Armageddon - Max Hastings [316]
A German woman handed Corporal Werner Kleeman the dogtags of a GI she sought to report for raping her. Kleeman threw them away: “I didn’t want to get the boy into trouble.”
As men of the British 7th Somersets ran into a farmyard in the face of desultory German fire, weapons cocked and grenades in hand, a company sergeant-major kicked open a door and found himself confronted by some forty small German children, together with two teachers. They were all standing at attention, hands held high, staring fixedly ahead without even a tear on their frozen faces. After the first shock, the British soldiers and the German children gazed silently at each other for a few seconds, then the conquerors moved on. Lieutenant-Colonel Ferdinand Chesarek of the 28th Field Artillery drove up to an airfield where Germans were running briskly from plane to plane, throwing thermite bombs into the cockpits. “Christ almighty, what confusion—all those wagons, guns, troops, trucks and everything else. All these armed Germans mixed up with us. Everything was so crazy.” One night a British sentry woke Captain Andrew Wilson of the Buffs to report the capture of a prisoner who had stumbled into their tank leaguer. A torch beam revealed a German sergeant-major, who protested vehemently that he possessed a leave pass to proceed home and could not legitimately be detained.
A contemporary British report identified three causes for sluggish forward movement: enemy resistance; difficulty of supply and repair; and “the desire of soldiers to enjoy ‘the fruits of victory.’ ” Bing, one of 13 Para’s Alsatian dogs which had jumped at the Rhine in special harnesses, disappeared one morning and was found hopelessly drunk in a German wine cellar. Loot had become the chief preoccupation of some men. “Did he have a Luger? Did he have a Luger?” a captain in Private Charles Felix’s battalion demanded, almost jumping up and down with excitement, when he heard that his men had captured a German officer.
Lieutenant Howard Randall’s company commander invited him to ride into the neighbouring town, which they found deathly quiet, the house windows draped in white flags. Outside the timbered town hall, they left one man to guard the jeep while the other four Americans wandered inside, pistols drawn, and made their way to the mayor’s office. They met two white-haired men and an elderly woman, who pointed nervously to an immense heap of cameras, binoculars and weapons, obviously collected from the local population. The Americans kept pistols pointed at the Germans, who maintained an icy composure, while with their spare hands they delved into the hoard. “The captain suddenly spotted a handsome Leica camera and made a dive for it . . . Then I saw a nice blue-black pistol . . . I swooped down and grabbed it, and then some beautiful ceremonial knives. I grabbed them all and stuffed them hurriedly into my jacket pockets. The situation had become ludicrous. The three unruffled Germans never said a word, while the four of us were scrambling all over the floor.” After the Americans left, it was a week before the town was formally occupied. When they returned, they found that SS men had hanged the mayor for displaying white flags.
A frightened German woman approached the British lines with a pretty girl and said to an officer: “Please do not let your men rape my daughter.” Dr. David Tibbs drew himself up in the approved stance of an affronted English gentleman and said stiffly: “Madam, these are British soldiers.” Yet while nothing remotely resembling the Russian orgy took place on the Western Front, many Allied soldiers seized the opportunities granted to them for easy sexual intercourse, whether through rape or some marginally less brutal arrangement. During street fighting in Bremen, a young officer of the KOSB lost two men of his