Armageddon - Max Hastings [277]
A few, a very few Allied soldiers enjoyed the battles in Germany. “My only experience of war was being on the winning side,” said Captain John Langdon, a twenty-three-year-old officer with 3rd Royal Tanks. “It may sound a terrible thing to say, but I found it all terrifically exciting. I loved it.” Most of his comrades did not. “There was an impatience, even desperation to get this thing over,” said Major John Denison of 214th Brigade. “The liberation of Germany is a sight to see,” wrote George Turner-Cain, “hardly one stone left upon another, furniture taken out and burnt, china and bottles all broken. I do not like to see this kind of action, and do not encourage my men to do it. It is the Canadians and Yanks who are determined to create such havoc.” Every soldier supposed that excesses were the prerogative of some army other than his own.
They all hated street fighting. Supporting artillery, so effective in open country, became almost irrelevant. Among houses tactical radios, unreliable at the best of times, ceased to function at all. Tanks were vulnerable to grenades or petrol bombs dropped from above on to the turrets, always their most vulnerable points. The whole weight of endeavour fell on the infantry. “Clearing a town is an arduous process which cannot be hurried,” observed a British briefing note. Men were told to leave behind packs which caught on windows, and warned that German paratroopers customarily occupied ground floors and cellars of houses. Clearing a street, infantry squads covered each other as they ran from house to house, sometimes grenading and sub-machining every room before entering. It was a laborious business which became ever more painful as the same routine had to be repeated through towns and villages across Germany, wherever resistance was met.
WILHELM PRITZ had endured a terrible war: two years on the Eastern Front and three wounds as an infantryman, before he gained the merciful deliverance, as it seemed to him, of a posting as a heavy mortar NCO with the 766th Regiment in Saarland. They blew up their remaining tubes and escaped across the Rhine north of Heidelberg in March 1945, suffering the bitter reproaches of civilians west of the river: “So—you’re quitting and leaving us to face the enemy.” When a Kettenhunde—military policeman—tried to herd him into the ranks of a battle group on the east bank, Pritz said simply: “Try to stop me and I’ll kill you.” He and some fifteen other stragglers banded together for protection against further MPs and began walking towards Heidelberg. At first, they also led a horse pulling a 37mm gun, but they wearied of this burden, and abandoned horse and gun in a shed. At the small town of Schlecheim, they took refuge among the local inhabitants in the cellar of a house. They had made up their minds to surrender. But surrender could be intensely dangerous.
Early next morning, 1 April, they sent a small boy into the town to look around. He returned to report that American troops were already searching houses. The civilians with them insisted that the soldiers should pile their weapons in another room, which they did. They were frightened, “but nothing to what we would have been if we had been facing the Russians.” At last, an American shouted from up the stairs: “Kamerad! Kommen!” They filed out of the cellar, hands high. A GI briskly removed their watches and medals. An American officer demanded in perfect German: “So what are we going to do with your Hitler and your Himmler?” “You can do what you like as far as I am concerned,” said Pritz wearily. He