Armageddon (113 page)
“Twenty-two-year-old Private Harold Lindstrom”: Lindstrom MS, op. cit.
“Private Henry Williams, a New Yorker”: Donald T. Peak,
Fire Mission
(Sunflower University Press: 2001), p. 189.
“What good is all awareness of the peril”: Klemperer, op. cit., pp. 584–5.
“You must have been fascists”: AI Ibragim Dominov.
“Lieutenant Tony Saurma of the Grossdeutschland”: AI Tony Saurma.
“When Ursula Salzer escaped”: AI Ursula Salzer.
“Is there any place that is free from evil?”: Evelyn Waugh,
Unconditional Surrender
(Chapman & Hall: 1961).
“An NKVD report of 26 May”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.96.
“Genrikh Naumovich survived Mauthausen”: AI Genrikh Naumovich.
“Eighteen-year-old Viktor Mamontov”: AI Viktor Mamontov.
“Most of the people from our village”: AI Valya Brekeleva.
“Georgi Semenyak, who survived”: AI Georgi Semenyak.
“Captain Vasily Legun, a Soviet bomber”: AI Vasily Legun.
“I grew up in a world in which”: AI Anita Barsch.
“translated the nation’s tragedy”: D. Volkogonov,
Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1991), p. 509.
“After the defeat of Japan”: Quoted Maurice Matloff,
Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare 1943–44
(Department of the Army: 1959), pp. 533–4.
“This is what we have been fighting for”: Robert Rhodes James ed.,
“Chips”: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1967), p. 414.
“Bands of Army Krajowa bandits”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.96.
“The logistical difficulties were surmountable”: Roy Jenkins,
Churchill
(Macmillan: 2001), pp. 783–6.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first debts for this book must be to Ash Green of Knopf in New York and Jeremy Trevathan of Macmillan in London. Back in the spring of 2001, they offered me the financial backing to make the project possible. This required a leap of faith, since it was more than fifteen years since I had last written a major work of history. During the interval, I had enjoyed a sabbatical masquerading as a newspaper editor. My long-suffering agents in New York and London, Peter Matson and Michael Sissons, deserve the credit for convincing my publishers that I remained capable of putting pen to paper. Michael Sissons also read and made very helpful criticisms of an early draft of my manuscript. Peter James has achieved an enviable reputation as one of the foremost editors in British publishing. My own experience with him leads me to pay homage to his brilliant skills as a shaper of prose, pruner of excesses, arbiter of grammar and logic. If this book is comprehensible to the general reader, as distinct from the military-history buff, then Peter deserves the credit. My text is vastly improved by his contribution.
In 2002, I travelled extensively in the countries whose experiences form the book’s theme. I owe a great deal to the people of five nations who endured my questioning, often for several hours. I am especially grateful to those such as Elfride Kowitz, now Johnson, who also passed me on to their friends and contemporaries—in her case to other witnesses who experienced the horrors of East Prussia in 1945.
Antony Beevor, who has written wonderfully well about Russia in the Second World War, introduced me to his enchanting researcher and translator, Dr. Luba Vinogradova, whose assistance and companionship has been one of the pleasures of preparing my own work. Luba’s charm, together with her obvious affection and admiration for the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, again and again made it possible to overcome the instinctive suspicions of elderly Russians in remote places about a foreign writer investigating their experience. At the outset Luba begged me not to follow the line of questioning pursued by a BBC interviewer, who established his agenda by asking every veteran: “Did you rape anybody?” I had no trouble acceding to her wishes. Interviewing veterans of the Red Army and Russians of both sexes who lived through the war has been among the most fascinating and emotional experiences of my professional life.
In Germany, Nathalie Hillsmann was responsible for locating veterans for me, and organizing my travels. Georgia Wimhöfer, Ingo Stinnes and Angelica von Hase shared the burden of interpreting on my various research trips. Angelica was also responsible for researching and translating extracts from documents in the German military archive in Freiburg. Major John Zimmermann, who is writing the volume covering the last phase of the Second World War in the Potsdam Military History Institute’s magnificent history of the period, gave me some important pointers when we met at the beginning of my project. He was afterwards generous enough to read and make significant comments on my manuscript.
I am indebted to my old journalistic friend Henri van der Zee both for his superb book
The Hunger Winter
, describing Holland’s experience in the last year of the war, and for his assistance in making connections in his country. My own account draws heavily upon his narrative. His former newspaper,
De Telegraaf
, published my appeal for Dutch memories of the period, which produced a deluge of letters and personal memoirs, and enabled me to meet and interview some important witnesses.
In Britain, I researched extensively in the wonderful manuscript collection of the Liddell Hart Archive at King’s College, London, of which I am privileged to be a trustee. Thanks are due to Patricia Methven, its director, and to her staff. Likewise to Stephen Walton and his colleagues at the Imperial War Museum, whose manuscript collection becomes more important to historians every year, with the passing of those who lived through the war. The Public Record Office remains a delightful place to work, as well as a peerless source of information. I am grateful to its military specialist, William Spencer, for his advice and assistance. The staff of the Tank Museum at Bovington provided much useful guidance and advice. I clambered about inside their remarkable collection of German and Soviet vehicles, and rode their working Sherman and Comet tanks. I always find such experience invaluable, in helping to understand what it was like to fight in an armoured vehicle sixty years ago. The London Library and the RUSI Library in Whitehall are peerless sources of relevant published works. I enjoyed the benefits of an exchange of material with Professor Norman Davies, from which he gained little and I learned much. He borrowed a collection of documents I had secured from the Russian State Archive to add to his own huge researches, and I was able to read before publication the manuscript of his authoritative new book on the Warsaw Rising. Roger Moorhouse, who assisted Professor Davies on his own work, also helped me with some German translations. Among the veterans whom I interviewed, I must single out Field-Marshal Lord Carver, who commanded a brigade in north-west Europe, and was a friend to me for many years before his death. I greatly respected his judgement as an historian as well as his record as a distinguished soldier. The same is true of General Sir David Fraser and Field-Marshal Lord Bramall, whose views have significantly influenced my own conclusions.
In the United States, beyond interviewing veterans, for the first time I had the pleasure of working at the United States Army’s Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Its staff were immensely helpful. Its collection is, of course, a treasure trove of books, documents and recorded interviews. Most of its Oral History collection is available in transcript, and its holding of diaries and personal papers of key figures in the wartime U.S. Army is without equal. I owe a debt also to Tim Nenninger at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Its magnificent new building is a revelation after the miseries of researching a generation ago at the NA’s old premises in Suitland, Maryland. The late Dr. Stephen Ambrose became, sadly, a controversial figure in the last year or two of his life. I can only express gratitude that I was able to borrow material from his large collection of unpublished manuscripts written by veterans of the Second World War, together with copies of some privately published memoirs. Such works have become an important source for historians of the period. I am also grateful to Dr. Williamson “Wick” Murray, an historian whom I much admire, for drafting a reading list for me at the outset of this project, of important works on American battlefield performance. I pursued almost all of Wick’s suggestions.
Friends and specialists in three countries were kind enough to read and comment upon my draft manuscript: in Britain, the doyen of military historians Professor Sir Michael Howard, CH, MC, and Don Berry, my former colleague at the
Daily Telegraph
, whose editorial judgement I have always respected so much; in Germany, Gotz Bergander and Major John Zimmermann; in the United States, Wick Murray and a fellow military historian whom I have admired for thirty years, Professor Russell Weigley. The latter’s books, especially his huge work
Eisenhower’s Lieutenants
, remain for me among the most important studies of the American campaign in north-west Europe. None of those above bears the smallest responsibility for what I have written, and least of all for my mistakes. They were invited to offer general comments, before this manuscript was sent to its publishers.
I must thank my secretary, Rachel Turner, who worked for me in the editor’s office of the
Daily Telegraph
for so long, and is once more doing many things for me without which this book could not have been written. It is a cliché for authors to conclude by paying tribute to their wives, yet only writers’ families know how painful it is to live in a house in which a book is taking shape. The proverbial wife’s plea “For richer, for poorer, but please God not for lunch” is set at naught when an author is scribbling day and night about issues which perforce become obsessions. When I tell Penny that my debt to her is beyond payment, she is inclined to murmur: “I’m just glad you know it.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sir Max Hastings was a foreign correspondent for many years, reporting from more than sixty countries for BBC TV and the
Evening Standard.
He has reported on conflicts in the Middle East, Indochina, Angola, India, Zimbabwe, and finally, in the 1982 Falklands War. He has presented historical documentaries for television, including a series on the Korean War. In 2003 he presented a documentary on Churchill and his generals. Hastings is the recipient of numerous awards from the United Kingdom for his books and journalism, including Journalist of the Year in 1982, and Editor of the Year in 1988. He has written eighteen books on military history and current events.
Bomber Command
earned the Somerset Maugham Prize for nonfiction;
The Battle for the Falklands
and
Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy
also received awards. For sixteen years, he was successively editor in chief of the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Evening Standard,
from which he retired in 2002. Hastings has published two memoirs,
Going to the Wars
(2000) about his experiences as a war correspondent, and
Editor
(2003) about his time running newspapers. He makes his home outside London and continues to contribute to newspapers on political and defense issues, as well as writing books.
ALSO BY MAX HASTINGS
MEMOIR
Going to the Wars
(editor)
REPORTAGE
America 1968: The Fire This Time
Ulster 1969: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland
The Battle for the Falklands
(with Simon Jenkins)
BIOGRAPHY
Montrose: The Kings’ Champion
Yoni: Hero of Entebbe
MILITARY HISTORY
Bomber Command
The Battle of Britain
(with Len Deighton)
Das Reich
Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy
Victory in Europe
The Korean War
COUNTRYSIDE WRITING
Outside Days
Scattered Shots
ANTHOLOGY (EDITED)
The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2004 by Max Hastings
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Published in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London. Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data