“Four destroyers should have been sufficient to sink us,” a Private Bohle related. “There were nine ships in all. The SCHARNHORST had to fight a lone battle from 12.30 hours to 20.00 hours. And if the destroyers hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have sunk us. It’s actually hard to realise: twenty-six thousand tons of steel and iron and two thousand men all gone! It’s a miracle how they stood up to it for so long, for we received a hell of a lot of hits. There were seven to eight torpedo hits alone. I would never have thought a ship could withstand seven torpedo hits. We were definitely hit seven times. The last three put the finishing touches. The first ones didn’t affect us at all.” Private Backhaus, another survivor of the
Gaining medals that proved one’s bravery at the front was even more important to staff officers and generals than to ordinary soldiers. The general chief of staff of the army, Franz Halder, was completely humiliated by Hitler in a heated argument on August 24, 1942. “What can you tell me about the troops,” the Führer fumed, “as someone who was sitting in the same chair in World War I and yet who has failed to even earn the black insignia for being wounded in combat?”709 Hitler was prodding the deepest wound in the egos of many of the Wehrmacht’s top leaders: never having proved themselves in frontline combat.
Many of the top Wehrmacht generals had been staff officers in World War I and had thus never been wounded, and it was Hitler’s will that that situation not be repeated in World War II. Proving one’s mettle at the front was supposed to be part of everyone’s career, even for staff officers. The idea that generals, too, should be prepared to fight personally was one consequence of this change in the military frame of reference. But not every general took the imperative as seriously as Walther von Reichenau, who swam half naked across the Weichsel River with his men during Germany’s invasion of Poland and earned an assault badge as a field marshal in Russia.710 Most generals focused on status symbols more in keeping with their class: the Knight’s Cross and rapid promotion. Major General Hans Sattler, whose career had suffered a setback when his will to fight was questioned in 1941, turned up his nose at this attitude, carping: “An adjutant who was present there told me that he said: ‘The worst people are the generals; if they are not promoted or given accelerated promotion and awarded the Knight’s Cross, they are discontented.’ What do you think of that, that’s what SCHMIDT says.”711
The weight carried by the most prestigious decorations among high-ranking officers is clearly evident in the conversations between the sixteen generals who were captured in Tunisia in May 1943. Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, the last commander of the German-Italian troops in northern Africa, attracted pity from his colleagues because he had not even been given the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, while Rommel had been awarded the one with Diamonds.712 The POWs in Trent Park also whispered of General Hans Cramer: “He had been recommended for it, but he didn’t get it, and as a result he is furious that he didn’t. He has made every possible effort to get it, and he’ll get it yet.”713 When Lieutenant General Gotthart Franz received word in August 1943 that he was to be awarded the Knight’s Cross for his service in Tunisia, he fastened his Iron Cross First Class around his neck even before the International Red Cross delivered his new medal. Bursting with pride, he wrote home that he could now look his family in the eye again.714 Not everyone in the POW camps was lucky enough to receive retrospective decorations. Lieutenant General Menny wrote in his diary, with a sigh, that he no longer had any chance of receiving the much coveted Oak Clusters. It was better if officers had already racked up all the medals they wanted before they were captured. General Bernhard Ramcke boasted to his fellow detainees that he had received the highest accolades for bravery in both World Wars I and II.
A high-ranking, frontline officer without a sufficient number of medals was sure to be eyed with suspicion by his peers. For this reason, shortly after his arrival in Trent Park, the fortress commander of Aachen, Colonel Gerhard Wilck, felt compelled to justify himself: “I was CO of a ‘Regiment’ in the east. I was in NORWAY for a long time, that’s why I have relatively few decorations.”715
