Inferno - Max Hastings [371]
Kotlowitz lay motionless until nightfall, when he was evacuated by medics to become a combat-fatigue case. He never served in the line again. British lieutenant Tony Finucane described a battalion “advance to contact” in Holland: “We strung out across the flatland in what looked and felt like a casual stroll in the afternoon sunshine. Suddenly nearing the objective, and with men feeling for their shovels to get well dug in before nightfall, we saw a hundred yards ahead of us lots of men in grey advance in a similar formation. Imagine it! Two battalions head on in the open! Within moments a real infantry small arms battle—and pandemonium—started. We had no supporting fire, the enemy (usually referred to by ourselves as ‘the wily Hun’) opened up with what looked like a 20mm ack-ack gun. But in the event, with odds about evens we were better at it than they were. They backed off about half a mile.”
But each such small encounter, victorious or no, imposed a loss of momentum and irreplaceable British losses. By the time Finucane found himself at Cleve in December, his platoon was reduced from thirty-five men to eleven. When his brigadier visited the forward positions and was told of the battalion’s depleted rifle strength, he said with a sigh, “That’s what I keep telling the General. The casualties don’t look much considering the total number of men involved, but they are all fighting troops.” Alan Brooke was heard to say that he wished circumstances had placed the British on the right rather than the left of Eisenhower’s line. The British CIGS believed that opportunities existed in the south which Montgomery’s army could have exploited more effectively than the Americans. In this, he was assuredly wrong. His view reflected only a manifestation of mutual Anglo-American mistrust, which became more pronounced as each nation’s generals balefully examined the other’s failures and disappointments.
Stalin, curiously enough, displayed more enthusiasm for the Western contribution to the war that winter than at any previous period, despite the Allied tensions provoked by Russian refusal to aid the embattled Poles in their ill-judged Warsaw Uprising. “A new feature of the struggle against Hitler’s Germany in the past year,” he told a Moscow party conference on 6 November, “is the fact that the Red Army has not been fighting the Germans alone as was previously the case. The Tehran conference was not held in vain—its resolutions on the joint offensive against Germany from the west, east and south are being implemented with real conviction. There is no doubt that without the second front in Europe, which has engaged up to seventy-five German divisions, our forces would have been unable so quickly to break German resistance and expel Germany’s armies from the Soviet Union. Equally, without the Red Army’s powerful summer powerful offensive, which engaged up to two hundred German divisions, our allies would have been unable so rapidly to throw the Germans out of central Italy, France and Belgium. The challenge, the key to victory, is to keep Germany in the grip of the two fronts.”
By December, when snow came, Eisenhower’s armies had resigned themselves to shivering through the winter, then resuming their offensive when conditions allowed. It is hard for civilians to comprehend the miseries of an outdoor existence week after