War and Game

In September 1944, Lieutenant-General Sir Miles Dempsey, commanding the British 2nd Army, finished an order to his Army on non-fraternization with the Germans with the words:

We must remember always that these are the people who, twice in the last thirty years, have deliberately brought us to war.

Few of his soldiers would have needed reminding. Most of those over forty-five years old, of whom there were plenty, particularly in senior positions, had fought in the previous contest; as had the fathers, uncles and elder brothers of those in this round too young to have participated in the preceding one. The strength of feeling about the need to defeat the regime which held power in Germany is borne out by the substantial number of conscientious objectors who served as medical orderlies in the Second World War in all theatres. It was unnecessary, as in the First World War, for the Allied press to invent stories of the Hun raping nuns, or bayoneting babies. As the Allies were to discover, atrocities, beyond the comprehension of the British newspaper proprietors of 1914-18, were there for all to see when the armies arrived in Germany and the occupied territories.

An officer who fought in north-west Europe has written: It was an amazing campaign - the quality of the staff work has probably never been rivalled (people were so experienced by then) and the expertise of the old hands who had survived the war so far too was unrivalled (although many of them were pretty 'cagey' - and rightly so!), whilst the overall quality of the lower ranks (many very, very young and flung into battle with little real preparation) was very variable. The best were super, but too many were not really up to the demands of the tougher parts of the fighting.

The deficiencies cannot be laid at the door of the young men. As the last winter of the War approached, there was a serious shortage of well trained manpower available to the British. There were all too few remaining, particularly in the infantry, of those who had trained together in the battle camps in the years before D-Day. Individual reinforcements need training as part of the team. Unless formations were withdrawn from the battle for protracted periods, there was no opportunity for this. On the job training is a poor substitute for thorough preparation. Infantry casualties were heavy. There is a perception in the public mind that the casualty rate in this campaign was substantially lower than in France and Belgium in 1914-18. Two examples may correct this impression, at least as far as the infantry is concerned; they were not much lower. In nearly four and a half years on the Western front, starting in August 1914, a particular regular battalion [l] lost 5,110 killed and wounded, giving a monthly loss rate of 98.26, which over a period of eleven months would have resulted in 1,080 casualties. The 2nd East Yorkshires, one of the D-Day assault battalions, lost a total of 1,072 dead, wounded and missing in the eleven months between Normandy and reaching Bremen. This was not exceptional. Indeed over a shorter period, the 4th Somerset Light Infantry lost 1,313 killed or wounded. The 4th Somersets landed in Normandy with the 43rd Wessex Division on 23 June 1944. On 5 July three officers and 62 other ranks were required as reinforcements. Between 14 and 18 July, a further twelve officers and 479 other ranks arrived and even then the Battalion was still below its full strength of 36 officers and nearly 700 soldiers. [2] The 3rd Infantry Division suffered 6,000 casualties in the first two months of fighting in Normandy. In the battle of Arras in 1917, over a period of six weeks, the same Division had 5,400 casualties.

[1] John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire, Sidgwick & Jackson, p. 210.

[2] Sidney Jary, 78 Platoon, Sydney Jary Ltd, p. 2.