Armageddon - Max Hastings [64]
It would be absurd to pretend that all German units displayed Clausewitzian zeal and imagination, especially in the last year of the war. But infiltration was the most effective and least costly means of gaining ground on terrain where tanks and men walking or running upright presented easy targets. “I thought our tactics were very unimaginative,” said Lieutenant Edwin Bramall. “I would have liked to see more skirmishing and more fire and movement.” Captain David Fraser said: “The British Army was enormously road-bound, and it affected operations.” An American unit commander summarized the weaknesses of U.S. infantry training as follows: failure to follow creeping artillery barrages closely enough; carelessness when exposed to fire—“men walk when they should creep or crawl”; lack of defensive training in armoured units; unreadiness to undertake night operations; failure to take advantage of fog and darkness to cross open ground. As the armies advanced into Germany, there were also many complaints from commanders about their men’s lack of training for street fighting, a highly specialized art.
“The Americans seemed to us very green,” said Captain Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, a veteran gunner officer with 9th Panzer Division.
They operated by the book. If you responded by doing something not in the book, they panicked. It usually took them three days after an attack to prepare for the next one. We became accustomed to leave only an outpost screen in front for them to bombard, with the main defences positioned further back, so that their initial attack hit thin air. It took the Allies a ridiculously long time to get into Germany. If they had used our blitzkrieg tactics, they could have been in Berlin in weeks.
“With the Allies it was always the same,” said Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder, a twenty-four-year-old regular officer who was adjutant of the 18th Volksgrenadiers.
They attacked in daylight, starting with artillery, then the tanks. If we had just one or two machine-guns still operational, we could make them stop and wait until next day. There was a basic difference between the Allied approach and our own. The Allies would never move without reconnaissance and preparation. We often expected to have to do it on the run, off the cuff. The last time we attacked in Russia, we formed up on the start line straight off the train.
Yet Sergeant Helmut Günther of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers observed sensibly: “It wasn’t that the Allies were cowardly—they just didn’t need to take chances. Slow? They were careful.”
The most vital and difficult tactical relationship was that between tanks and infantry. Advancing armour had to be protected by accompanying footsoldiers. It was the job of a tank to use its gun to deal with its enemy counterparts, preferably at a range of several hundred yards. But when, as constantly happened, armoured vehicles found themselves facing enemy infantry equipped with the deadly Panzerfaust, or meeting well-concealed anti-tank guns, then a tank crew could see little through the narrow vision slits of their steel box. They could not readily use their guns upon short-range targets. Yet “tank terror” was a phenomenon familiar to the Allied