Armageddon (69 page)

Enormous scholarly effort has been expended since 1945 upon exploring the Allies’ motives for destroying Dresden. Many researchers, especially Germans, find it hard to comprehend that, in the minds of the Allied planners, the city possessed no special significance. It was merely one among a dozen undamaged urban areas which had been listed for months on Sir Arthur Harris’s target board at High Wycombe—his notorious schedule of unfinished business in Germany. The demolition of itemized cities was essential to the fulfilment of his vision for the triumph of air power. Harris was specifically encouraged to address targets in eastern Germany by Churchill, on the eve of the Yalta conference. The prime minister was eager to demonstrate to the Russians the power of the Allied air forces. Freak meteorological conditions created in Dresden a firestorm—a wall of flame driven by fierce wind—of a kind which Bomber Command aspired to create every night of its offensive, but only three times accomplished: at Hamburg in 1943, Darmstadt in 1944 and Dresden in 1945.

When researching the bomber offensive a quarter of a century ago, the author chanced upon, and revealed for the first time, the RAF’s briefing notes to its squadrons which attacked Dresden. “In the midst of winter,” these read in part,

with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium . . . Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance . . . its multiplicity of telephones and rail facilities is of major value for controlling the defence of that part of the front now threatened by Marshal Konev’s offensive . . . The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front . . . and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.

The banality of this document accurately reflects the almost casual spirit in which the assault on Dresden was mounted. Great horrors in war are not always, or even often, the product of commensurate reflection by those who unleash them. Churchill himself regretted the destruction of Dresden after it had taken place, when the cultural implications were drawn to his attention. But amid the relentless pressures of prosecuting a war, to the prime minister as much as to Harris, Dresden seemed merely a placename on a map until the attack took place. Afterwards, of course, it was scarcely even that.

“This misery has got to stop,” Luftwaffe Unteroffizier Erich Schudak wrote in anguish in his diary after an air raid on 5 March. “What has become of our beautiful Germany?” Yet Schudak could not bring himself to accept that there was only one fashion in which “this misery” would end. On 18 March, he wrote: “Most of the squadron is convinced we have lost the war. To that, I can only say: ‘What weaklings!’ I know things don’t look bright and are getting desperate, but I’m sure we could turn the situation around.” Sir Arthur Harris might have said that, as long as such a spirit persisted among Germany’s defenders, his assault upon Germany’s people had to continue. And so indeed it did.

Henry Kissinger, perhaps surprisingly given his own Jewish background and subsequent political history, is among those who believes today that the area bombing of Germany was wrong: “Yet when a nation had tolerated the murder of so many people, they did not seem to deserve much sympathy.” This point will continue to be argued, with special passion among the people of Germany, through generations yet unborn.

The bombing of the cities and industrial centres of the Reich continued to the very end, destroying some targets useful to the Nazi war effort, and many that were not. On Monday 12 March 1945, a massive USAAF raid on Vienna destroyed its great Opera House. Some 160,000 costumes, together with sets for 120 productions, were consumed in the pyre. Two hundred and seventy people died merely in the cellar of the Jockey Club, which received a direct hit. It took rescuers a fortnight to burrow through the rubble and recover the bodies. “The smell is nauseating and clings to one’s nostrils for days,” wrote “Missie” Vassiltchikov, who had left Berlin to work in a Viennese hospital. The last perfor-mance to be staged at the Opera House was that of Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Marching on the Rhine

ROADS TO THE RIVER

I
T WAS LATE
January 1945 before the Americans and British were done with the Bulge battle, and ready to address operations of their own creation. Hitler’s offensive and its aftermath had already imposed six weeks’ delay upon the advance into Germany. Long before the Ardennes actions were over, however, Montgomery was once more urging upon Eisenhower the case for a concentrated punch at the Ruhr from the north, by his own 21st Army Group with Simpson’s Ninth U.S. Army under command. Bradley was disgusted. At a conference at SHAEF on 31 January, he told Eisenhower that since the Ardennes offensive and the publicity Montgomery had generated, “friendly and intimate co-operation between him and the Field-Marshal was out of the question. He stressed strongly the political importance in the United States of giving the big thrust to an American commander. At present his troops, and to some extent their families, were either indignantly loyal to him, or had had their confidence in the leadership severely shaken. Neither reaction, he said, was healthy.”

Russell Weigley has observed that, while Eisenhower never wholeheartedly committed himself to Montgomery’s cherished northern axis, he showed himself far more sympathetic towards it than the British commander allowed or than American generals thought reasonable. “If the field-marshal had not been too deficient in understanding and tolerance towards Ike to recognize this fact, he might have been able to exploit it to his advantage.” In the aftermath of the Bulge, Eisenhower accepted that Montgomery should be given the chance to make a big push. To Bradley’s fury, he agreed to place Ninth Army under British command until the Rhine was crossed. But he insisted that Montgomery’s offensive should be delayed until the second week of February, to give Bradley’s 12th Army Group the opportunity to recover ground in the Ardennes before the British moved.

Montgomery chafed at this. On the old Bulge battlefield, where First Army stood, the Germans were no longer in any position to go anywhere except backwards. “So far as I can see,” Montgomery wrote contemptuously to Brooke on 22 January, “the Ardennes battle is being continued for the sole reason of keeping Bradley employed offensively . . . I am not consulted in any way about plans for centre or south, or about plans for the front as a whole, and I have no idea what is the long-term plan . . . The real trouble is that there is no control and the three Army Groups are each intent on their own affairs.” The British Chiefs of Staff supported Montgomery’s view that Eisenhower’s armies possessed supplies sufficient only for one immediate big push, which should take place in 21st Army Group’s sector, on the Dutch–German border. In the spring of 1945, shortfalls in supply were still causing immense difficulties. Each month from December 1944 onwards, discharges from all the ports in Allied hands fell short of estimated capacity by 15 to 20 per cent. The British argued once more for giving priority to the northern axis.

At the Malta meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff which preceded the Yalta conference at the end of January, this issue caused some of the most bitter arguments of the war. It provoked Marshall to threaten resignation if the British did not fall into line with Eisenhower. America’s chief soldier “lit out so vigorously that he carried everything before him,” wrote Stimson admiringly. Men great and small were growing weary and fractious after years of war. The Americans’ patience with their allies was wearing thin. Strategy and national pride apart, Montgomery’s personal behaviour in the wake of the Bulge had been so outrageous that there was no possibility his aspirations would be heeded. There were now three Americans in north-west Europe for every British soldier. U.S. predominance was increasing daily. It is no exaggeration to say that, after the Ardennes battle, the Americans scorned Montgomery and anything he proposed. Malta gave Marshall the opportunity “to express his full dislike and antipathy to Montgomery.” The public courtesies of the alliance were maintained, but privately Eisenhower and his colleagues had had enough of 21st Army Group’s commander, and of British pretensions.

The British delegation at Malta understood this, even if it was gall and wormwood to them. “An unsatisfactory meeting with the Americans which led us nowhere and resulted in the most washy conclusions,” Brooke wrote after the war. “I did not approve of Ike’s appreciation and plans, yet through force of circumstance I had to accept them . . . we were dealing with a force that was predominantly American, and it was therefore natural that they should wish to have the major share in its handling. In addition there was the fact that Marshall clearly understood nothing of strategy.” Churchill advanced an impulsive proposal that his favourite general, Alexander, vastly better than Montgomery at rubbing along with the Americans, might replace Tedder as deputy Supreme Commander. The prime minister cherished a delusion that Alexander would put more spine into the direction of the ground campaign. This seemed unlikely, given Alexander’s notorious indolence. Posterity owes a debt to the American Chiefs of Staff for squashing such a folly. Unsatisfactory as might be the existing command structure, with its poisoned relationship between Montgomery and the Americans, it would now persist unchanged until the end.

The great captains of history have always been conscious of what the enemy might do, but they have focused chiefly upon their own intentions. It is one of the strangest aspects of the north-west Europe campaign that, even as Hitler’s armies sank to their knees, they retained psychological dominance on the battlefield. The most baleful consequence of the Bulge was that it reinforced Eisenhower’s fears about German counter-threats. “We must make certain,” he told Montgomery on 17 January, “that he [the German] is not free, behind a strong defensive line, to organize sudden powerful thrusts into our lines of communication. As I see it, we simply cannot afford the large defensive forces that would be necessary if we allow the German to hold great bastions sticking into our lines at the same time that we try to invade his country.” In other words, Eisenhower intended his armies to continue a cautious broad-front advance to the Rhine.

In the early years of the war, the German army conducted offensives of stunning daring: against the British and French in 1940; against the British and later the Americans in the North African desert; against the Russians in 1941 and 1942. German generals felt able to expose their flanks with impunity, because they faced adversaries who lacked the skill and imagination to exploit opportunities. On the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht was forced to change its attitude after Stalingrad and other dramatic envelopments showed how well the Russians had learned their lesson. In the west, however, the Germans were able to withdraw at their own speed from the Bulge, because the Allies made no attempt to cut them off. Allied commanders remained fearful about exposing their own flanks in attack, even when the Germans no longer possessed the resources or mobility to intervene with conviction. Eisenhower’s armies had suffered severe embarrassment in the Bulge battle. The Supreme Commander had no intention of exposing them to further setbacks. After the massive intelligence failure in the Ardennes, he felt no temptation to act aggressively upon the basis of the latest SHAEF assessment—that the German army in the west had shot its bolt. He refused to acknowledge that von Rundstedt’s armies were indeed, at last, on the ropes. He wrote, spoke and behaved as if the Wehrmacht was still the same enemy as that of Normandy.

Montgomery’s demands for boldness would deserve more respect from history if either the British or American armies had displayed the determination and fighting skills to make good his visions. Yet since September 1944 many Allied commanders had expressed dismay about the lack of aggression shown by their troops, save exceptional units such as the airborne and Rangers. After counter-attacking in the Bulge, the Allies had signally failed to seize the opportunity to translate the repulse of the German forces into their destruction. “The Germans appear to be beaten and beaten badly,” Gavin wrote in his diary on 3 February. “With better troops, I see no reason why we could not run all over them. The public will never know nor appreciate this. Our American army individually means well and tries hard, but it is not the army one reads about in the press. It is untrained and completely inefficient . . . certainly our infantry lacks courage and élan.”

Gavin was equally scornful about the manner in which trench foot had been allowed to assume epidemic proportions. He argued that while this was a genuine medical condition, it was preventable by good unit discipline—foot examination and changing socks. In truth, defective American winter footwear was the principal cause. In some formations, however, trench foot had undoubtedly become a convenient alternative to combat fatigue as a means of escaping from line duty. “Poor discipline was reflected by a high trench foot rate,” observed a U.S. Army post-war report, “as it was reflected by a high VD rate, a high court-martial rate and a high AWOL rate.” Several officers were relieved of their commands for failure to address trench foot effectively in the winter of 1944–45. A total of 46,107 cases were reported in Bradley’s armies between October 1944 and April 1945, around 9.25 per cent of all casualties, the equivalent of three combat divisions lost to Eisenhower. By contrast, and as the Pentagon noted with some chagrin, under far worse battlefield conditions the French army in the First World War suffered a 3 per cent trench-foot rate.

At the beginning of 1945, Eisenhower commanded seventy-three divisions in north-west Europe. Of these, forty-nine were infantry, twenty armoured and four airborne; forty-nine were American, twelve British, three Canadian, one Polish and eight French. A further seven American divisions reached the front by February, most of them fresh from the United States. On the other side, seventy-six German divisions were deployed in north-west Europe; a further twenty-four in Italy; seventeen in Scandinavia; ten in Yugoslavia; and 133 on the Eastern Front. This paper order of battle was, of course, misleading. The average German armoured division was now reduced to some forty tanks and self-propelled guns, compared with almost 300 in its British or American equivalents. On 6 February, the Wehrmacht reported a total manpower deficiency of 460,000 men. Many German soldiers would have been medically disqualified from service in the Allied armies. Even with their teenagers and cripples, most Wehrmacht formations mustered less than half the men of their Anglo-American counterparts. While the Allies were extravagantly equipped, the German army was starved of the most essential fighting material. Speer’s efforts yielded a final substantial delivery of new aircraft to the Luftwaffe, but since there were neither trained pilots nor fuel to get them airborne, this achievement was meaningless. Wehrmacht tanks and vehicles suffered flooded filters and clogged carburettors from “Moselle petrol,” a violet-coloured blend of gasoline and alcohol on which they were now dependent, and which made it necessary for tank crews to pre-heat their exhaust manifolds with blowtorches, at severe risk of fire. German tanks were designed to provide five hours’ reliable continuous running, a vital requirement on the battlefield, yet by now it was rare indeed for any armoured unit to be able to achieve this. “Our battery was still fully equipped, and receiving ammunition,” said Karl Godau, a gunner officer of 10th SS Panzer. “Gas, always gas was the problem.”