Armageddon - Max Hastings [319]
Private Denis Christian of 6 Commando was bemused to be reprimanded by the owner of the house in which he was billeted for failing to clean the bath. His unit’s German interpreter subjected the British to a lecture about “how Germany had only lost the war because it lacked oil.” A teenage girl whom 13 Para met in Graven not only spoke good English, but assured them severely that the Wehrmacht would soon retake the area. The Führer would then punish the Allies for daring to invade the fatherland. The English soldiers respected the girl’s courage, but were horrified by the depth of Nazi indoctrination which the encounter revealed. The battalion’s colonel, Peter Luard, announced flatly that the battalion would take no SS prisoners. When two Waffen SS indeed fell into their hands, an officer simply took them behind a tank and shot them. “With hindsight, it seemed very shocking,” said Lieutenant Peter Downward. “Yet the SS were so truculent.”
“A woman of a house in which I was billeted entered the room, looked at the wreckage and burst into tears with the words ‘Es ist alles kaputt und es war so schön,’ ” Captain David Chudleigh reported to his division headquarters early in April, in disgust rather than sympathy.
Even after I had carefully explained to her what the war was all about, and that what she was suffering was little in comparison with what she and her kind had inflicted on the world for more than five years, the only reaction was a flood of tears. I do not believe her horizons were any broader for my efforts. A few minutes later this woman pointed out the body of a German soldier lying in the garden, and asked me to take it away and bury it, but not in her garden. Considering that she was a woman (of a sort), her indifference to the fate of one of her countrymen was astonishing. A long-term educational programme is obviously needed here.
Sergeant Robert Brookshire of the 609th Tank Destroyer Battalion was riding in a jeep flagged down by a tearful German woman waving a handkerchief. She was a teacher and told the soldiers desperately: “Some of my pupils, young boys, are up this hill in a cabin, armed with rifles, and have vowed that they will fire at Americans until they are killed. Will you please not shoot them, but come with me and try to convince them to surrender?” Between them, the German teacher and the American NCO induced the sheepish fourteen-year-olds to file out of the building without their weapons. Brookshire was always a reluctant killer. About the same time, he suddenly found himself confronted by six Germans. He froze, thinking his end had come. Then the Germans laid down their weapons. “Why didn’t you kill them?” asked a buddy. Brookshire said: “Because I somehow knew that if I did, I’d never see my young daughter again.”
As the U.S. 743rd Tank Battalion was mopping up near Lemgo, it came upon a German general outside a large house, at the head of 500 men, “lined up at attention, guns piled in one part of the courtyard, equipment piled neatly in another.” The American unit suffered its last fatal casualty of the war in the battle for Magdeburg on 17 April. A faust hit a Sherman turret, killing the gunner and wounding the commander and loader. It was fired by a German woman. Aschaffenburg earned a reputation as one of very few towns—Hameln was another—where local civilians fought energetically against Third Army. “There was some of the hardest fighting of the war in that town,” recorded an American officer. “Hitler had said that every