Armageddon - Max Hastings [355]
He joined several men sheltering behind a slow-moving Tiger. There was a heavy explosion. Stunned, Fromm reached for his Schmeisser and found it plastered with the intestines of his neighbour. He threw away the gun in revulsion. They laid a groaning teenager on the hull of a tank and plunged on into the woods. The Tiger tracks rolled impassively over men lying wounded in its path. Fromm was surprised how unaffected he was by their plight. He felt drained of all sentiment save the urge to survive. He abandoned the sluggish tank to follow an officer whom he saw studying a map by torchlight, because such a man seemed likely to know where he was going. There were soldiers milling everywhere. Suddenly, a shadow loomed ahead in the darkness. A dozen guns were raised. The faceless figure said: “If you start shooting at me, you’re all dead, but if you stick to this path, you’ll get through.”
Early in the morning, however, they found themselves under fire again. Fromm had picked up another weapon, but buried himself as deep as he could behind a log pile. “Don’t be so feeble,” said an SS man scornfully. “Get up where you’ve got a field of fire.” The boy’s gun was jammed with sand. He hurled it aside. At last they moved on, sleep-walking. As night came again, they reached a village. “We’ll get through if we run,” said an SS man who proved to have a mutual friend with Fromm in Heidelberg. There was a nightmare moment when one German ran into a huge Russian emerging from a cottage. Both men exclaimed in shock and fled in opposite directions. Next morning, as Fromm rested exhausted by the roadside, he saw a VW Schwimmwagen race by, bearing a Luftwaffe general adorned with decorations. The boy felt fiercely angry: here was one of the leaders who had brought them all to this, riding in a car while soldiers walked. It was too much. He clambered to his feet and staggered on, almost comatose.
Many Allied soldiers found it confusing to spend the last days of the war fighting children. A British Bren-gunner firing into a house defended by Hitler Jugend trained his weapon on a side door from which it was plain that, sooner or later, the cornered defenders would try to escape. A few minutes later, a figure dashed out. After a burst of Bren fire, the German fell writhing and screaming in the midst of the street. As the British soldier pressed the trigger again, he glimpsed the face of a young boy, who slumped in death. “His features have been printed on my mind ever since,” said the infantryman. “I have always asked myself: if I hadn’t fired the second burst, might that boy have lived to grow into a decent man?”
“The fourteen-year-olds were very dangerous, because they possessed no sense of adult behaviour,” said Major Bill Deedes. “They might produce a grenade they had hidden, and throw it after being taken prisoner.” Private Walter Brown and his platoon of the U.S. 90th Division were sickened to find that they had shot ten of a group of fifteen German boys firing on them from a mountainside near the Czech border: “we felt like butchers, and yet those bullets would have killed us as dead as those of any SS soldier.” A young captive tossed a “potato masher” grenade at the colonel of the Scots Greys on 2 May. The British officer shot him with his pistol. “The rules of war got very fractured in the last phase—we lost three officers to these child soldiers,” said Deedes. “Until then, the courtesies had still obtained. But we ceased to extend them to the Hitler Jugend. I became almost more nervous and jumpy than I had been in Normandy. Here one was facing the odd German who would just stay and