Armageddon - Max Hastings [71]
The American and British armies contained a few eager warriors, from Patton downwards, who embraced the experience of combat. “I remember wondering what life after the war would be like,” wrote Brigadier Michael Carver, a professional soldier commanding a British armoured brigade. “Would I miss the intensity of an active life, lived to the full close to nature, as life on the battlefield, for all its fears and frightfulness at times, undoubtedly was? I was afraid I might.” By contrast, the vast majority of those who fought in infantry or tanks simply yearned desperately for the war, and their own exposure to risk, to be over. Most men who thought at all—and many did not—felt quietly conscious of the justice of the Allied cause. “We were absolutely certain we were right,” said Captain Lord Carrington, a future British foreign secretary. “It made a lot of difference.”
Yet a critical divide persisted between the Eastern and Western Fronts in the Second World War: most American and British soldiers did not share the bitter hatred for their enemy which prevailed among the Russians. GIs or Tommies were subject to flashes of passion and rage when they were frightened, or when their unit was suffering heavy losses. But, once the adrenaline rush of battle slowed even a little, it was striking how little ill-will Allied soldiers, and especially Americans, sustained towards the Germans. “Hate them?” said nineteen-year-old Private Tony Carullo. “No, no, we respected them. Even if you captured them, they’d look you in the face and ask: ‘What are you people doing here?’ It was the French we didn’t care for.” RAF Squadron Leader Tony Mann said: “I never hated the Germans as I hated the Japanese.” Mann had flown Hurricanes in Burma before being transferred to north-west Europe.
This was a view shared by Corporal Roy Ferlazzo. “The Germans were just soldiers like us.” He found it impossible to regard them with the same hostility as the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. “I never hated the Germans—I just wanted to beat them,” said “Dim” Robbins. “Once we’d won a battle, I never liked shooting Germans just for the hell of it.” Over the sights of his Bren gun, Sergeant Reg Romain of the 5th Wiltshires watched a badly wounded German crawling away from the wreckage of a half-track near Westerbreek: “I let him go, because it was plain his fighting days were over.” “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans,” sang the great English actor and writer Noël Coward, master of the drawing-room comedy. With hindsight, it is interesting that Coward’s words found favour even as satire, in the midst of a bloody contest of arms. Yet, until the revelation of the concentration camps, many Allied soldiers fought their battles with remarkably little passion, save the desire to survive.
American and British historians have expended immense energy in recent years arguing the issue of whether the German soldier was superior to his Allied counterpart. To all save the most dogged nationalists, it must be plain that Hitler’s armies performed far more professionally and fought with much greater determination than Eisenhower’s men. Allied generals were constantly hampered by the fact that, even when they advanced bold and imaginative plans, these were often incapable of execution by conscientious but never fanatical civilian soldiers, opposed by the most professionally skilful army of modern times. Yet it seems wrong to leave the matter there. There is a vital corollary. If American and British soldiers had been imbued with the ethos which enabled Hitler’s soldiers to do