Softness has costs. Hastings is careful to point out the additional death toll incurred with each passing day the Allies failed to defeat the Germans. Holland starved, the German people and countryside were ravaged, and the camps kept operating. Nevertheless, he writes (page 510):
If Allied soldiers had possessed the energy, commitment, and will for sacrifice of either the German or Russian armies, they might have achieved a decisive breakthrough. But American and British soldiers were not panzergrenadiers. Socially and morally, we should be profoundly grateful that it was so. If this view is accepted, then it becomes no more relevant to suggest that the Allies could have won the war in 1944 than to debate how history might have turned out if the ancient Britons had learned to fight like Roman legionaries. To have achieved a swift victory, Eisenhower's soldiers would have needed to be different people. If American and British soldiers of 1944-45 had matched the military prowess and becomed imbued with the warrior ethos of Hitler's armies, it is unlikely that we should today hold the veterans of the Second World War in the just regard that we do. They fought as bravely and as well as any democracy could ask, if the values of civilization were to be retained in their ranks.Posted by Ben Brumfield at May 16, 2006 07:47 PM
Interestingly, although the death penalty was abolished for desertion in the British Army in 1929 and the opportunities for desertion in WWII were much greater than in the First World War (because many more men were stationed in Britain), the desertion rate remained lower. The US Army executed one man, Eddie Slovik. Conversely, the 'highly motivated' Wehrmacht shot 15,000 of its men for desertion.
Posted by: Alan Allport at May 17, 2006 06:50 AM