Armageddon - Max Hastings [67]
In attack, they were masters of suppression using machine-pistols. They’d spray our front, drive our soldiers to the ground, and then they’d come in on us. The more they shot, the less our people shot, and the more dangerous it got, until finally, when our people had stopped shooting, we knew the Germans were either going to overrun us, or capture some of our people, or kill our people by getting right on top of us.
DuPuy described his horror on finding that a company commander in his unit had positioned his men on a forward slope in full view of the enemy: “It was murder. Finally, after they killed and wounded maybe 20 men . . . the rest just got up and bolted out of there and went over the reverse slope, which is where they should have been in the first place.”
Every German soldier was taught the doctrine of so-called “active defence.” This required a focus not upon holding forward positions to the last man, but rather upon launching fierce counter-attacks while attackers were still milling in disarray upon captured positions. Especially towards the end of the war, on both Eastern and Western Fronts the Germans would man their forward positions thinly, deploying their main forces further back, hopefully beyond the reach of artillery bombardment. When Allied attackers had made their initial advance, occupied German forward positions and given way to physical and mental weariness after a great surge of effort, the Germans counter-attacked, repeatedly evicting Allied troops from positions they had just won. Allied commanders sought to drum into every unit the importance of digging in quickly on an objective. But this was easier said than done. German will and energy for such aggressive tactics remained astonishing to the end, even if there was a decline in the skill of the soldiers available to carry them out. It was a precept of the entire war, that the German Army always detected and punished an enemy’s mistakes.
The qualitative superiority of German tanks to American and British ones was another critical factor in the Wehrmacht’s performance against the Allies. Allied planners, and especially the U.S. War Department, made a fundamental error in 1943. They recognized the weakness of American tank guns and protective armour against those of the enemy. But they concluded that the Allies’ quantitative advantage was so great that the qualitative issue did not matter. “Before we went into Normandy,” wrote an American armoured officer, “we had been led to believe that the M4 Sherman was . . . thoroughly capable of dealing with German armor on an equal basis. We soon learned that the opposite was true.” His own 3rd Armored Division took 232 Shermans into France, and lost 648 completely destroyed, together with another 700 crippled but repairable—a total loss of 580 per cent of strength. The fact that such losses were readily replaceable reflected the Allies’ huge resources. But, for men obliged to contest the battlefield against panzers, awareness of the inadequacy of their own tanks against those of the enemy profoundly influenced their combat behaviour. After painful early experience, most U.S. armoured units gave orders for platoon commanders to ride third in a column, not first.
For a tank crew, it was irrelevant to know that their own army possessed an overall superiority of anything up to ten to one. They were confronted only with the immediate reality that if they fired at a German Tiger or even Panther, their shell was likely to bounce off, unless it struck a weak point below the gun mantle or on the flank. Meanwhile, if an enemy’s shell hit a Sherman, the notorious “Ronson” or “Tommy cooker,” it was likely not merely to stop, but to burn. “The Sherman was a very efficient workhorse, but as a fighting tank it was a disaster,” said Captain David Fraser. The first time Corporal Patrick Hennessy fired his Sherman’s gun at a Tiger tank, he watched the shell hit its hull, then ricochet straight up into the air. “I thought: ‘To hell with this!,