Armageddon - Max Hastings [173]
The British have always considered Americans boastful. Yet Churchill’s people, impelled by regret at their own shrinking power, during the Second World War often spoke and behaved less graciously than their transatlantic allies. Churchill’s private secretary wrote: “The more I contemplate the present trend of opinion and of events, the more sadly I reflect how much easier it will be to forgive our present enemies in their future misery, starvation and weakness than to reconcile ourselves to the past claims and future demands of our two great Allies. The Americans have become very unpopular in England.” Dwight Eisenhower was a steelier and less genial figure than his public persona allowed. Yet the Abilene boy who grew up in classically humble rural American circumstances, the poker-player who retained a lifelong enthusiasm for dime Western novels, always behaved in public as one of nature’s gentlemen. Montgomery, the bishop’s son educated at St. Paul’s and Sandhurst, never did. He was a cleverer man and a far more professional soldier than his Supreme Commander, but his crassness towards his peers was a fatal impediment to greatness.
No Allied general on the Western Front matched the verve displayed by Zhukov and his fellow marshals in the east. The Germans were persistently surprised by the sluggishness of the Western allies in attack, especially when the tide of battle was running as strongly their way as it was after the Ardennes offensive collapsed. Yet it can be argued that Allied generals achieved as much, or as little, as the performance of their soldiers would allow. It was a source of constant frustration to aggressive American commanders such as Ridgway and Gavin that on the battlefield U.S. troops failed to match their high ambitions. After the failure of an attack on 13 January, Ridgway sharply quizzed Leland Hobbs, commanding 30th Division, about “the poor showing of the 119th Infantry.” Hobbs said apologetically that one of its battalion commanders had been summarily relieved. Ridgway declared that there had obviously been a failure of leadership all the way through the regiment. Demanding to be given its casualty figures, he exploded on hearing that just fifty-eight men had been lost to all causes. “He said that confirmed his view that enemy resistance had been insignificant.”
Gavin raged at the limitations of other formations beside whom his paratroopers had to fight. “We are training our men to drive tanks and tank destroyers, since our armoured supporting people frequently abandon their vehicles when threatened in an attack,” he wrote in his diary on 18 January.
If our infantry would fight, this war would be over by now. On our present front, there are two very weak German regiments holding the XVIII Corps of four divisions. We all know it and admit it, and yet nothing is done about it. American infantry just simply will not fight. No one wants to get killed . . . Our artillery is wonderful and our air corps not bad. But the regular infantry—terrible. Everybody wants to live to a ripe old age. The sight of a few Germans drives them to their holes. Instead of being imbued with an overwhelming desire to get close to the German and get him by the throat, they want to avoid him if the artillery has not already