Armageddon - Max Hastings [62]
Many Allied commanders lamented the infantry’s practice of halting to call down artillery fire when they encountered even two or three Germans, rather than themselves engaging the enemy at close quarters. Infantry dependence on artillery created the chronic shortages of ammunition which so retarded the campaign timetable, and imposed a monumental burden on the supply system. “Reliance on fire superiority to win our battles alone is extremely fallacious,” wrote U.S. Major-General John Dahlquist in an irritable circular to all units of his 36th Division. “We cannot sit off at a distance, shell the enemy and wait for him to quit . . . Indiscriminate firing of heavy weapons and artillery at long distances at unremunerative targets must stop.” Exactly the same failures were identified in the British Army. Von Rundstedt asserted in his post-war interrogation that he considered the British even more cautious in action than the Americans. “That [British] infantry tactics ultimately advanced little from the standards of 1916 is disgraceful,” observes one magisterial study. Its author, Dr. Timothy Harrison Place, acknowledges the argument, made by defenders of both Montgomery and the British Army, that “artillery-dominated tactics . . . were the only practicable ones given the fragility of morale and dwindling reserves of manpower.” Yet Harrison Place rejects this view, and concludes that failure to master infantry small-unit tactics appropriate to the conditions of 1944–45, and to break free from the tyranny of dependence upon artillery bombardment as a substitute for energetic ground attack, accounted more than anything else for the indifferent performance of the British Army in north-west Europe.
The director of military training at 15th Army Group in Italy wrote a paper about British shortcomings in 1943 which remained just as valid in 1944–45: “Our tactical methods are thorough and methodical but slow and cumbersome. In consequence our troops fight well in defence and our set-piece attacks are usually successful, but it is not unfair to say that through lack of enterprise in exploitation, we seldom reap the full benefit of them. We are too flank-conscious, we over-insure administratively, we are by nature too apprehensive of failure and our training makes us more so.”
Hitler’s and Stalin’s armies were imbued with an insouciance, indeed brutality, about casualties. It might be argued that 1944–45 Wehrmacht and Red Army battlefield behaviour characterized as “fanatical” or “suicidal” by the Western allies was no more than had been routinely demanded of British and French infantry in the First World War: the dictators’ soldiers were required to obey orders that were overwhelmingly likely to result in their deaths. Yet here was the point: British and American generals of the Second World War believed that their soldiers neither would nor should allow themselves to be sacrificed in the same fashion as their fathers had been on the Somme, at Passchendaele and in the Argonne. Allied commanders in north-west Europe sought to avoid making demands upon their men which they believed would be found unacceptable.
“The American soldier,” Brigadier-General Pearson Menoher, Chief of Staff of the U.S. XV