Armageddon
Contents
THE PRINCIPAL COMMANDERS AND THEIR FORCES
THREE:
The Frontiers of Germany
FOUR:
The Russians at the Vistula
EIGHT:
The Bulge: An American Epic
TEN:
Blood and Ice: East Prussia
ELEVEN:
Firestorms: War in the Sky
THIRTEEN:
Prisoners of the Reich
FIFTEEN:
“The Earth Will Shake as We Leave the Scene”
For Penny, who makes it all possible
Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.
—Winston Churchill, 6 February 1945
We were living an existence in which people’s lives had absolutely no value. All that seemed important was to stay alive oneself.
—Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, Red Army
INTRODUCTION
A dictionary defines Armageddon: “The site of the decisive battle on the Day of Judgement; hence, a final contest on a grand scale.” The last campaigns of the Second World War in Europe locked in bloody embrace more than a hundred million people within and without the frontiers of Hitler’s Greater Reich. Their outcome drastically influenced the lives of many more. The Second World War was the most disastrous human experience in history. Its closing months provided an appropriately terrible climax.
Armageddon
has its origins in my earlier book
Overlord,
which described the 1944 D-Day invasion of Europe and the campaign in Normandy. The narrative ended with the American and British breakthrough in August, followed by a triumphant dash across France. Many Allied soldiers believed that the collapse of Hitler’s empire must swiftly follow. I concluded
Overlord:
The battles in Holland and along the German border so often seem to belong to a different age from those of Normandy that it is startling to reflect that Arnhem was fought less than a month after Falaise; that within weeks of suffering one of the greatest catastrophes of modern history, the Germans found the strength . . . to prolong the war until May 1945. If this phenomenon reveals the same staggering qualities in Hitler’s armies which had caused the Allies such grief in Normandy, it is also another story.
The early part of this book is that story. The starting point was a desire to satisfy my own curiosity about why the German war did not end in 1944, given the Allies’ overwhelming superiority. It is often asserted that in the west they had to overcome a succession of great rivers and difficult natural features to break into Hitler’s heartland. Yet the Germans’ 1940 blitzkrieg easily surmounted such obstacles. In 1944–45, the Allies were masters of armoured and air forces greater than the Nazis ever possessed.
Most works on the last months of the war address either the Eastern or Western Fronts. This one aspires to view the story as a whole. The Soviets were separated from the Anglo-Americans not only by Hitler’s armies, but by a political, military and moral abyss. I have attempted to explore each side of this, to set in context the battles of Patton and Zhukov, Montgomery and Rokossovsky. I have, however, omitted the Italian campaign. It exercised a significant indirect influence upon the struggle for Germany, absorbing a tenth of the Wehrmacht’s strength in 1944–45, but its inclusion would have overwhelmed my narrative. Beyond archival research, I have met some 170 contemporary witnesses in Russia, Germany, Britain, the United States and Holland. This is the last decade in which it will be possible usefully to conduct such interviews. Many people recall their experiences vividly, but they are growing very old. Those fresh, fit, vital, often brave and handsome young men, whose deeds decided the fate of Europe sixty years ago, are today stooped and frail, the destiny of us all.
It was helpful to me that a generation ago, when researching earlier books, I met American and British generals and airmen who held senior posts such as Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Generals “Pete” Quesada, James Gavin, J. Lawton Collins, and “Pip” Roberts. Today’s surviving military witnesses rarely held ranks beyond that of major. For the perspective of senior officers, in this book I have drawn extensively upon unpublished manuscripts and oral-history interviews, of which rich collections exist in the United States, Britain and Germany. All historians are grateful for the recent flood of privately published veterans’ memoirs. Because this book portrays a human tragedy, rather than a mere battlefield saga, I have also interviewed Russian and German women. Their wartime experiences deserve more attention than they have so far received, other than as victims of rape.
In
Overlord,
I argued that Hitler’s army was the outstanding fighting force of the Second World War. There has since been a revisionist movement against such a view. Several writers, notably in the United States, have written books arguing that authors such as myself overrate the German performance. Some of the revisionists cannot be acquitted of nationalistic exuberance. An American military historian of my acquaintance observed justly, and without envy, that a best-selling colleague had “taken to raising monuments rather than writing history,” by producing a series of volumes which pay homage to the American fighting man.
A U.S. veteran of the north-west Europe campaign praises the works of Stephen Ambrose, saying: “They make me and my kind feel really good about ourselves.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with the creation of romantic records of military experience, which bring a glow to the hearts of many readers, as long as their limitations as history are understood. This book, too, tries to bring alive the experience of those who fought. Its chief purpose, however, is objective analysis. The defence of Germany against overwhelming odds reflected far more remarkable military skills than those displayed by the attackers, especially when all German operations had to be conducted under the dead hand of Hitler. Since I wrote
Overlord,
however, my own thinking has changed—not about the battlefield performance of the combatants, but about its significance. Moral and social issues are at stake, more important than any narrow military judgement.
A cultural collision took place in Germany in 1945, between societies whose experience of the Second World War was light years apart. What the Soviet and German peoples did, as well as what was done to them, bore scant resemblance to the war the American and British knew. There was a chasm between the world of the Western allies, populated by men still striving to act temperately, and the Eastern universe in which, on both sides, elemental passions dominated. Although some individuals in Eisenhower’s armies suffered severely, the experience of most falls within a recognizable compass of what happens to people in wars. The battle of Arnhem, for instance, is perceived as an epic. Yet the entire combat experience of many British participants was compressed into a few days. Barely three thousand men died on the Allied side. Among British veterans of north-west Europe, Captain Lord Carrington remembers with considerable affection his service with the Grenadier Guards tank regiment: “We’d been together a long time. It may sound an odd thing to say, but it was a very happy period. We were young and adventurous. We were winning. One had all one’s friends with one. We were a happy family.” I do not extrapolate from this that British or American soldiers enjoyed themselves. Few sane people like war. But many found 1944–45 not unbearable, if they were fortunate enough to escape mutilation or death. Hardly any Americans felt the hatred for the Germans which Pearl Harbor, together with the Japanese cultural ethic expressed in the Bataan Death March, engendered towards the soldiers of Nippon.
It is a sombre experience, by contrast, to interview Russian and German veterans. They endured horrors of a different order of magnitude. It was not uncommon for them to serve with a fighting formation for years on end, wounds prompting the only interruptions. The lives of Stalin’s subjects embraced unspeakable miseries, even before the Nazis entered the story. I have met many people whose families perished in the famines and purges of the pre-1941 era. One man described to me how his parents, illiterate peasants, were anonymously denounced by neighbours as counter-revolutionaries, and shot in 1938 at a prison outside Leningrad—the modern St. Petersburg. A woman listening to our conversation interjected: “My parents were shot at that prison too!” She employed the commonplace tones one might use in New York or London on discovering that an acquaintance had attended the same school.
After she spoke, another woman said darkly: “You shouldn’t talk about things like that in front of a foreigner.” In Russia, there is no tradition of pursuing objective historical truth. Even in the twenty-first century it remains difficult to persuade a fiercely nationalistic people to speak frankly about the bleaker aspects of their wartime history. Almost all important research on the wartime era is being done by foreigners rather than Russians who—led by their president—prefer to draw a veil across Stalin’s years. Some twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in the war,*
1
while combined U.S., British and French combat fatalities amounted to less than one million. Yet respect for the achievement of the Red Army does nothing to diminish repugnance towards Stalin’s tyranny, entirely as evil as that of Hitler, and towards the deeds that were done in Russia’s name in eastern Europe. The Americans and British, God be thanked, inhabited a different universe from that of the Russian soldier.
As for the Germans, a few years ago I stood in front of a television camera on Hitler’s rostrum at Nuremberg and said how much I admired the courage with which the post-war generation had confronted the Nazi legacy. After we finished filming our researcher, a young German woman who has worked on many documentaries about the period, intervened. “Excuse me,” she said. “I think you are wrong. I believe our people are still in denial about the war.” I have since thought a great deal about what she said, and concluded that she is partly right. Many young Germans are extraordinarily ignorant about the Nazi period. Some older ones seem less troubled by historic guilt today than when I first began meeting their generation, a quarter of a century ago. It is as if the horrors of the Nazi years were committed by people quite unrelated to the law-abiding pensioners who now occupy comfortable urban and suburban homes in Munich or Stuttgart, Nuremberg or Dresden, citizens in good standing of the European Union.
A woman described to me how, in May 1945, she stood with her terrified mother and siblings in a villa on the Baltic when two Russian officers burst in. One began to harangue them in fluent German about the crimes of their country in the Soviet Union. “It was so awful,” she said, “having to listen to all this, when we knew that we had done nothing wrong.” It was hardly surprising that she felt this, as a teenager back in 1945. It seems surprising that her view was unchanged in 2002. There is a growing assertiveness in Germany about the war crimes of the Allies. I share the view of German historians, such as Jorg Friedrich, that the British and Americans should more honestly confront their undoubted lapses, some of them serious. For instance, more than a few Germans were hanged in 1945 for killing prisoners. Such behaviour was not uncommon among Allied personnel, yet it seldom, if ever, provoked disciplinary action. New Zealanders massacred medical staff and wounded men at a German aid station in North Africa in June 1942. No one was ever called to account, though the episode is well documented. The British submarine commander “Skip” Miers systematically machine-gunned German survivors after sinking their ships in the Mediterranean in 1941. Any captured Nazi U-boat commander would have been executed in 1945 for such action. Miers, by contrast, received the Victoria Cross and became an admiral.