Citizen Soldiers_ The U.S. Army from the - Stephen E. Ambrose [13]
DURING THE four weeks of hard fighting since D-Day, the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions took heavy casualties, close to 50 per cent overall, higher among junior officers. In the first week of July, when the 30th Division relieved the 82nd, Lieutenant Sidney Eichen reported that he and his men stared in shock and awe at the paratroopers who had inaugurated the battle a month earlier.
"We asked them, 'Where are your officers?' and they answered, 'All dead.' We asked, 'Who's in charge, then?' and some sergeant said, 'I am.'
I looked at the unshaven, red-eyed GIs, the dirty clothes and the droop in their walk, and I wondered. Is this how we are going to look after a few days of combat?"
Infantry in the line, advancing from hedgerow to hedgerow, also suffered brutally. In the 1st, 4th, 29th, and other divisions the turn-over in junior officers in the first month was almost total.
Major G.S. Johns of the 29th described a typical hedgerow action "with a machine gun being knocked out here, a man or two being killed or wounded there. Eventually the leader of the stronger force, usually the attackers, may decide that he has weakened his opponents enough to warrant a large concerted assault. Or the leader of the weaker force may see that he will be overwhelmed by such an attack and pull back. Thus goes the battle-a rush, a pause, some creeping, a few isolated shots, some artillery fire, some mortars, some smoke, more creeping, another pause, dead silence, more firing, a great concentration of fire followed by a concerted rush. Then the whole process starts all over again."
The Germans were able to inflict heavy casualties because they were on the defensive and also took advantage of their skill in warfare. Many of the German officers and NCOs were veterans of the Russian front, and nearly all were veterans of some battles, while this was the first for most of the GIs. The Germans were bolstered by a weapons system that was much better suited to hedgerow defence than the American weapons were to attack in such terrain.
The Germans had more mortars, and heavier ones, than the Americans. Their MG-42 machine guns fired 1,200 rounds a minute, the American counterpart less than half that. The handle on the German "potato masher" hand grenade made it easier to throw further. The Germans had the nebelwerfer, a multibarrelled projector whose bombs were designed to produce a terrifying wail when they flew through the air-sixty or seventy virtually simultaneously. The GIs called them Moaning Minnies. There was no American counterpart.
Then there was the panzer faust, which was far superior to the American bazooka. It did not have the range of a bazooka, but that hardly mattered in hedgerow country. It was operated by a single soldier and was so simple that no special training was required, while the bazooka required a trained two-man team. The panzerfausts bomb had greater penetrating power than the bazooka's.
In heavy artillery the Americans generally outgunned the Germans in quantity, but long-range gunnery wasn't effective in the close quarters imposed by the hedgerows. The German 88-without doubt the best artillery piece of the war, in the opinion of every GI-was a high-velocity, flat-trajectory weapon that could fire armour-piercing shells down the lanes and roads or be elevated and fire airburst shells against bombers. The shell travelled faster than the speed of sound; one heard it explode before one heard it coming.
But the American .50-calibre machine gun, mounted on tanks, had no equal in penetrating power, and the American M-l Garand was the best all-purpose military rifle in the