Armageddon - Max Hastings [72]
Many individual German soldiers were likewise unwilling warriors, men born and raised with the same instinctive humanity as their Allied counterparts. But they fought within the framework of an army which was institutionally brutalized. Hitler and his generals demanded of Germany’s soldiers, on pain of savage punishment, far more than the Western allies expected from their men. American and British officers knew that their citizen soldiers were attempting to fulfil tasks which ran profoundly against the grain of their societies’ culture. The Germans and Russians in the Second World War showed themselves better warriors, but worse human beings. This is not a cultural conceit, but a moral truth of the utmost importance to understanding what took place on the battlefield.
Such observations lead in turn, however, to a consideration which might dissuade the democracies from celebrating their own humanity too extravagantly. Western allied scruples made the Americans and British dependent upon the ferocity of their Soviet allies to do the main business of destroying Hitler’s armies. If the Russians had not accepted the casualties necessary to inflict a war-winning level of attrition on the Wehrmacht, the Western allies would have had to pay a far higher price, and the struggle would have continued for much longer.
AACHEN, ON THE Belgian border just forty miles west of Cologne and the Rhine, became the first major German city to fall to the Allies. Hodges’s First Army began its slow, methodical operations to encircle the town in heavy rain on 1 October, after four days’ artillery bombardment of German positions, on a scale that echoed the barrages of the First World War. The first American objective was to breach the West Wall north of the city. Initial air strikes failed. Not merely did they inflict little damage upon the Germans, but a navigational error caused the bombers to kill thirty-four Belgian civilians in a town twenty-seven miles from the target area. The mud made movement tough for infantry and tougher still for tanks. By 7 October, however, the northern arm of the American operation had done its business, piercing the West Wall. 1st Division began to push up behind Aachen from the south. Yet, in the days that followed, repeated German counter-attacks on the American flanks caused grief and delay. Several exposed units of the attacking formation were cut off and destroyed piecemeal.
“Remember those happy days when you stepped out with your best girl ‘going places’?” inquired a propaganda pamphlet of which thousands were fired into the American lines by German artillery. “What is left of all this? Nothing! Nothing but days and nights of the heaviest fighting and for many of you NOTHING BUT A PLAIN WOODEN CROSS IN FOREIGN SOIL!” The Germans daubed a painted message across a house front in one of the villages through which the Americans advanced: “MANY OF YOU WHO COME UP THIS ROAD WON’T BE COMING BACK.”
Huebner, commander of 1st Division, the “Big Red One,” visited one of his regimental colonels. He found this officer in near despair about losses from shellfire: “General,” said the hapless infantryman, “if we don’t get some help pretty soon, the 16th Infantry is just going to cease to exist.” Huebner puffed a pipe with his usual unshakeable calm. “Freddy,” he said finally, “if higher authority has decided that this is the place and the time that the