Armageddon - Max Hastings [29]
Yet the Allies’ exhilaration about the inroads they had made upon their enemy’s strength in Normandy might have been moderated had they paused to consider that Hitler still disposed of more than ten million uniformed men. The Wehrmacht’s strength had peaked at 6.5 million in 1943, and now stood at 3.4 million, but that of the Waffen SS was still increasing, towards a summit of 830,000 at the beginning of 1945. Millions of foreigners from Hitler’s empire had been armed and garbed in German uniform, and some fought with the desperation of the damned. It was true that many of the Germans being mobilized were untrained, poorly armed and not yet embodied in coherent formations. A million men wasted rations in the uniform of Göring’s Luftwaffe, which in the air was almost moribund. A large proportion of German recruits would have been rejected for service in the American or British armies on grounds of age or physical infirmity. The Russians discovered that among their vast summer haul of captives was a Wehrmacht soldier who had spent two years in a British prison camp before being repatriated as unfit for military service. The Volkssturm, Germany’s Home Guard, was a minimal asset. Yet granted the German genius for transforming the most unpromising human material into serviceable fighting units, the sheer mass of Germany’s surviving men at arms demanded more respect than it received from Allied commanders in early September 1944. Even in the sixth year of the Second World War, some senior commanders experienced difficulty in grasping the titanic scale of the conflict, and the resources available to a ruthless and boundlessly ingenious enemy.
The Allies possessed overwhelming material advantages, above all in the might of the Red Army. But fighting soldiers were quicker to perceive the gravity of the task they still faced than those at rear headquarters. The optimism of Allied commanders was fed by a daily diet of intercepted signals between Germany’s generals, proclaiming their desperation. At the sharp end, however, renewed fighting along the Allied front cooled optimism. On 14 September, Colonel Turner-Cain wrote in his diary: “The national press is at last more sober in its estimate of when the war would end. They now talk of three months instead of next week. Their idiotic optimism had a peculiar effect on men’s morale, and one could feel them saying to themselves: ‘Why should I put myself at risk of being killed or wounded if the war is to end next week?’ Hence they were a bit sticky about doing anything aggressive.” The British forces’ shortage of manpower, which was to dog their operations from Normandy to the Elbe, was already exercising its baleful influence. Most companies in Turner-Cain’s battalion were reduced to two officers, and some to two platoons. Replacements proved to be a ragbag of men unwillingly transferred from the Service Corps, military police and disbanded units.
Eisenhower sustained hope in Montgomery’s breast about a British charge into Germany by writing to him: “My own choice of routes for making the all-out offensive . . . is from the Ruhr to Berlin.” Perhaps, after all, the Supreme Commander would grant 21st Army Group’s commander his triumphal march on Hitler’s capital. It would be time enough to review grand strategy, however, when it was seen whether Eisenhower’s “choice” was attainable by way of a British bridge across the Rhine. While the commanders of America’s armies fumed and fretted about the gasoline famine which Montgomery’s grand play had forced upon them, in the third week of September 1944 Western Allied leaders’ eyes focused upon a single road to the prim, neat Dutch town of Arnhem.
CHAPTER TWO
The Bridges to Arnhem
THE DROP
WINSTON CHURCHILL sent a note to the British Chiefs of Staff in August 1943, cautioning