Armageddon - Max Hastings [375]
Even after the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, many thoughtful British and Americans restrained their strictures upon Soviet wartime behaviour because they recognized that Russian sacrifices had made it possible to defeat Hitler at relatively small cost in American and British lives. To this day, some people are surprised to be reminded that the U.S. and British armed forces each suffered fewer than 300,000 fatal casualties as a direct result of enemy action, about the same as the forces of Yugoslavia, and approximately half America’s 600,000 battle deaths in its Civil War. For every British and American citizen who died, more than thirty of Stalin’s people—many of them from his subject republics—perished.
No American or British commander in north-west Europe revealed the highest gifts of generalship, because a combination of cautious grand strategy and the limitations of Allied troops denied the few plausible candidates for greatness scope to demonstrate it. Had Patton, for instance, been leading Waffen SS formations, he possessed the energy and grasp of war to have performed spectacular feats. As it was, constrained by the nature of American citizen soldiers, he showed flashes of inspiration, but his army experienced as much hard plodding as any on the Western Front. Montgomery was a meticulous planner of operations, Market Garden excepted, but his soldiers rarely displayed the tactical energy to deliver grand coups. They were deeply grateful that their commander did not demand from them the sacrifices required by Soviet battlefield triumphs. This helps to explain the lasting affection in which Monty is held by those whom he led. Conversely, had von Manstein or Zhukov commanded troops burdened by the decencies of the democracies, these formidable commanders might have emerged from the war as apparently pedestrian fellows. Over the course of history, many ruthless generals have been able to forge armies after their own image, in the manner of Genghiz Khan. But by the mid-twentieth century civilized societies imposed upon their military leaders parameters of humanity and respect for life. Thus it was that the least civilized combatants of the Second World War performed the most notable military feats achieved by flesh and blood. It was left to the Western allies to amaze the world by the deeds that could be accomplished through the brilliant application of technology and industrial might.
I remarked in Overlord that no military plan is in isolation good or bad. It must be judged according to the capabilities of those available to carry it out. Eisenhower’s armies possessed insufficient mass and combat power to defeat Germany in the autumn of 1944 until months more bombing, shelling and above all Soviet assault had ground down Hitler’s forces to the point of collapse. If Allied soldiers had possessed the energy, commitment and will for sacrifice of either the German or Russian armies, they might have achieved a decisive breakthrough. But American and British soldiers were not panzergrenadiers. Socially and morally, we should be profoundly grateful that it was so. If this view is accepted, then it becomes no more relevant to suggest that the Allies could have won the war in 1944 than to debate how history might have turned out if the ancient Britons had learned to fight like Roman legionaries. To have achieved a swift victory, Eisenhower’s soldiers would have needed to be different people. If American and British soldiers of 1944–45 had matched the military prowess and become imbued with the warrior ethos of Hitler’s armies, it is unlikely that we should today hold the veterans of the Second World War in the just regard that we do. They