Armageddon - Max Hastings [259]
Allied armour found itself increasingly impeded by rubble in towns devastated by heavy bombing. The city of Cleve, for instance, became a much more difficult obstacle after the Allied air forces had visited it. Mistakenly, 1,384 tons of high explosive had been dropped instead of the incendiaries requested by the army. “Bomb craters and fallen trees were everywhere,” recorded a British officer, “bomb craters packed so tightly together that the debris from one was piled against the rim of the next in a pathetic heap of rubble, roofs and radiators. There was not an undamaged house anywhere, piles of smashed furniture, clothing, children’s books and toys, old photographs and bottled fruit were spilled in hopeless confusion into gardens from sagging, crazy skeletons of homes.” Ruins provided better defensive positions for surviving Germans than undamaged buildings. One platoon of the 7th Somersets found a Panther tank crunching relentlessly towards its positions. A PIAT operator, Private Hipple, crawled to the edge of a bomb crater and was preparing to fire at the great brute from a range of twenty-five yards when the Panther’s gun went off. The blast, at point-blank range, blew the hapless soldier into the bottom of the crater. Astonishingly, he recovered and crept upwards again with his PIAT. He fired several bombs which seemed to strike the Panther, without disabling it. The German occupants, however, were sufficiently discomfited to beat a retreat.
Overall statistics showed that the Allies were suffering only modest casualties. But, for those unlucky enough to serve at the tip of the spear, there were some terrible days. On 26 February, the Canadian Cameron Highlanders were attacking in the Rhineland between Calcar and Udem. The attack began in mud and darkness, and the Camerons in their vehicles found themselves under heavy fire. One of their company commanders, Major David Rodgers, jumped down from his Kangaroo (a turretless Sherman used as an infantry carrier) and ran into the nearest house defended by German paratroopers, which he cleared alone before his men reached him. He did the same with a second house, killing four of the enemy and capturing a dozen. He returned to his battalion headquarters to report, and found the CO dead, his intelligence officer severely wounded and the position being sprayed by enemy automatic weapons. Rodgers, accompanied only by his batman, ran headlong across open ground to a house from which the Germans were firing, kicked open the door and pressed the trigger of his Sten gun. It clicked dead. The magazine was empty. He grabbed his pistol and started firing, wounding two Germans and causing the other occupants to surrender. He went on to clear the rest of the house room by room, killing or wounding nine Germans and capturing twelve. He then returned to assume temporary command of his battalion, and toured each of its company positions on foot to ensure its security before he handed over to the unit second-in-command. For his morning’s work Rodgers was recommended for a Victoria Cross, though he received only an immediate DSO. Once again, it was shown how the behaviour of a single determined man could influence the outcome of a battle, if he was fortunate enough to survive to complete the business. “Bomber” Harris once memorably remarked that “any action deserving of the VC is, by its nature, unfit to be repeated as an operation of war.”
The 156th Brigade of the British 52nd (Lowland) Division suffered a less happy outcome of