Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (40 page)

John Price, a medical orderly with the British 2nd Ox & Bucks, was moved to discover how desperately men wished to be reassured that they would survive, how much words meant to them even when they were suffering the most terrible injuries. For all the wealth of facilities that the Allies possessed, there was seldom a short-cut from pain. One day in the farmyard in the Orne bridgehead where he was based, Price was appalled to see a young lieutenant drive up in a jeep, shouting with the pain of terrible bowel wounds. They laid him on a stretcher on the bonnet, and Price sat beside him as they drove for the casualty clearing station, holding his hand until he died. When Robin Hastings, CO of the Green Howards, was at last wounded by mortar fragments on 27 June, Padre Lovegrove was touched that a man of such courage and forcefulness suddenly showed fearful shock at his own vulnerability, and begged the orderlies who were tending him: ‘Don’t hurt me.’ Hastings’s temper was not improved when he met his detested brigadier as he was being driven to the rear by jeep. The senior officer demanded furiously: ‘What are you doing back here? I think you’re perfectly fit,’ which, as Hastings remarked acidly afterwards, ‘showed what a bloody old fool he was’.

In the field hospitals, doctors and nurses toiled over the procession of ruined men laid before them in the tents, cutting away mudstained battledress and bloody boots to reveal the interminable tragedies beneath.

The family of a wounded British soldier received a simple roneoed sheet from the Army Records Office at Ashford. For example, a Mr Griffin of 28 Dean Drive, Stanmore, Middlesex, was addressed:

It is a measure of the relative severity of the Normandy fighting, compared with later battles, that hospital admissions as a result of enemy action comprised 9.7 per cent of British soldiers engaged in the first three months following the invasion, falling to 2.6 per cent in the autumn quarter. Accidental injuries attained a remarkable 13.2 per cent in the wake of D-Day, although many of these were very slight. Psychiatric casualties reached a high of 14 per 1,000 among the British in the same period, falling to 11 per 1,000 by winter. Although ‘battle fatigue’ never reached epidemic proportions in the British army, every unit in Normandy suffered its share of men who found themselves utterly unwilling to endure more. One morning, as Charles Mundy and his fellow troop commanders of the 22nd Dragoon Guards stood in their turrets on the start-line before an attack, they were startled by a brief burst of sten-gun fire. A man had simply shot himself in the foot rather than endure the assault. An American company commander in Major Randall Bryant’s battalion reported to him to declare flatly: ‘I’ve had it. You can do anything you want, but I won’t go back.’ Men seldom despised or scorned those who were driven to these acts – they merely pitied them, and prayed that they themselves might not be reduced to such extremities. Major Bryant was only roused to real anger years later, when the ex-company commander showed himself at a veterans’ reunion.

One morning, Captain Anthony Babington of the Dorsets heard the call ‘Stretcher bearer!’ in the midst of an incoming barrage, and was surprised to see no reaction from the medical orderly’s
slit trench, for the man had hitherto been uncommonly quick to reach any wounded soldier. Running across, he found the orderly lying in the bottom of the trench, crying and shaking. He asked if the man was wounded, and received no reply. When the shelling stopped, he told his CO about the stretcher bearer. ‘Oh, send him back with an NCO and we’ll find him a job in the rear,’ said the colonel. All of them understood, in the Second War, something which had not been contemplated in the First – that each man possessed a limit beyond which he could not be forced. It was merely vital to ensure that such problems did not become epidemic.

A few men deliberately recoiled in disgust from the labour of destruction upon which they were engaged. Lieutenant William Douglas-Home, who was to become a distinguished British playwright and was the brother of a future Prime Minister, had told his fellow-officers for years that if he disapproved of something that was done on the battlefield, he would say so. They did not believe him. Now, in France as a Crocodile troop commander, he was appalled by the impending massed air bombardment of a town to induce its garrison to surrender. He set out on his own initiative to attempt to parley the Germans into giving up, declining to have anything to do with the attack himself. He was stopped, court-martialled, and served a term of imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs. When it was learned that he had been threatening for months to make a gesture of this sort, his commanding officer was also sacked.

Each night, one of the most painful tasks for the commanding officer of every unit was to write to the families of his men who had died. Most widows and mothers bore the news with pathetic resignation. A few were bitter. On the way home from the Mediterranean, Padre Lovegrove of the Green Howards had listened for hours to an officer talking about the little daughter he looked forward so much to seeing. When they docked, he learnt that she had died while he was on passage. In the following months the officer suffered great strain comforting his wife. In Normandy, he
too was killed. Lovegrove received a tragic, savage letter from the man’s wife, demanding to know how the padre could pretend that there could be a loving God, who allowed such unspeakable miseries to occur.

That summer, there was no more pitiful measure of the enormity of what was taking place in Normandy than the death announcements in the newspapers of Britain and America: ‘Died of wounds’, ‘Killed while leading his wing over Normandy’, ‘Killed in action June 1944, aged 23’. The London
Times
for 2 July reported on its news pages that ‘General Eisenhower may . . . look forward to the early use of a port of entry into France following the capture of Cherbourg,’ while ‘the time may be approaching when General Montgomery will be strong enough to march boldly inland.’ But among the columns of announcements on the front page, there were scores like this:

On the battlefield, men were reluctantly fascinated by the look of the dead. Lieutenant Wilson of The Buffs gazed down on a cluster of SS infantry, and was impressed by their physical splendour even as they lay lifeless. He was struck by the contrast between these young Nazi supermen and the usual British infantry platoon, ‘with all its mixtures which were a sergeant-major’s nightmare – the tall and short, bandy-legged and lanky, heavy-limbed countrymen and scruffy, swarthy Brummagem boys with eternally undone gaiters.’
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How can we defeat men like these? he wondered, gazing down at the German bodies. ‘To me, Normandy will always mean death,’ said Lindley Higgins, ‘that yellow-green, waxy look of corpses’ hands. Anything that personalized death was upsetting, like seeing a 4th Division flash on a body’s helmet.’
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Keith Douglas, who was killed in Normandy, wrote:

Some soldiers were supersititious about picking up a dead man’s weapon, although few were above looting a German Luger pistol if they found one. Almost every man had his private equivalent of touching wood, his secret luck charm. Trooper Steve Dyson of the 107th RAC, a Catholic, carried a little statuette of the Virgin in his tank, wedged between the smoke bombs. Philip Reisler’s 2nd Armored tank gunner, a Polish boy from Michigan, convinced himself that he would be hit if he failed to write up his diary each night. Three times in the war when he did not do so, he was wounded. Coming out of action, the whole crew invariably sang over the intercom:

Men were frequently shocked by the speed at which an entire unit could be transformed into a ruin on the battlefield. One morning in mid-July, the 2nd KRRC were waiting in their half-tracks, on the reverse slope of a hill in the approved manner, to follow up the 43rd Wessex Division in an operation towards Evrecy. Lieutenant Edwin Bramall had just joined the other platoon commanders for
a company Orders Group when they came under devastating fire from German self-propelled guns which had worked around to overlook them from high ground on their flank. Bramall dived under a half-track and found himself lying next to his friend Bernard Jackson, a slightly-built Old Harrovian who was senior platoon commander. ‘Do you think we’ve had it?’ Jackson asked him. A moment later there was a fierce explosion as a shell hit the half-track, and Jackson lay blackened and dead. Bramall emerged from cover to find ‘quite a
götterdämmerung
situation, with vehicles and motor-cycles on fire everywhere’. He suddenly felt a burning sensation in his side, and threw himself to the ground to extinguish flames on his clothing – he had also been hit by a shell fragment. Somehow Bramall and the other surviving platoon commander managed to shepherd the remaining half-tracks into dead ground before he was evacuated to the Regimental Aid Post. When he returned to his unit just a month later, ‘I found a very different battalion. There had been no dramatic heavy fighting – just a lot of casualties and a lot of shell-shock cases.’
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The Scots Guards Tank Battalion – which numbered among its officers a future British Home Secretary, a Moderator of the Church of Scotland and an Archbishop of Canterbury – went into its first action, in support of 43rd Wessex Division in July, with all the enthusiasm of novices. They gained their objective with the loss only of Major Whitelaw’s tank blown up by a mine. But as they stood deployed on a ridge in the midst of virgin country they found, characteristically of many British armoured units, that they had far outstripped their infantry. The officers were assembling for an Orders Group in a wood when they heard a huge explosion and saw a pillar of smoke in the distance. The second-in-command, Major Sidney Cuthbert, said: ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening,’ and dashed across the ridge in his tank, followed by Whitelaw in a second. Suddenly, Whitelaw saw the turret of Cuthbert’s Churchill lifted bodily into the air. In the flash of bewilderment so common to men in war, he thought: How odd that the turret should do that. In a few ruthless minutes of fire, a single German
self-propelled 88 mm gun, which had stalked unseen behind the Guards’ positions, destroyed six of their tanks and killed 15 men.
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