary to draft more men when we have four times as many in the war as the British.” Some important Americans, their president foremost among them, were morbidly suspicious of what they perceived as Churchillian attempts to sacrifice American lives in support of the restoration of the British Empire. The United States had accepted in 1942 the policy urged upon it by the British of “Germany first.” But many Americans, including a few at the summits of command, regarded the European war as regrettable business to be concluded before their country settled accounts with its principal enemy, Japan.
The divide between the Western allies and the Germans and Russians was most strikingly reflected in their attitude to casualties. Stalin’s commanders looked forward to the last phase of the struggle for Europe with their customary indifference to death and suffering, save insofar as these influenced the Red Army’s ability to fight its next battle. The leaders of Germany had conducted a romance with death for more than a decade. They still cherished hopes of final victory, though it was already plain that Hitler would settle almost equally willingly for a climactic bloodbath worthy of the Third Reich’s place in history.
General Dwight Eisenhower’s citizen soldiers, by contrast, were united in September 1944 by relief that after Normandy the end was in sight. Enough blood had been shed. It was good to believe that now it was a matter of mopping up. After the breakout in France, in Captain “Dim” Robbins’s words: “we were told that the German Army was wrecked. It was just a question of crossing the Rhine.” Men thanked their stars for approaching deliverance, and many resolved to take as few chances as possible in the last days. On 28 August, the British Air Ministry circulated a memorandum to all RAF commands about precautionary measures for celebrations of the end of the war. There should be no extravagant or destructive displays, it warned. Commanding officers should ensure that personnel had no unauthorized access to firearms, explosives or pyrotechnics. “Everything is going so wonderfully well,” Colonel George Turner-Cain, commanding the British 1st Herefords, wrote in his diary on 1 September, “with the Huns showing little fight. Most seem content to give themselves up.” Four days later, he recorded: “Rumours flying in streams. Swiss radio says Hitler has gone to Spain and peace has been declared.”
Many Germans seemed eager to abandon the struggle. “A Jerry gives himself up to us in a cabbage field,” Trooper John Thorpe of the 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry wrote in his diary on 2 September. “The water is running out of his clothes, he’s covered in mud and shaking with cold and fright. We give him a biscuit and hand him over to our infantry.” “Dear Mum,” Lieutenant Michael Gow of the Scots Guards wrote home on 1 September, “Isn’t the news splendid? At last it seems that the German withdrawal, which in many respects was as masterly as our advance, has turned into a rout.”
The weary remnants of I SS Panzer Corps found themselves