Armageddon - Max Hastings [317]
“The Germans were very hungry. The girls would get at my riflemen for a tin of sardines,” observed Major Bill Deedes. An officer of 52nd (Lowland) Division was shocked to come upon two German women “being shagged in relays by American soldiers.” A post-war U.S. Army report on military discipline concluded that in north-west Europe: “Rape became a large problem . . . A considerable percentage of offences is directly attributable to faulty unit leadership . . . [Men’s orientation for war] included propaganda of hatred towards the Germans. This made it easy for the soldier to justify looting, assault, burglary, robbery and even rape. The theory was that the fighting soldier must hate the enemy . . . Its application complicated the problem of military justice.” It seems an awkward reflection on the administration of justice in 1944–45 that more than 40 per cent of all death sentences passed in the ETO were imposed upon African-American soldiers, though these constituted a tiny proportion of U.S. Army strength.
Sergeant Colin McInnes gazed in awe at the shambles to which occupying troops had reduced a German house. “We were struck at once by the tremendous physical energy of the looters,” he wrote.
Furniture was upended and flung about in heaps in a way that made movement from room to room as difficult as rock-climbing. Anything of glass was smashed, walls had their paper torn from them or were splashed with ink, wood was gouged out of cupboards and tables, upholstery had been sliced open on the seats and arms of chairs and sofas, and curtains were ripped to tatters. It seemed that all this expressed a hatred of organized life, and a yearning for primitive chaos on as large a scale as possible.
A British war correspondent was bemused one morning to hear a ferocious din emerging from a house. He entered, and beheld a cluster of men manically smashing a grand piano with axes.
In “Red” Thompson’s platoon of the U.S. 346th Infantry, the last fatality of the war was caused by a mortar bomb which fell on the head of their most dedicated looter, a man who emptied the drawers of every house he entered. Some men refused to loot at all, not on moral grounds, but constrained by fear of German booby traps. A few men plundered systematically, in planned pursuit of objects of value. Fortunes were made in Germany in 1945, by men sufficiently cool and acquisitive to choose their plunder judiciously, and with the rank or transport facilities to carry it away. Some British Special Air Service groups, profiting from the latitude they were granted about their own movements, devoted the last days of the war to systematic safe-blowing. Most soldiers, however, merely grabbed any artefact to hand, in the manner of warriors since time immemorial. They groped for tangible compensation for having risked their lives, and cherished the licence granted by dispensation from the customary laws of property. The Anglo-Americans were a great deal less brutal than the Russians, but they seized enemy property with almost equal abandon.
Lieutenant Tom Flanagan of the British 4th KOSB was appalled to see one of his men snatch a blanket from an old woman, observing: “You’ll not be wanting that, missus.” The man then grabbed an eiderdown and a watch. The young platoon commander sought to intervene, but his sergeant said firmly: “You’ll be wanted at company headquarters, sir. I’ll deal with this.” Flanagan wrote: “I left . . . trying hard not to believe what I had just witnessed. Those men were behaving as I had always imagined German soldiers to behave, not like the image I held of ‘Tommy Atkins’ who was kind, tolerant, easily put upon, considerate to old folk and especially good with children. This conflict of fact and