The artillery barrage lifted; Jenkowitz popped his head out of his hole. The Amis were coming now, perhaps a hundred of them clambering through the deep snow. He glanced about. On the left, Mueller nodded reassuringly. On the right, Simpfel was readying his rifle. Further beyond Simpfel, he could see Ditz and the Sudeten laying their grenades in a neat row on the lip of their hole. They were ready. "Stay steady, boys!" Jenkowitz called out. "Talk to each other!" "Machtet alles neider!" Simpfel shouted an old German war cry. "Mash 'em all down!" "My Spandau's short on ammo, so I'll be opening fire late." Mueller, ever the cool professional, advised everyone. A few of the guys began firing their Mausers. "Take that, you artillery-loving girls!" Somebody else nailed a GI and taunted, "You don't fight so good man-to-man!" Now the firing was general, and despite all the shouting, Jenkowitz could tell that there were less than a dozen men firing. A dozen men with Mausers and a Spandau could not stop a hundred. He fired his Mauser furiously; he was good and could get off six aimed shots a minute. He got one GI in the leg; another was a dead solid hit in the torso. Onward they came, crawling forward, jumping from cover to cover, and there just weren't enough rifles to stop them. Jenkowitz was scared; this was it. He was going to die in the next few moments when that unstoppable Ami tide rolled over him. But he wasn't going to run and leave his comrades in the lurch. Better to die here. Already grenades were arcing through the air, falling just short of his hole. Then a miracle happened -- shells from a howitzer began falling among the Americans. Somewhere, somebody had found enough ammo to lend some support. It worked. The Americans began running. Jenkowitz looked at Mueller. "That was close."/Psychology What makes men fight? A simple question, on whose answer wars are won and lost. Most soldiers, understandably, don't want to die, so they merely go through the motions. On the attack, they run forward a few steps and then hide behind something. On the defense, they run as soon as the going gets hot. Why do some soldiers carry the attack all the way to the enemy? Why do some soldiers refuse to run? They don't do it for patriotism, or out of a sense of duty or honor. They don't do it because they're afraid of a court-martial; what can they do to you that the enemy can't? Soldiers fight for their comrades, for the small group of men with whom they share their lives. The Germans realized this and built their army around it. Men from one division were recruited from the same geographical region, and kept together in units. They were taught to shout and yell to each other during combat, to bolster their sense of shared identity. The Germans were lavish with medals, pins, patches, and other tangible expressions of achievement. Everybody got some sort of prize. The American Army of World War II did a poor job here. Men from different regions were thrown together in training then scattered to different units. In pursuit of "modularity", units were constantly reshuffled. In contrast to the Germans, the Americans were taught to fight in silence. The system for giving medals was slow, overly legalistic, and chintzy. Man for man, right up to the end of the war, the Germans outfought the Americans. They were buried under an avalanche of material, outnumbered, outgunned, outshelled, and destroyed./ı ∏ ≥† Ç
