Inferno - Max Hastings [344]
When a shell landed close to a Canadian sergeant in Normandy, he exclaimed, “Shit and shit some more!” A newly arrived replacement asked if he was hit. The NCO said no, “he had just pissed his pants. He always pissed them, he said, when things started and then he was okay … Then I realized something wasn’t quite right with me, either. There was something warm down there and it seemed to be running down my leg. I felt, and it wasn’t blood. It was piss … I said, ‘Sarge, I’ve pissed too’ … He grinned and said, ‘Welcome to the war.’ ” Fear afflicted other men in other ways. A Canadian prisoner was led into a Waffen SS regimental headquarters, under intense Allied bombardment. To his amazement, the staff were sheltering under map tables while singing a rousing chorus of “O Beautiful German Rhine” to the accompaniment of a mouth organ. The Canadian shook his head and mumbled in confusion, “War is a merry thing!” Some unglamorous tasks imposed disproportionate risks: “The first men to die in most battles were the phone linesmen,” said a Waffen SS gunner, Capt. Karl Godau. Field telephone communications were vital when few units had tactical radios: linesmen were constantly obliged to expose themselves under fire to repair breaks caused by shelling or passing vehicles, and many were killed doing so.
A panzer staff sergeant, captured by the Americans, offered his interrogators a comparison between the Eastern and Western Fronts: “The Russian won’t let you forget for one moment … that you are fighting on his soil, that you represent something he loathes. He will endure the greatest hardships … True, the average soldier lacks the resourcefulness of the American, but he makes up for it with a steadfastness I have never seen matched. If nine men get killed in an attempt to cut through wire, the tenth will still try—and succeed. You Americans are masters of your equipment, and your equipment is very good. But you lack the Russians’ tenacity.”
Yet if both sides suffered terribly in Normandy, German losses were worse, and irreplaceable. As early as 16 June Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division was weakened by 1,149 casualties and its tank strength was halved; during a briefing at his command post, Meyer wrote: “I see worried faces … Without talking about it openly we know we are approaching a catastrophe … Faced with the enemy’s enormous naval and air superiority, we can predict the breakdown of the defensive front … We are already surviving on subsistence level. Up to now we have received neither a single replacement for comrades wounded or killed, nor one tank or gun.”
The SS Panzergrenadier Fritz Zimmer recorded in his diary at the end of June that his company was reduced to eighteen men; a week later, on 8 July, he fought the last action of his own war:
From 6:30 to 8 a.m. again heavy drum fire. After this Tommy attacks with great masses of infantry and many tanks. We fight as long as possible, but realise we are in a hopeless position. When the survivors try to pull back, we find ourselves already surrounded … I crawled back under continuing fire as fast as possible. Some comrades tried to do the same, unsuccessfully. I still cannot understand how nothing happened to me, with shells falling two or three metres in front, behind and beside me. Splinters whizzed about my ears. I worked my way to within about two hundred metres of our lines. It was hard work, always on my stomach, only occasionally on hands and knees, for three or four kilometres. Attacking Tommies passed me five or six paces away without noticing me in the high