Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe

Living with War

1 WARRIORS

The experience of war was extraordinarily diverse. The Eastern Front, where 90 per cent of all Germans killed in combat met their fate, overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler. Between 1941 and 1944, British and American sailors and airmen fought at sea and in the sky, but relatively small numbers of Western Allied ground troops engaged the Axis in North Africa, Italy, Asia and the Pacific. Much larger Anglo-American forces spent those years training and exercising: when 1st Norfolks went into action at Kohima in June 1944, for instance, it was the battalion’s first battle since leaving France through Dunkirk in May 1940. Many other British and American units experienced equally protracted delays before joining the fray. The conflict was a pervasive circumstance for the peoples of Britain and its white dominions, and to a lesser extent the United States, but it imposed serious peril and hardship on only a relatively small minority of men ‘at the sharp end’ of ground combat. At sea, fatalities in most naval battles were counted in hundreds. In the sky, aircrew suffered high proportionate losses, but these were dwarfed by those of the eastern land campaign.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 per cent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 per cent, Yugoslavia 3 per cent, the USA and Britain 2 per cent each, France and Poland 1 per cent each. About 8 per cent of all Germans died, compared with 2 per cent of Chinese, 3.44 per cent of Dutch people, 6.67 per cent of Yugoslavs, 4 per cent of Greeks, 1.35 per cent of French, 3.78 per cent of Japanese, 0.94 per cent of British and 0.32 per cent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 per cent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 per cent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 per cent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 per cent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 per cent 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 per cent of US Marines died, compared with 2.5 per cent of the US Army and 1.5 per cent of the US 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 US chiefs of staff mistrusted, though American Airborne and Rangers later played conspicuous roles in the north-west 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 useful 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 Major 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 of such units. The Bruneval raid, trumpeted by Allied propaganda, was indeed a fine example of daring and initiative, aided by luck and an unusually feeble German response.

Such operations worked best when carried out by small forces pursuing limited objectives; more ambitious raids achieved more equivocal outcomes. A month after Bruneval, 268 commandos landed at Saint-Nazaire, while an old destroyer rammed the gate of the port’s big floating dock. Next day, five tons of explosive detonated as planned aboard the destroyer, demolishing the lock gates and killing many German sightseers as well as two captured commando officers who had concealed their knowledge of the impending explosion. But 144 of the attackers were killed and more than two hundred army and naval personnel were taken prisoner. During the big assault on Dieppe in August 1942, the Germans suffered 591 ground casualties, but two-thirds of the 6,000 raiders, mostly Canadian, were killed, wounded or captured. By 1944, when Allied armies were deployed in major campaigns, British commando and airborne forces had been allowed to outgrow their usefulness, absorbing a larger share of elite personnel than their battlefield achievements justified. In the earlier war years, however, they made a useful moral contribution and delighted their participants.

Many professional soldiers welcomed the career opportunities Hitler provided. Those who survived and displayed competence gained promotions in months that in peacetime would have taken years; commanders unknown outside their regiments one summer could achieve fame and fortune by the next. In five years Dwight Eisenhower – admittedly an exceptional example – rose from colonel to full general. ‘One of the fascinations of [the] war,’ in the words of British Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, ‘was to see how Americans developed their great men so quickly…Ike grew almost as one watched him.’

Britain’s Sir Bernard Montgomery advanced from being a lieutenant-general in August 1942, unknown outside his service, to become an army group commander and national hero just two years later. At lower levels, many regular officers who entered the war as lieutenants became colonels or brigadiers by their mid-twenties. Horatius Murray, for instance, in 1939 after sixteen years’ service had only attained the rank of major, but finished the war as a lieutenant-general. On the other side, the Wehrmacht’s Captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder remembered his campaign experience ‘with gratitude’, despite being wounded three times. Likewise Major Karl-Günther von Haase, who survived captivity in Russian hands: ‘In the early war years we were proud to belong to the German army. I look back on my military career not without satisfaction.’

Some people found that bearing their share of their nation’s struggle for conquest or freedom rendered sorrows tolerable, ennobled loneliness and danger. But the humbler their personal circumstances, the slighter seemed the compensations for sacrifice. William Crawford, a seventeen-year-old Boy Second Class serving aboard the battlecruiser Hood, wrote home miserably: ‘Dearest Mum…I know it’s wrong to say but I sure am fed up. I feel kind of sick, I can’nae eat and my heart’s in my mouth. We struck bad weather today. Talk about waves as big as houses, they’re crashing over our bows…I wonder if it would do any good Mum if you wrote to the Admiralty and asked them if there was no chance of me getting a shore job at Rosyth. You know, tell them you have got two sons away and that. Be sure to tell them my age. If only I could get off this ship it would not be so bad.’ Crawford, however, was still aboard Hood when she was sunk with almost all hands in May 1941.

As his letter illustrates, stoicism was no more universal among sailors at sea than soldiers on the battlefield. ‘I am absolutely fed up with everything,’ a naval paymaster-commander named Jackie Jackson wrote to his wife from the Mediterranean in May 1941. ‘The dirt and filth, the flies and heat and more than anything the fact that I am not hearing from you.’ He complained that he had received only one letter in six weeks, ‘the most depressing I have ever received in my life. Add to that a cable which more or less implied that the house has been wrecked and you can get a fair idea of how much I want to hear from you occasionally, and at the same time how I dread it, as I am probably going to have even worse news and more complaints…I’ve had a hideous time and I wonder why I’m alive.’ It is easy to see why such people as Winston Churchill, George Patton or pilots flying Mustangs or Spitfires – a small and privileged minority – enjoyed the war. It is equally apparent why many others – especially a Russian infantryman or Chinese peasant, a Polish Jew or Greek farmer – could not.

Most of those who fought clung stubbornly to their own amateur status, performing a wholly unwelcome duty before returning to their ‘real’ lives. As a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in action against the Germans with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Peter White, reflected: ‘It must take about seven years…to make a being feel really like a soldier and not just a civilian dressed up. The situation seemed so ludicrously unreal and yet grimly real at the same time. We could at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the poor blighters opposite us were in the same boat even though it was a boat of their seeking.’ John Hersey wrote of the Marines on Guadalcanal: ‘The uniforms, the bravado…were just camouflage. They were just American boys. They did not want that valley or any part of its jungle. They were ex-grocery boys, ex-highway laborers, ex-bank clerks, ex-schoolboys, boys with a clean record…not killers.’

RAF Corporal Peter Baxter lamented: ‘My whole generation…are wasting some of the finest years of their lives in the dreary business of war. Our manhood has come to full fruition, but it is stifling and decaying in these wasted years…The deadening, paralysing influence of service life has blighted my middle twenties.’ Many young men had never before lived away from home, and hated the indignities and discomforts of barracks existence. Frank Novy, a twenty-one-year-old, spent his first night in the army at a depot in Leeds. ‘After a few minutes on the palliasse I heard complaints from all sides. My own was terribly hard, and I had no pillow, my teeth were aching and soon I had a headache. I felt depressed and tired out. I tried to sleep, but I kept thinking of home, and all I had left went round and round in my head, ceaselessly, persistently…At times I felt so depressed that I wanted to cry, but couldn’t.’

Recruits found themselves growing new skins. Len England described how a fellow soldier delivered a stream of wisecracks to a girl behind the counter in the YMCA, then turned to England and said in surprise, ‘I’ve never flirted before in my life. I’ve only been in the army five days, and now look at what I’m doing.’ England observed that he and his new comrades felt different people, ‘more authoritative and self-assertive in uniform’. Educated men recoiled from the crude banality of barracks vocabulary: among Americans, everything seemed to be ‘tough shit’; an alleged coward ‘was shaking like a pup shitting carpet tacks’; civilians who escaped military service were ‘4-F bastards’.

No sentence was complete without its obscene expletives: the fucking officers made them dig fucking foxholes before they received fucking rations or stood fucking guard. Even the most delicately reared recruits acquired this universal military habit of speech, though officers’ messes aspired to more gentility. Cultured men were pained by translation into a world in which art, music, literature had no place. Captain Pavel Kovalenko of the Red Army wrote one night in the line: ‘After dinner I sat down to read Nekrasov. My God, when will I be able to spend as much time as I want enjoying Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov. I saw a photograph of Tolstoy as a young man in officer’s uniform…Tears choked in my throat, almost overwhelming me.’

Captain David Elliott of the Welsh Guards found himself ‘terribly depressed’ on returning to his barracks in Britain after a weekend leave: ‘There is nothing so utterly boring, so utterly narrow and so utterly petty as regimental soldiering which lacks the accompaniment of a state of battle…Certainly in this battalion there is no charity, no loving kindness, no loyalty…Among the officers, if not among the men, there are many problem children.’ While embryo airmen revelled in the thrills of flight training, few recruits found comparable compensations in discovering how to become infantrymen. Pfc ‘Red’ Thompson from Staten Island, New York, felt that he acquired limited skills: ‘I learned to take care of myself; to be wary, to look and listen; and to dig holes.’ Every soldier became reflexively familiar with the order ‘Get your gear on and stand by to move out,’ usually with scant notion of where he was going. Ignorance of anything beyond a man’s field of vision was the norm. As a 1942 recruit training in North Carolina, nineteen-year-old Missourian Tony Moody decided that he and his comrades cherished no lust for glory: ‘We somehow hoped we wouldn’t be in harm’s way.’

Pressures on manpower caused the conscription of more than a few recruits who should never have been obliged to serve. ‘My comrades were mostly from Yorkshire and Lancashire,’ wrote the eighteen-year-old Pte. Ron Davidson.

The 1930s had been a bad time for many and physically some found things very difficult and others were barely literate. I remember one who did not make the grade, aneuretic and also sub-normal – needless to say he had been passed A1 by the army doctors! He could just about dress himself, but the intricacies of army gear were beyond him and we used to get him into it. We used to lay out his kit in the prescribed manner, but this was done at night so [he] slept on the wooden floor which he regularly wet. The army in its wisdom decided [he] was ‘idle’ and a malingerer and set about ‘waking him up a bit’. This took the form of huge P[hysical] T[raining] I[nstructor]s chasing him all over the barrack square, yelling in his ear the most frightful obscenities.

This misfit was eventually discharged, but most rifle platoons included one or two subnormal men, whose conduct in battle was unsurprisingly erratic. British soldier William Chappell avowed his own submission to military service, but never ceased to ache for the civilian world from which he had been torn: ‘I accept this life. I accept the loss of my home, the collapse of my career, the bomb that injured my mother, the wide scattering and disintegration of the web of friendship I had woven so painstakingly for myself…I still want the same things. More chocolate; longer hours in bed; easily acquired hot baths, delicious, varied and delicate food; all my own possessions around me…I am bothered by my feet, sick of khaki, bored and annoyed by my companions, all the monotonous, slow, fiddle-de-dee of army life. I long for it all to be finished with, and sometimes vaguely envy those who have gone.’

An American officer wrote from the Pacific: ‘When the tents are down, I think every man feels a loneliness because he sees that this wasn’t home after all. As long as there were four canvas walls about him, he could kid himself a little…Standing on barren ground surrounded by scrap lumber piles and barracks bags with nothing familiar on his horizon he feels uprooted and insecure, a wanderer on the face of the earth. That which is always in the back of his mind now stands starkly in the front: “Will it ever end, and will I be here to see it?”’ S/Sgt. Harold Fennema wrote to his wife Jeannette in Wisconsin: ‘So much of this war and army life amounts to the insignificant job of passing time, and that really is a pity. Life is so short and time so precious to those who live and love life that I can hardly believe myself, seeking entertainment to pass time away…I wonder sometimes where this is going to lead.’ Yet if camp life was monotonous, at least it was closer to home than the theatres of war. Pfc Eugene Gagliardi, a nineteen-year-old newspaper pressman from Brooklyn, regarded his entire later experience of service in Europe as ‘a nightmare. All my good memories of the army were before we went to France.’

Active service, when it came, changed everything. American correspondent E.J. Kahn wrote from New Guinea: ‘As an urban selectee’s military career progresses, he changes gradually from a preponderantly indoor being into a wholly outdoor one.’ Marine Eugene Sledge recoiled from the brutish state to which the battlefield reduced him: ‘The personal bodily filth imposed upon the combat infantryman by living conditions on the battlefield was difficult for me to tolerate. It bothered almost everyone I knew…I stunk! My mouth felt…like I had gremlins walking around in it with muddy boots on…Short as it was, my hair was matted with dust and rifle oil. My scalp itched, and my stubble beard was becoming an increasing source of irritation in the heat. Drinking water was far too precious…to use in brushing one’s teeth or in shaving, even if the opportunity had arisen.’

Combat opened a chasm between those who experienced its horrors, and those at home who did not. In December 1943, Canadian Farley Mowat wrote to his family from the Sangro front in Italy: ‘The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t really know you any more, I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. It is one of the toughest things we have to bear – that and the primal, gut-rotting worm of fear.’