Inferno - Max Hastings [368]
Allied hopes of breaking into Germany—or even of winning the war in 1944—did not immediately collapse at the end of September with the failure of Market Garden. Instead, they shrank progressively during the weeks that followed, as their soldiers floundered into a sea of mud and local disappointments. Too much historical attention has focused on the drama of the dash for Arnhem; even had Montgomery secured a Rhine bridge, it is implausible that he could have exploited this to break through into Germany. More promising possibilities lay in the path of Hodges’s First U.S. Army, around Aachen just inside the German frontier; in early and mid-September, this nearest sector of Hitler’s West Wall was scarcely defended, yet between the twelfth and the fifteenth the Americans failed in a succession of unconvincing attempts to break through. Hodges was the least impressive commander of a U.S. army, and his autumn operations were conducted with notable clumsiness. Five more weeks elapsed before the First Army occupied the ruins of Aachen. If Patton had commanded there, it is just possible that a quick breach in the West Wall might have been achieved. As it was, his Third Army battered at Metz through September, cursing the incessant rain, to no consequence except that of a mounting casualty list.
Hodges’s next serious error was to launch his army into a desperate, bloody two-month struggle to clear the Huertgen forest, which was thought to threaten his right flank and rear. Four American divisions in turn suffered misery, heavy losses and soaring combat-fatigue rates in the dense woodland. The Germans doggedly held their ground, imposing a price for each small advance, and by the time the First Army emerged onto the Rur plain in early December, all hopes of an early victory had perished. Montgomery’s armies, meanwhile, were obliged to spend the autumn clearing the Scheldt estuary to open Antwerp. This was a task that might have been fulfilled in days in mid-September, when the enemy was in disarray; in October and November, however, it required months of hard fighting in waterlogged terrain. Again and again, units launched attacks along narrow open causeways exposed to withering German fire.
The Scheldt estuary was defended not by SS panzers or elite infantry formations, but by the 70th “White Bread” Division, formed from medical cases, which a German naval officer described as “an apathetic, undisciplined mob.” Yet it required no great skill to fire machine guns and mortars at attackers exposed in plain view: for weeks, these ailing Germans frustrated the best of the Canadian Army. The commanding officer of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada wrote of “the utter misery of the conditions and the great courage required to do the simplest things. Attacks had to go on along dykes swept by enemy fire. To go through the polder meant wading, without possibility of concealment, in water that at times came up to the chest. Mortar fire, at which the Germans were masters, crashed at every rallying point … It was peculiarly a rifleman’s fight in that there were no great decisive battles, just a steady continuous struggle.” Most attacks had to be conducted by platoon-sized forces, advancing on a one-man front. So deadly was German automatic fire that the proportion of fatalities to wounded men was 50 percent higher than usual.
After a week in the Breskens pocket fighting, a single Canadian brigade had lost 533 men, including 111 killed. By the end of November, one division committed had suffered 2,077 casualties, including 544 killed or missing, and the other lost 3,650 casualties in thirty-three days, 405 men from each of its rifle battalions. This represented a rate of loss almost as heavy as that the Canadian troops suffered in the November 1917 Passchendaele battle, generally regarded as one of the worst experiences of World War