An aid man with the 30th Infantry Division recorded his experiences: ‘To get down fast you needed to learn to buckle your knees and collapse rather than make a deliberate movement to the prone position.’ He wrote of the ‘light of hope’ in the eyes of wounded men when he appeared. It was easy to spot those about to die with ‘the grey-green color of death appearing beneath their eyes and fingernails. These we would only comfort. Those making the most noise were the lightest hit, and we would get them to bandage themselves using their own compresses and Sulfa [powder].’ He concentrated on those in shock or with severe wounds and heavy bleeding. He hardly ever had to use tourniquets, ‘since most wounds were puncture wounds and bled very little or were amputations or hits caused by hot and high velocity shell or mortar fragments which seared the wound shut’.
His main tools were bandage scissors to cut through uniform, Sulfa powder, compresses and morphine. He soon learned not to carry extra water for the wounded but cigarettes, since that was usually the first thing they wanted. They were also lighter to carry. Shellbursts in oak trees killed many, so he searched around for wounded and corpses whenever he saw branches on the ground. Work parties took the bodies back to Graves Registration. They were usually stiff and swollen, and sometimes infected with maggots. A limb might come off when they were lifted. The stench was unbearable, especially at the collection point. ‘Here the smell was even worse, but most of the men working there were apparently so completely under the influence of alcohol that they no longer appeared to care.’
He once had to fill out ‘Killed in Action’ tags for a whole squad wiped out by a single German machine gun. And he never forgot an old sergeant who had died with a smile on his face. He wondered why. Had the sergeant been smiling at that instant of death, or had he thought of something while dying? Tall big men were the most vulnerable, however strong they might be. ‘The combat men who really lasted were usually thin, smaller of stature and very quick in their movements.’ Real hatred of the enemy came to soldiers, he noticed, when a buddy was killed. ‘And this was often a total hatred; any German they encountered after that would be killed.’ He even noted how sentimental GIs from farming communities would cover the open eyes of dead cows with twists of straw.
There was a marked divide between farm boys and city boys who had never been in the countryside. A soldier from a farm caught a cow, tied her to the hedgerow and began to milk her into his helmet. The city boys in his platoon came over and watched in amazement. They were also impressed when he put dried weed and branches out in front of their positions so that Germans could not creep up at night silently to throw grenades.
US Army medical services in Normandy were almost overwhelmed at times by cases of combat exhaustion, otherwise known as battle shock. At first, nobody really knew how to deal with this massive problem. The neuro- psychiatrist of the 29th Infantry Division, Major David Weintrob, recorded with cynical amusement that he was sent into action with ‘a sphygmomanometer, a set of five tuning forks, a percussion hammer and an ophthalmoscope’.
By 18 June, all his tents had been filled with soldiers suffering combat exhaustion. The flow eased in a quieter period from 21 June to 10 July, with an average of only eight cases a day. But from the morning of 11 July, with the offensive to seize Saint-Lo, ‘the rains came’, as Weintrob put it. There were anything between thirty-five and eighty-nine admissions a day. He had to listen to ‘visions of 88s to the right of him; 88s to the left of him; 88s on top of him’. Nearly half of the combat-exhaustion casualties were replacements who collapsed after less than forty-eight hours in the front line.
Weintrob had so many cases that he had to pass most on to the First Army Exhaustion Center, which soon became overwhelmed itself and ‘bluntly refused to accept any but the very acute battle psychoneuroses’. This influx — ‘the great majority of cases were those of extreme physical exhaustion with mild anxiety states’ — enabled Weintrob to persuade their commander, General Gerhardt, to allow him to set up a new system. The diminutive but belligerent Gerhardt, who had invented the divisional battle-cry ‘Twenty-nine, let’s go!’, was won over by Weintrob’s argument that he could get many more men back into the firing line this way.
Weintrob had fifteen medical assistants covering ten large ward tents and eight pyramidal tents. Patients arrived from the forward casualty clearing stations. They received twenty-four hours’ rest and light sedation. On the second day, they were cleaned up and given new uniforms. A psychiatric examination took place on the third. The most acute cases were evacuated rearwards. Weintrob divided the rest into three categories: fit for an immediate return to duty after a short rest, suitable for the new training programme, or to be classified as unfit for further combat duty. He recognized that there were some men who would never be able to cope with the stress of combat. They would simply be a danger and a hindrance to the rest.
Weintrob first set up what became known as the ‘Hot Spot Spa’, which was basically an ‘out and out rest camp’, with movies shown daily and ball games. But this became much too attractive, and soon many men who felt in need of a break started to fake combat-exhaustion symptoms. So he instituted a new programme with weapon training, target practice and road marches to rebuild military confidence. This was run by non-coms recovering from light wounds. The programme also helped him assess borderline cases. Out of 1,822 cases (an eighth of the total non-fatal battle casualties), 775 men were returned to duty. Just over half, 396 men, were still in combat after fourteen weeks. Weintrob estimated that ‘a man who has broken down psychologically on two occasions is lost as an efficient combat soldier’.
Quite clearly the vulnerability of replacements was the most urgent problem to tackle. Weintrob and Major G. B. Hankins, who ran the training programme, urged Gerhardt to change the system. Instead of sending replacements forward to a platoon during darkness on the day they arrived, they should be held back and put into the training programme until the regiment to which they were allotted came back into reserve. This would allow the opportunity to train them with machine-gun and artillery fire going overhead and explosions set off around them to simulate shellbursts. Replacements also needed to be integrated better. They should be given the division’s blue and grey patch to wear on their uniforms before they joined their platoons. Almost all of Weintrob’s innovations were later brought into general use by the US Army by that autumn.
German officers, on the other hand, would have shaken their heads in amazement. Their hard-pressed divisions in Normandy never had the luxury of a few days’ training behind the lines. New soldiers arrived at the point of a boot. And if they shot themselves through the hand or foot, they were executed. The Obergefreiter with the 91st Luftlande-Division wrote home on 15 July to say that ‘Krammer, a capable and brave lad, stupidly shot himself through the hand. Now he is to be shot.’ Their only hope was for ‘a nice
17. Caen and the Hill of Calvary
During the Epsom operation and after it, Montgomery continued his policy of telling Eisenhower as little as possible. ‘Ike is considerably less than exuberant these days,’ Eisenhower’s aide wrote in his diary. The ‘slowness of Monty’s attack’ was one his chief concerns, and Eisenhower had spoken to Churchill about it while the battle was in full swing.
Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, and Air Marshal Coningham even discussed the possibility of having Montgomery relieved. Coningham, who commanded the Tactical Air Force supporting 21st Army Group, had loathed Montgomery since the North African campaign. He had never been able to forgive Montgomery’s compulsion to take all the credit. Now he was infuriated by Montgomery’s pretence that his strategy was proceeding according to plan when he had manifestly failed to take the ground needed for airfields.
Senior American officers were becoming scornful of what they saw as inexcusable caution on the British front. By 30 June, the British Second Army had suffered 24,698 casualties since the invasion began, while the Americans had lost 34,034 men, nearly half as many again. (German losses for the same period were 80,783.) Casualties on D-Day itself had been much lighter than expected, but since then the situation had deteriorated rapidly. British infantry casualties were 80 per cent higher than estimated and there were fewer and fewer replacements to bring units back up to strength.[36]
On top of an instinctive abhorrence of heavy losses from his experience in the First World War, Montgomery felt he had an even stronger reason for caution in his attacks. Yet he did not discuss the manpower crisis with