Inferno - Max Hastings [207]
The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 percent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 percent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily—the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen. Some 3.66 percent of U.S. Marines died, compared with 2.5 percent of the U.S. Army and 1.5 percent of the U.S. Navy.
A modest number of those fighting contrived to enjoy the war, usually when their own side was winning—Germans and Japanese in the early years, Americans and British thereafter. Young people who relished adventure found this readily available. Lt. Robert Hichens of the Royal Navy wrote in July 1940: “I suppose our position is about as dangerous as is possible in view of the threatened invasion, but I couldn’t help being full of joy … Being on the bridge of one of HM ships, being talked to by the captain as an equal, and knowing that she was to be in my sole care for the next few hours. Who would not rather die like that than live as so many poor people have to, in crowded cities at some sweating indoor job?” Hichens was killed in 1942, but he was a happy warrior.
Special forces—the “private armies” regarded with mixed feelings by more conventional warriors—attracted bold spirits careless about risking their lives in piratical enterprises by land and sea. Between 1940 and 1944, partly because Churchill’s soldiers were unable to confront the Wehrmacht in Europe, British raiding units conducted many small operations of a kind the U.S. chiefs of staff mistrusted, though American airborne units and Rangers later played conspicuous roles in the northwest Europe campaign. The prime minister promoted raids on German outposts to show aggression, test tactics and equipment, and sustain a façade of momentum in the British war effort. Probably the most cost-effective of these took place on the night of 27 February 1942, when a small contingent of the newly formed Parachute Regiment assaulted a German radar station on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre on the French coast.
The objective was reconnoitred by local French Resistance workers before 120 paratroopers led by Maj. John Frost dropped into thick snow, secured the position against slight resistance from the surprised Luftwaffe radar crew, and held it while an RAF technician, Flight Sergeant Charles Cox, coolly dismantled key components of its Wurzburg scanner. The force then fought its way down to the beach for evacuation by landing craft, having lost only two men killed and six taken prisoner. The captured technology proved invaluable to British scientific intelligence. Churchill and the chiefs of staff were impressed by this first test of their paratroops, and endorsed a big expansion