Armageddon - Max Hastings [66]
When an Allied advance was going well, a tank troop or company led the way until it met resistance or—most frequently—until its leading vehicles were knocked out. Many units rotated the dubious honour of heading a column, because in the course of a given day whoever fulfilled this role could expect to lose his tank if he was lucky, and his life if he was not. It was impossible to avoid heavy tank losses in an advance, whichever army was doing the attacking. But it was a source of constant dismay and frustration to Allied commanders that, after a couple of Shermans had been brewed up by a small German force on the edge of a wood or at the entrance to a village, it frequently required hours to organize and carry out the necessary infantry attack to clear the way for tanks to renew the advance. Armour–infantry co-operation worked best when footsoldiers worked with the same tank battalion for weeks at a stretch, officers getting to know each other. But this was often impossible. Every armoured commander complained that he lacked sufficient infantry support, a reflection of the chronic Allied shortage of riflemen. The British 21st Army Group was armour-heavy, because armoured formations required less manpower. Montgomery’s forces suffered from their imbalance of infantry and tanks throughout the campaign.
The faust, vastly superior German counterpart of the American bazooka anti-tank rocket and British spring-loaded bomb-throwing PIAT, was the decisive weapon in enabling Hitler’s armies to continue the war until May 1945, given the weakness of their artillery and almost complete absence of air support. German units were prodigally supplied with fausts. Even a poorly trained teenager with the courage to ambush a tank at a range of thirty to sixty yards could expect to cripple it with a faust in his hands, and many did so. The Germans also exploited the use of mortars, “poor man’s artillery.” Experienced German units equipped themselves with machine-guns—the excellent MG42, with an alarmingly higher rate of fire than its allied counterparts—on a scale far in excess of their paper entitlement. They knew that on the battlefield few men fired their rifles, and even fewer hit anything when they did so. MG42s gave a small number of troops the ability to generate formidably heavy fire, and enabled German units to “punch above their weight” to the end. Their ingenuity was remarkable. It was not uncommon for a German machine-gunner covering an important line—a road or rail track—at night deliberately to fire tracer well above head-height. This encouraged Allied soldiers who saw the streaks above them to suppose that it was safe to walk upright. Meanwhile, a second gunner without tracer would fire much closer to the ground, his bursts invisible until they caused men to fall.
As S-3 of the 357th Infantry, Captain William DuPuy analysed German tactical skills:
In defence, they took pieces of terrain and knitted them together into positions from which they were able to fire in all directions . . . they used cover and concealment, and they used imagination . . . A handful of Germans could hold up a regiment by siting their weapons properly. If they had two assault guns and 25 men, they put one assault gun up one side of the road, perhaps on a reverse slope firing through a saddle, and another one behind a stone house, firing across the road. They protected these with some infantry and had a couple of guys with Panzerfausts up on the road itself, or just off the road in pits or behind a house. An imaginative Allied commander could send a company round them in a wide encircling movement. But sometimes a unit would stay there and fight