Armageddon - Max Hastings [289]
Only fifteen men of Baum’s liberating column returned safely to the Allied lines, along with twenty-five Hammelburg prisoners who made their own way across country. The remainder were killed or captured. Lieutenant Robert Harrison of the 101st Airborne, one of the Hammelburg PoWs who had been captured in the Bulge, set out to walk to the American lines. Back before D-Day, Harrison had endeared himself to his men when their pay did not come through. He advanced them $35 apiece out of his own pocket to tide them over. Many were killed before they could repay him. Now, Harrison covered fifty-eight miles before reaching a river, where Germans guarded the bridge. He tried to swim across and was shot in the water. It was just a month before the end of the war.
It is extraordinary that Patton was never subjected to disciplinary action for this act of egomania unmitigated by any possible military advantage. “I feel terrible,” the general wrote to his wife on 6 April, “I tried hard to save him [John Waters] and I may be the cause of his death.” When he heard that his son-in-law had been badly wounded as a result of his initiative, he burst into tears. He attempted to impose blanket censorship on the raid, but inevitably the story leaked to the press. Marshall, in Washington, was outraged. Eisenhower excused Patton: “[He] is a problem child, but he is a great fighting leader in pursuit and exploitation.” True enough, yet Patton’s Hammelburg action seems far less excusable than the “slapping incidents” in Sicily, for which he had been dismissed from his command. The episode must be cited in any assessment of Patton’s claims to greatness. It is impossible to imagine any other senior participant in the Allied campaign committing such a selfish, murderous folly or being pardoned for the loss of life which it incurred. At a moment when all Europe was on its knees, when Germany was a maelstrom of suffering humanity, an Allied army commander committed an act which argued that he cared only for his own.
THE DAMNED
WESTERN PRISONERS often caught sight of Russian PoWs in neighbouring compounds. German guards distributed Red Cross parcels and sometimes a thin gruel of humanity among the British and Americans, while presiding over unspeakable excesses to Russians a few hundred yards away. The Germans acknowledged the Western allies as fellow inhabitants of the same planet. They denied this privilege to Stalin’s people. An American PoW at Thjorn was appalled to watch through the wire as Russian amputees shuffled through thick snow with the stumps of their legs bound with sacking. Thousands died there, as in every Russian camp conducted by the Nazis. They were buried in a common grave beyond the gates. “Every day a sort of tumbril rattled past outside the entrance with its load of naked bodies which were tipped unceremoniously into a hole.” A Russian described how, when a man died during the night, they tried to prop him up in his bed until after Appel, so that the living might draw his rations. In Stalag XIB, Corporal Denis Thomas watched a German guard stroll over to a Russian boiling potatoes in the neighbouring compound and casually kick his mess-tin into the dirt.
Every American and British prisoner knew that he could consider himself fortunate compared with the Russians. In the course of the war over 5.7 million Red Army soldiers were captured by the Germans, of whom 3.3 million—58 per cent—died. Around 600,000 were summarily killed on or near the battlefield. The balance died in the camps of Germany and Poland. The saga