   Friedrich Holme could barely contain his excitement. So this was battle at last! Everything in his short life seemed to point to this grand culminating moment. He had joined the Hitler Youth when he was ten; at 16 he heeded the call of duty and enlisted in the SS. Now he was a bow gunner in the 12th SS Panzer, the elite "Hitler Jugend" Division, and he was proud.
   The great offensive that would win the war had started four days earlier, and they had done nothing but sit in traffic jams. The roads had been churned into liquid by the passage of thousands of vehicles. Three times in four days they'd become mired, and Friedrich had sunk thigh-deep working to free the tank.
   But now their tank company was lined up in the woods with infantry milling about. They were about to attack! Mueller, the 19-year-old driver, threw the tank into gear and they lurched forward into the open, charging down on the Americans. Friedrich's heart was pounding. His job was to shoot the bow machine gun, but he couldn't see anything to shoot at through the tiny viewing port. He could hear their 20-year-old commander giving directions to the driver over the headset.
   There were explosions: the American artillery. He heard shrapnel bouncing off the Panther's armor, and the ricochet of bullets. Wenkel's voice was tense, frantic. The tank's engine screamed as they maneuvered wildly across the battlefield. They stopped; the main gun fired. Suddenly Friedrich was thrown out of his seat; a tremendous sound paralyzed him. When he opened his eyes, Mueller was dead and he was choking on thick smoke. He tumbled out of the escape hatch; an American pointed a pistol at him. Friedrich Holme, 16, was a prisoner of war.
/Boy Soldiers
     Manpower is the fundamental raw material of any army, and it is always in short supply. Start with 80 million Germans; take out the 40 million women and the 10 million male children, and you've got a pool of 30 million men. Next, remove 5 million old men, and you're down to 25 million. Now take out government workers and public servants (4 million), those who don't meet minimum physical standards (1 million) and workers in farms, war industries, and other essential servics (10 million) and you've got 10 million men for the armed forces. That may sound like a lot, but now factor in the losses they suffer. In the summer of 1944 Germany lost half a million men on the Western Front and another million on the Eastern Front. These were total losses in killed, captured, and disabled. The graduating class of new 18-year-olds numbered only half a million.
     The arithmetic of death is simple and brutal: if you lose 1.5 million, and you replace half a million, that creates a shortfall of one million soldiers. How do you make up the loss? The Germans tried everything. They used foreign slave labor to replace factory workers. They put more women to work in factories and on farms. They combed out all unnecessary rear-area jobs, sending Navy and Luftwaffe troops into the Army. They lowered the physical standards for the Army, and raised the draft age to 60. They also lowered (to 16 years old) the age at which a boy could volunteer. Then they "strongly encouraged" boys to volunteer. They seldom checked a boy's claimed age; there were many 14-year-olds fighting in the German army in the Battle of the Bulge./