to flee after the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, and are now retreating with a vengeful Soviet Red Army hot on their heels.
From June 25, 1940, and the surrender of France, to June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Great Britain, her Commonwealth and her Empire stood alone against the Nazi tidal wave. With British cities being bombed by the Luftwaffe, and British shipping largely at the bottom of the Atlantic, cut off, hungry and alone, Britain still stood, the indomitable hero of the western world.
But after Hitler’s ally, Japan, attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the great, sleeping giant across the sea finally awoke. The United States of America, which had till then limited itself to supplying material aid to Britain, was all at once, overnight, fully engaged in the war.
America’s not-so-secret weapon was its productive capacity. By 1944 the USA was producing 96,000 warplanes per year, more than ten planes each hour in a twenty-four-hour day. In the total war effort, American industry produced 110 aircraft carriers, 41,000 cannon, 100,000 tanks, 310,000 aircraft, 12,500,000 rifles, and 41,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition.
It also raised, trained and equipped a military that by 1944 numbered nearly 12 million soldiers, sailors and marines.
The world waited as the Americans put on a poor show in North Africa and became bogged down in Italy under ineffectual generals. America’s allies granted the genius of American war production, but they doubted the fighting spirit, grit, determination and competence of American soldiers, from Eisenhower down to the private in a foxhole.
The Americans faced the ultimate test: leading a fractious, suspicious coalition of British, Canadian, Australian, Free French and Free Polish forces to invade and liberate Europe, and to destroy Hitler’s evil regime.
The Nazis were no longer advancing, but the Nazi empire was very far from beaten. New German weapons, the V1 cruise missile, the V2 ballistic missile, the world’s first jet fighter, the Me 262, and the massive Tiger tank were coming online.
Now on the defensive, the superbly-equipped, experienced, well-trained, well-generaled and dug-in German army, the Wehrmacht, and its brutal and fanatical counterpart, the Waffen SS, were fighting to save the Nazi regime and their Fatherland.
The Nazi beast cornered was at its most dangerous.
Between D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the German surrender, on May 7, 1945, 125,000 American GIs—more than 350 per day—would die bringing freedom to western Europe and destroying the greatest evil humanity had ever faced.
107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945
There’s a story going round, Gentle Reader, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but supposedly a guy heard it from a German POW. The story is that the first Allied bomb dropped on Berlin killed an elephant in the zoo.
I guess I’m sorry for the elephant, but that sort of sums up the way it goes in war. There’s no moral sense to it. Sure, one side may be better than the other, I mean, I was at Buchenwald. No one needs to convince me the Nazis are evil. But what I mean is that in the day-today of it death and destruction do not rain down on the bad and spare the good. Death does not care whether you’re a bright and sparkly hero or a yellow coward. Death doesn’t know you, or care to know you. You’re just the poor dumb bastard who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re just that elephant.
The philosophy of the combat soldier in a nutshell: you’re gonna die. Might be today, might be tomorrow, might be fifty years from now all safe and snug in your bed. But when your number is up, your number is up. And that might be in three . . . two . . . Bang!
Do I sound like a weary old veteran? A sweet young slip of a girl like me? Shall I blush?
When this all started, when the US of A got into this war, and the Supreme Court decided what the hell, let’s send women too, everyone wondered what effect it would have.
Could women fight? My girl Rio has a shiny Silver Star, a fistful of Purple Hearts, and a notched M1 that say yes.
Could the men fight alongside women or would the simple creatures be too distracted by feminine curves? Well, I once spent a long night in a hole with Luther Geer, who has never been a gentleman, but he is a good soldier, and he never even made a pass at me. Possibly he was distracted by the artillery barrage coming down on our heads. Possibly it was that I hadn’t showered in . . . God only knows how long; you’d have to ask my fleas. We were not a man and a woman in that hole, we were two scared little babies screaming and cursing and so cold we were grateful for the warmth of our own piss running down our legs.
It was not a romantic evening.
And people wondered what it would do to us afterward, to us ‘Soldier Girls.’ Would we lose all our feminine attributes? Would we become mannish?
Stupid question. Women don’t stop being women, and men don’t stop being men. Both of us, men and women, become an entirely new creature: the combat soldier. You don’t recognize combat soldiers by legs or breasts or the hidden bits; you recognize them by their eyes. Maybe a civilian wouldn’t spot it, but we always will. We are our own separate tribe. We know things. And we are none of us, men or women, the people we started out being.
Sorry, Gentle Reader, I’ve been prosing on and I should be sticking to the story. It’s just that as bad as North Africa and Sicily were, as miserable and brutal and pointless as Italy was, what comes next I am afraid will defeat my meager talents as a writer. I don’t know quite how to explain Omaha Beach, or the bocage country, or the bloody goddamned forests they call the Hürtgen and the Eifel. And Shakespeare himself could not do justice to Buchenwald or Dachau.
Sorry.
I guess you can’t tell, but for a minute there I couldn’t type. Maybe it was more than a minute. I suppose it must have been a while longer because one of my pals here in the hospital came up and for no reason laid her hand on my shoulder and that’s when I realized I’d been crying.
There are things in my head, pictures and sounds and smells . . . I did not need to know these things, Gentle Reader. I could have lived my life and never known, but now I do, and perhaps it’s perverse of me, but I’m passing those terrible things along to you.
Not very nice of me, really.
Maybe that’s why the old guys, the veterans from the first war, don’t talk much. Maybe they don’t want to inflict it all on unsuspecting civilians. Maybe they are kinder than I am. But I figure you deserve the truth.
Here’s some truth: I once shot an SS prisoner in the throat. He was begging for his life, half dead from hunger and cold. He only had one boot and the other foot was black from some combination of trench foot and frostbite. And I put a carbine round right through his Nazi throat. I could have shot him in the head, but I wanted him to have a few seconds to reflect on the fact that he was going to die.
You don’t approve, Gentle Reader? Are you tut-tutting and shaking your head? You would never do that? Oh? Were you there in the Hürtgen? Were you there on Elsenborn Ridge? No? Then with the greatest respect I have to tell you that your moral opinion means nothing to me. My judges are the filthy, freezing, starving men and women who were there with me. Come with me to the beach and the bocage and the forests, Gentle Reader, spend a few days, and then render your judgment.
Well, enough of that. Tell that story when it’s time. Wipe your eyes and keep typing, old girl.
Time is short. They’re shipping me out soon, back to the land of Coca-Cola and Cadillacs, and I need to finish this story. At night I read bits of it to some of the other guys and gals here. We drink the hooch smuggled in by our buddies outside, and we chain-smoke,