Armageddon - Max Hastings [69]
Almost every soldier on both sides shared a hatred of snipers, which frequently caused them to be shot out of hand if captured. There was no logic or provision in the Geneva Convention to justify such action. Sniping merely represented the highest refinement of the infantry soldier’s art. Its exercise required courage and skill. Yet sniping made the random business of killing, in which they were all engaged, become somehow personal and thus unacceptable to ordinary footsoldiers. Snipers were readily identified by the bruise and sometimes cuts inflicted by the recoil of a rifle with a telescopic sight tightly affixed to a man’s right eye. The CO of the U.S. 143rd Infantry reported that his men were most reluctant to use sniper rifles themselves, “because they think they will be shot if captured.” This was not a delusion.
Local truces not infrequently took place between Germans and British or American troops, to allow wounded men to be removed from the battlefield. There was a notable incident in the Belgian village of Bure on 3 January 1945. During three days of bitter fighting between the British 13 Para and German panzergrenadiers supported by a tank, the battalion doctor David Tibbs was treating wounded men when his sergeant, Scott, reported that there were some badly wounded men in a house on the front line, and he was going to get them out. Tibbs, preoccupied with his work, acquiesced: “the Germans had a pretty good record of respecting the red cross in our sector.” Accompanied by the battalion padre, Sergeant Scott slowly drove an ambulance with a large red-cross flag up the main street. Firing on both sides stopped. Stretcher-bearers had begun to bring out the wounded when they heard the roar of a tank engine. A Panther clattered up the street towards them. It stopped by the ambulance, and the hatch opened. A German appeared, and admonished them in perfect English: “This time I let you do it—next time, I shoot!” He closed the hatch. The tank lurched back to the German line. The ambulance finished its work and drove to the rear. The battle resumed. Even on the British front, this episode provoked lasting astonishment. “Why were the Germans so accommodating?” mused Dr. Tibbs. “They must have hoped that we would behave in the same way in similar circumstances, and by and large, we did.” It was unthinkable that anything of the kind could have happened in the east.
Most men were less fearful of death than of being maimed. As Private Tony Carullo of the 2nd Infantry walked up a road, he heard a shell and leaped aside into a ditch. When he climbed out again, he found that four men carrying a casualty in a shelter half (or groundsheet) had been obliterated: “There were body parts all over the road, one guy’s nerves were still reacting, everything was mangled. You weren’t scared you were going to die—you were scared of getting mangled up like those guys.” This fear was echoed on the other side of the hill: “You were not afraid of being killed—you feared being horribly wounded, or taken prisoner by the Soviets,” observed Lieutenant