Armageddon (67 page)

Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen recorded a conversation among America’s top soldiers in which his chief suggested:

that it would be good to fight the Germans all the way to Berlin, to teach them the lesson of death or destruction they have carried to the world. Everyone is in hearty assent. I suggested to Bull [G-3 at SHAEF] that we bomb each town in our path, but “Pinky” protested that this was not our way of waging war. Patton promptly declared that if it was necessary to have military objectives to bomb, he would declare every switchboard in every town a military objective. The need for harsh treatment of Germany is now more apparent than ever.

TARGETS

M
OST OF THE
citizens of the Third Reich, great and small, cherished a sense of outrage about the Allied air assault. Guderian used the opportunity of a radio broadcast to deliver what he called “an appeal to the chivalry of our adversaries. I referred to the Anglo-American air terror. I regret to say that this desperate plea of mine was without success. Humanity and chivalry had both disappeared during those months.” Even those Germans who possessed no love for Hitler, and yearned for an end of the war, felt deep bitterness towards the Allied air forces. Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, a post-war chancellor of Germany, witnessed the destruction of Hamburg. “The sky became black, the sun disappeared. The worst thing was the stench—like being in the kitchen of McDonalds . . . a smell of beef . . . but the beef was people.” Schmidt lost his parents, grandparents, parents-in-law and home to Allied bombing. “It was wholly unjustified, indeed it was inexcusable,” he said passionately, long afterwards.

Few Germans ever acknowledged the legitimacy of the role in which the Allies cast them, shareholders in a monstrous evil which placed them beyond the pale of civilization and the right to mercy. Instead, most of those on the ground perceived themselves as victims of a great injustice. They were oblivious of concentration camps and murdered millions. They saw only their own law-abiding, hard-working, civilized communities reduced to rubble by Germany’s boundlessly vengeful foes. In 1944–45 air attack and its consequences became the dominant realities of most Germans’ lives. “It was a war of despair and mounting torments,” wrote Paul von Stemann, the Danish correspondent in Berlin. “There were no signs that the bombings would lead to a collapse. It was incomprehensible how people struggled on . . . but there did not seem to be a breaking point. It was the great fallacy of the war, that civilians could be brought to succumb by conventional bombing.”

“I’ll describe to you today how our home town looks,” a Heuchelheim woman wrote in misery to her husband at the front.

The middle of Ludwigshaven is flat, and Ludwigstrasse a heap of ruins, only the
Bürgerhaus
is standing. Bismarck street is almost burnt out. Schiller, See Krak and Neidermann completely gone. Ludwig arrived on leave in the morning, and had the most terrifying experience that night: incendiaries on the house. He put them out, but all around is a ruin . . . he got terrible burns on his left hand. One horror follows another. Last week, Frankenthal and Opal Oppau got it. Mannheim and Ludwigshaven are dying cities. Helene Kruck can’t take it any more, she simply can’t . . . she hasn’t got even a bed, so I’m taking her in here so she can at least rest at night. Each successive attack is more terrible than the last. Horror and fear run through every street.

Frau Rothmeier of Idstein wrote to her husband: “We spend most of our lives in the shelters. Our little girl sleeps for 15 minutes, and then I have to get her up again . . . At noon today it was especially bad. Squadron after squadron of bombers were followed by fighters which fired on people and houses. They fly so low you can almost touch them.”

On 1 December 1944, Private Heinz Trammler went home on leave. “At 4 o’clock, I arrived in Hamburg,” he wrote in his diary.

At 5:30, I was standing in the ruins of my house. My heart stood still. It was here that I lived with my wife and children in peace and comfort. Who is to blame for all this? The English? The Americans? Or the Nazis? Had a Hitler not come, there would have been no war. If the Nazis had not talked so big, or put on such a show, or done so much sabre-rattling, we would have peace with those who are our enemies today. Had we retained democracy in Germany, we would still be in accord with England and the United States. It was with those thoughts that I stood before my ruined home.

Few Germans thought as clearly as Private Trammler, but his uncommonly penitent reflections availed him nothing. The diary was found on his corpse by American troops advancing near Hennamont on 13 January 1945.

Dr. Marcus Scaff-Howie was shocked to find villagers near his Bavarian home raking through the debris of a crashed Liberator, searching the pockets of the dead crew for cigarettes and chocolate. “It seemed monstrous that even these decent country folk had lost their reverence for death,” he wrote in his diary. The British Joint Intelligence Committee agreed. Its members suggested in a report composed in the autumn of 1944 that the emotional reactions of the German people had been dulled by the innumerable horrors they were experiencing:

Everyone is convinced that no opposition could prevent the tragedy of the German people taking its fatal course . . . even bombing does not seem to have any influence on people’s morale. It is accepted as an inevitable fate. Nevertheless, there is much more interest in bombing than in events on the fields of battle, not because bombing is expected to hasten the end of the war, but because it directly affects the personal life of the individual. The main question for every German today is: “Shall I be bombed?”

“We discussed why the Germans carried on,” wrote Paul von Stemann.

Our answers were all inadequate. We said it was because they were apathetic, because they were tired, because they had no civic courage or initiative. They were mentally exhausted, and did not have the strength to end the war. When I came home to Denmark I was asked how the feeling was in Berlin. The answer was that there was no public feeling one way or the other. There was no reaction to be observed to the great events of the war. When the army tried to get rid of Hitler and did not succeed, there was no more reaction than if they had been told that the moon was not made of green cheese. It was all now beyond them.

The Berlin diarist “Missie” Vassiltchikov remarked upon the paradox that daylight bomber attacks mesmerized people by their terrible beauty as well as by the horrors they inflicted. When civilians were not in the shelters, they watched the perfect formations of glittering aircraft parade across the sky, inscribing signatures in condensation trails, their bombs often clearly visible as they fell.

The black-out was a dominant reality. “We lived in a dark world,” said Klaus Fischer, who lived in Jena in central Germany. “Even in the daylight hours you couldn’t see where you were going in the street cars with their windows painted black. At night you sometimes saw people in the street trying to read newspapers by moonlight.” The first alarm sounded when enemy aircraft were 120 miles away—perhaps forty minutes’ flying time. As soon as the sirens were heard, people knew that it was time to turn on the radio, fill the bath with water, turn off the gas. Families checked that luggage, thermoses, torches and gas masks were ready in the hall, and dressed children. In cinemas, a big V appeared on the screen. A second alarm sounded when raiders were much closer. The words
Flieger Alarme
appeared on cinema screens. The big feature stopped until the all-clear sounded. It was time to descend to the shelters, there to sit reading uneasily, listening in silence to the dull thunder above, or chatting in tense, muted tones to relations and neighbours. In Hamburg, Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg recorded in February 1945 that she and her fellow citizens had suffered five early warnings and three proper alarms in a single day and night “during this period of vast, general distress, of certain extinction.”

Although Germany’s armament production figures continued to rise through much of 1944, these would undoubtedly have been very much higher but for the effects of bombing on both plant and the workforce. In 1944, the Ford plant in Cologne reported 25 per cent absenteeism, and BMW in Munich 20 per cent. Such figures represented severe disruption of shift patterns and orderly working. Anyone who said that he was not frightened of being bombed was a liar or a fool. There was a glass-blower in Jena who always refused to go down to shelters when there a raid: “Either it gets you or it doesn’t,” the man shrugged fatalistically. “It” finally got him, like so many other people, in March 1945. Fires often burned for days, because there were too few engines to address the hundreds of conflagrations started by a big attack.

It would be mistaken to suppose that air-raid shelters represented havens of security. Many thousands of people asphyxiated in their subterranean gloom. Amid the fires created by a heavy attack, intense heat killed. Sometimes burst boilers or water mains drowned or cooked underground fugitives. During every attack, scenes of terror were played out among those seeking sanctuary. Twelve-year-old Vilda Geertz, in Hamburg, like many children treated the first raids as a game. But, as the attacks intensified, she saw the naked panic in the streets when alerts sounded, the tearful adults, people fighting each other to get through the doors into the shelters. Once inside, when the bombs began to fall, the whole world seemed to shake. Almost everyone suffered in some degree from claustrophobia. “I came to live in a fantasy world, in my books, because reality was so terrible.”

Frau Husle of Cologne wrote to her husband, a corporal in Model’s army, “The streetcars don’t run, the Neumarkt looks as if it had been ploughed. We have no water or electricity and very little gas. Candlelight may be romantic at Christmas, or if two people are together, but when I am so lonely it makes me very unhappy. My nerves are completely finished. One day you will see me again, but it is better not to think about it. If my hair has turned white it won’t matter—or will it???” Early in the air war, the authorities urged city-dwellers to send a trunk of clothes and possessions to some friend or relation in a less vulnerable area. That way, if their house was destroyed, they could retain some of the bare necessities of life. When Joyce Kuhns fled westward from Breslau with her three small children in January 1945, after many adventures she arrived at last on the doorstep of a friend in Halle. With the help of the caretaker, she gratefully dragged from the cellar a trunk of clothes she had sent there months before. Next night there was an air raid. When she and her children returned from the shelter, the house and the trunk had disappeared. Only the body of the caretaker remained.

When Allied aircrews saw black puffs of flak pockmarking the sky around them, they felt fear and often animosity towards the gunners beneath. Yet most of the crews of those hated flak guns were teenagers, too young to have been allowed to fly. Hans Moser was the sixteen-year-old son of a government official from Nuremberg, manning a 105mm gun named Bertha at a synthetic-oil plant in Upper Silesia. Between attacks, he and his comrades were expected to continue with homework, and even to attend some school classes in the battery huts. The teenage gunners were supposed to receive an allowance of a pint of milk a day to build their strength, though this never reached them. Moser, who was nicknamed “Moses,” walked to church every Sunday with a friend named Georg, who intended himself for the priesthood after the war. They sat in the pews among a congregation of sturdy local peasants. “We were so young that we didn’t think very deeply about things,” said Moser. “We simply accepted that this was how life was.”

In their chilly barracks after hours, girls played no part in their thoughts. They talked about schoolwork, played chess and read Karl May Western novels. They slept a lot and nursed their hunger, because they were at an age when boys are always hungry. Most of the time, their greatest enemy was boredom. Perhaps every three weeks, there was a raid. As they stood to their guns, there was a long, tense period of expectation. The smoke generators masking the oil plant began to pour forth steep columns of oily fumes, designed to confuse the enemy’s bomb-aimers. The unit doctor told the boys sternly that they should try to empty their bowels before an attack, because it would thus be easier to treat them if their intestines were pierced by shrapnel. When a raid began, as the gunners sweated to load and fire Bertha, they gazed up at the huge silver formations, resenting what they saw as the arrogant security of the crews, so confident of dumping their loads of terror and returning home for supper.

The gun crews cheered uproariously when they saw a plane suddenly bleed black smoke and plunge downwards. Once, an American flier fell beside their battery on his parachute. He had lost a leg, but remained conscious. The boys crowded curiously around him, and were amazed to hear him address them in fluent German. His name was Richard Radlinger. “Why do you come here attacking us?” the gunners demanded. The airman replied easily: “We’ll all have a beer together after the war.” Then he was taken away to a military hospital. After every raid, the oil plant looked a mess of wreckage and tangled steel. The gunners were amazed that within two or three days it always seemed able to resume production.

Throughout the air war, there were many cases of Germans wreaking summary vengeance upon shot-down airmen. When Richard Burt, a Liberator gunner from Utah, was being escorted through Vienna after being shot down, an elderly civilian began to curse him and belabour him with his umbrella. Burt’s guard restrained him. As Carl Fyler was taken to Bremen rail station after parachuting from his B-17, civilians shouted at him: “
Terrorflieger! Schweinhund!
Chicago gangster!” Sometimes, German bitterness had much deadlier consequences. Lieutenant Henry Docherty, co-pilot of a B-17, was badly beaten up in front of the mayor of Spandau. Docherty reported seeing four RAF fliers hung from telegraph poles. A Nazi SA man drove up to a house where a British airman was being held and asked: “Where is the pig?” The flier was lying on the floor, his face bleeding. The SA man shot him in the stomach, and told one of the guards to finish him off, which the man did.