Armageddon - Max Hastings [253]
A deserter from 12th SS Panzer told his captors on 16 January: “You could walk through to Cologne if you wanted. There is nobody to stop you.” Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt wrote of returning from leave in January: “When I reported back to my commander in the Eifel, it was plain to everybody that the end of the war was approaching. I said: ‘Hauptmann, it would make more sense for us to shift everything east against the Russians, and let the Americans keep coming here in the West.’ He answered: ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’ We scarcely knew each other, but not every officer was a Nazi, and he didn’t report me.” U.S. Ninth Army captured a report on two enemy sentries condemned to death in absentia, having disappeared from their posts and presumably deserted. The men were also sentenced to dismissal from the Wehrmacht and loss of their civil rights. “Sentence will be carried out,” declared German Fifteenth Army optimistically, “as soon as the two deserters return from captivity.” Patton interviewed a captured German commander, General Graf von Rothkirch, commanding the LIII Corps. The American asked the familiar question: why did the Wehrmacht continue to fight? He received the familiar answer: “We are under the orders of the High Command, and must carry on as soldiers in spite of personal opinions and beliefs.” A German staff officer from 331st Volksgrenadier Division told his American captors with some disdain that his comrades expected the Allies merely to continue to grind down German resistance through overwhelming firepower, “rather than attempt any bold and brilliant tactical stroke.”
To many men of the Allied armies, it seemed increasingly painful to risk their lives in the final stages. Lieutenant Howard Randall joined the U.S. 76th Division as a replacement platoon commander late in January. His first experience of bloodshed was prompted by a man who shot himself in the leg one night, to avoid attacking at dawn. “My flashlight revealed his greatly swollen calf with a gaping hole in it filled with bloody hamburger and bits of shiny bone. I could see steam rising from the wound as the brightened blood rushed through the hole . . . I stood up and found that my knees were weak. I thought to myself—Lord, if a little wound like that has such an effect on me, how will I stand up when blood is the order of the day?” Yet Lieutenant Tony Moody of the 28th Division marvelled at the courage with which some men endured horrifying wounds. On a night patrol in Colmar, a recently arrived replacement, a nineteen-year-old from Michigan named Dennis Wills, trod on a mine. He never screamed, nor indeed made a sound, while they laid him in a shelter half and struggled through the snow back to the American lines. He simply said resignedly: “I guess I’ll never jitterbug again.”
In a monastery on the edge of Eindhoven, a British maxillo-facial unit, known to its staff as the “Max Factors,” addressed the wounds inflicted by shrapnel, burns, blast. “The casualties themselves were uncomplaining beyond belief,” wrote Sister Brenda McBryde.
Those who were unable to speak, like the Guardsman who was being kept alive on eggnogs poured down his nasal tube, would hand me little notes: “Steak and chips tonight, Sis? Or shall we try the duck à l’orange?’ . . . One day a sergeant of the 51st Highland Division was carried in, propped upright on a stretcher by rolled blankets. “Let him fall back and he’s a goner,” the M.O. had warned the bearers. A flying chunk of mortar had carried his lower jaw clean away, and an emergency tracheotomy had been carried out. After resuscitation, he was on the operating table for two and a half hours while the surgeons removed the earth and grit of the ditch and shreds of khaki cloth from the pulpy