Armageddon - Max Hastings [257]
In theory, only 30,000 Germans supported by seventy tanks were left to face the U.S. Ninth Army when it launched Grenade on 19 February. This began with a crossing of the Roer on a fifteen-mile front. There was a supporting artillery piece for every thirty-two yards. A vast smokescreen was laid over the crossings, rising 2,000 feet into the air. Yet as the Americans began to move, they found themselves floundering in the waterlogged morass left behind by the floods. When they reached the river proper, boats were swept relentlessly downstream by a five-knot current. Private David Williams of the 104th Combat Engineers was struggling with an assault boat when there was a blast close by and his leg went numb. Shrapnel had gashed open his upper thigh. His buddy Ray, beside him, cried out, “Dave, Dave, Dave—oh dear, oh dear,” slung him over his shoulder and carried him to the rear.
The advancing Allies were becoming bolder about using darkness. The U.S. 30th Division staged a highly successful night attack on Altdorf, which they took almost without loss. However, when they tried another such operation on 26 February, two tanks at once tipped into unseen craters, in what turned out to be a minefield. German fire then brewed up two Shermans, and the flames brilliantly illuminated the attackers. American gunners spotted armoured movement on their left flank and knocked out four tanks. These were British mine-clearing flails, attached for the assault, which had strayed off-course in the darkness. A single day’s fighting on 27 February, attacking the town of Königshafen, cost one U.S. regiment nine tanks.
Many officers and men felt desperately tired. “It has been quite bloody awful for days,” Lieutenant-Colonel George Turner-Cain wrote in his diary on 2 March, “we have fought day and night . . . I am extremely tired and very nervy.” He added a few days later: “It is quite time I left command, as I am no longer fit to conduct stiff operations.” Even in retreat, the Germans remained unimpressed by Allied tactics: “Infantry do not press forward energetically,” observed an Army Group B report. “They merely follow the armoured forces and occupy ground. There are long pauses after the objective of a given attack has been taken. They are very sensitive about exposing their flanks.”
When the 92nd Reconnaissance Squadron of 12th Armored Division entered the little town of Linderburgerhof near Trier, in seconds the German defenders brewed up three light tanks leading the column. Private Frank Rumph dashed into the house nearest his wrecked vehicle. A Sherman roared forward, only to be knocked out at once. Its commander, the only survivor, crouched behind its immobilized hull. Rumph yelled at the man to join him. The two Americans retired into the cellar and munched some dried carrots they found there, until at evening more American light tanks arrived to rescue the survivors of the armoured party. Next day infantry cleared the place street by street, as so often proved necessary.
The British found the experience of fighting their way through the Reichs-wald forest especially painful. “The Reichswald was the nastiest battle we had fought since Normandy,” said Lieutenant Edwin Bramall. The Germans had constructed five successive lines of defence, manned chiefly by paratroopers. Flooded ground on both flanks forced the British and Canadians to advance on a narrow front. The thick woodland was almost impenetrable to tanks. Foliage jammed turret traverses. The Shermans were anyway unable to use their armament effectively—it was too dangerous to fire high-explosive shells lest they hit trees above their own infantry. The tanks were also highly vulnerable to faust ambushes in the dense cover. Lieutenant Kingsley Field, commanding a Churchill troop of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, was enraged when a British infantryman mistook his tank for a German and fired a PIAT bomb at it. Field sprang down