Inferno - Max Hastings [370]
For all Patton’s celebrity, his army made slow progress through Alsace-Lorraine, eventually reaching the German border in mid-December. On his right, Gen. Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group met bitter resistance from Germans defending a perimeter on the west bank of the upper Rhine, the so-called Colmar pocket. Pvt. William Tsuchida, a medical aidman in the Vosges, wrote to his parents:
What a mess this whole business is. My mind is one confused conglomeration of incidents, the basic fears of night, and the waiting for daylight. The rest of it I would just as soon forget because it is so rotten. I hope everybody with the soft war jobs realises the horrible days and nights the line company men have to spend out here … I get in such a daze sometimes that I force myself to read something when I can, like a magazine or old letter. What it amounts to is you wonder whether you should eat now or later and hope you have a dry place to sleep tonight and hope that casualties will slow down. Everything is hope, hope.
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An airborne soldier, Pfc. Bill True, was intensely moved when, one evening in the midst of the Dutch battles, a little girl approached the foxhole occupied by himself and another man, and handed them two pillows. Here was a tiny, innocent gesture towards decencies of civilisation which otherwise seemed immeasurably remote.
ALLIED SUPPLY difficulties persisted, even when ships began to unload at Antwerp. Anglo-American soldiers required far larger quantities of food and comforts than their enemies deemed necessary, and expended prodigious quantities of ammunition to secure even modest local objectives. Eisenhower’s troops advancing across Europe behaved much better than the Russians, but almost all soldiers living in fear of their lives display a cruel indifference towards the property of others. A Dutch doctor described his disgust on seeing the village of Venray, just behind the front line in Holland, after it had been occupied by British soldiers: “Words cannot describe how appalled I was when I saw how the town had been pillaged and destroyed. I spoke to an elderly English officer whose words speak for themselves: ‘I’m very sorry and deeply ashamed, the Army has lost its reputation here.’ ”
The killing of prisoners was never institutionalised, as on the Eastern Front, but Eisenhower’s men committed their share of excesses. A Canadian soldier described his experience of a patrol in Holland, in which his unit captured eight dismounted German tankers attempting to get back to their own lines. Their officer spoke good English, and the enemies chatted for some minutes about the cold, and how they would like to light a fire. They had just passed a farmhouse, he said, where there might be schnapps and a pig. Could they roast it? The Canadian said later, “The war was over for him, and I guess he was glad.” Then, suddenly, the lieutenant leading the patrol turned to his Bren gunner and said, “Shoot them.” The German officer who had been making jokes “sort of made a little run forward and put his arms across his chest and said something and the guy with the bren just cut loose … There were two, I think, still flopping like gaffed salmon, and this guy we called Whitey from Cape Breton—we called him Whitey because he was always boasting how good a coalminer he was—he shot those two with a pistol … It probably went into our history, I guess, as a German patrol wiped out. None of us really thought too much about it … But I’ll tell you this, a year before, if I’d been there, I’d have been puking up my guts.”
Allied forces edged towards the German border yard by painful yard. During a November attack in Alsace, within seconds of encountering devastating German machine-gun fire Pvt. Robert Kotlowitz found himself the only unwounded survivor of his platoon.
I remember from that moment, when mass disorientation began to set in,