Armageddon (77 page)

In the last weeks of the war, there was a dramatic increase in attrition from fausts. In Normandy, these had accounted for just 6 per cent of British tank losses, rising to 9 per cent in Belgium and Holland, 7 per cent in western Germany—and a startling 34 per cent east of the Rhine. Statistics were similar for American armoured units. Crews adopted increasingly desperate methods to protect their tanks, shielding them with sandbags and bundles of logs laced with chicken wire. When the U.S. 3rd Division captured a cement factory at Stolberg, crews ignored warnings that overloading hulls could wreck suspensions, and mixed concrete to lay on the front of their Shermans. “They would grab at any straws,” wrote an armoured officer, “they were desperate to survive.”

By February 1945, new tanks were being sent into service which belatedly matched those of the Germans. The British Comet and American Pershing were formidable weapons, with heavier protective armour and bigger guns. Infantry had to be warned to stand well clear of the Pershing’s high-velocity 90mm cannon when it fired, because of the terrific blast deflected by the muzzle brake. The Pershings fought their first battle in Cologne, and amazed the Germans by their ability to fire on the move, with gyro-stabilized gunsights.

Yet, to the very end of the war, it was remarkable how much damage well-handled enemy tanks inflicted upon the Allied juggernaut. On 30 March, a troop of King Tigers from a German armoured school encountered a column of Shermans advancing along a road with half-tracks loaded with infantry, and three tank destroyers. As the Americans approached a road junction, the Tigers cruised down the line in the opposite direction. “Observers said it looked more like a naval engagement than a land battle.” One Sherman hit a Tiger on the thin armour above its engine compartment, and another German crew bailed out when hit by a white phosphorus smoke shell, convinced that its Tiger was on fire. But the Americans suffered appallingly: seventeen Shermans, seventeen half-tracks, three trucks, two jeeps and a tank destroyer were knocked out in a matter of minutes.

Complaints about the quality of infantry replacements became a strident chorus in the last weeks, as both Americans and British scraped the manpower barrel. A U.S. rifle company commander, Lieutenant Jack M. Brown, lamented the quality of soldiers joining his unit: “The men as a whole are not well trained . . . They will not return enemy fire. They are not fit physically or mentally.” Brown described how an NCO came back from a patrol, complaining that his men went to ground and refused to move when friendly artillery fire was heard passing overhead. “A private came to the First Sergeant recently and complained of having nervous indigestion. He wanted to go on sick call, and as a result was evacuated. Upon questioning this man, I found that the ripple of friendly artillery fire was making him nervous . . . several men suddenly develop aches, pains etc on outpost duty, and request to be relieved. Someone has scared these men to death.”

Likewise in British units, the quality of replacements caused exasperation. David Tibbs ruefully contrasted the paratroop volunteers he had known in Normandy with newcomers in 1945. “Under stress, not infrequently they fell apart morally.” Lieutenant Roy Dixon said: “There was a certain reluctance towards the end to do anything exciting.” Major Bill Deedes: “The willpower to keep going forward under fire weakened as time went on. You don’t become ‘battle-hardened.’ One of the tank commanders we worked with had been brewed up three times. Inevitably, the nerve weakens. We weren’t nearly as good in 1945 as we had been in 1944.” The desperate shortage of British replacements made it necessary to break up more units and send their men to new regiments, creating unhappy misalliances. The 6th Cameronians were fiercely proud of their Scottish Calvinist lineage. When thirty Catholics arrived one day as replacements, they were not made welcome. The Protestant riflemen marched out behind an Orange banner, singing that anthem of intolerance “The Sash My Father Wore.” A bitter sectarian brawl broke out behind the lines. A young officer who tried to intervene was brushed aside by a man saying simply: “You bugger off—this is nothing to do with you.”

Given the desperate need for infantry, the U.S. Army hastily extended the use of African-Americans in combat roles. Their behaviour inspired some encouraging reports from field commanders. Major Roderick R. Allen reported: “they are performing very well. There has been no running away, and there have been some individual acts of heroism which were awarded the Bronze Star.” But others remained sceptical. Brigadier-General Fred Ennis, a senior officer of 12th Armored Division, reported: “We are having disciplinary trouble with some of them along sexual lines, and it would be distinctly helpful if we had latitude in plucking out the trouble-makers.” Lieutenant-Colonel Wells, commanding 66th Armored Infantry, said: “The colored troops as yet are definitely not first-line combat troops, but their performance has been good at sentry and outpost work. They have been very alert and will shoot at anything, but I would say that they are more jumpy than white troops.” It was scarcely surprising that African-Americans incurred problems in combat roles after generations of cavalier, even brutal treatment at the hands of the U.S. Army.

A
S THE
B
RITISH
fought their way into Osnabrück in the last days of March against some dogged resistance, a sergeant medical orderly went forward to treat a wounded German and was promptly shot. Shortly afterwards, the defenders sent a message to the British lines apologizing for the mistake, and said that the man had been taken to the city hospital. David Tibbs climbed into a jeep with the battalion padre, a driver and an immense red-cross flag. They drove unimpeded through the German line and into the city, through a vast throng of refugees, a hand pressed down hard on the jeep’s horn. “The devastation was enormous.” At the hospital, they found a dozen British wounded in one ward—most, as a German officer told them with bleak satisfaction, PoWs who had fallen victim to British shelling. Bill Webster, the man they had come to see, had been hit in the neck, and lay paralysed. The German surgeon who was treating him said he thought the sergeant had a chance of making a recovery, and indeed he later did so. The British visitors drank schnapps with the mother superior and the colonel in command. They toasted an early end to the war. Then they drove unscathed back to the British lines, amid spasmodic explosions as the retreating Germans blew up their ammunition dumps.

An officer of the Highland Light Infantry advancing into Osnabrück told a man to escort a young German prisoner to the rear. Hearing a shot, he asked who had fired. The same soldier answered: “It was me, sir. He kept saying ‘I die for my Führer, I die for my Führer’ . . . well, the bugger’s dead. Aye, he is.” The officer resignedly ordered the man back to his post.

On every side, the Germans were cracking, the Allied sense of victory was growing. Attacking an enemy-held village at the head of a troop of Crocodile flame-throwing tanks, Lieutenant Andrew Wilson felt himself gripped by an “unfeeling madness”:

He looked for places where the enemy might still be hiding. There was a wooden shed. As the flame hit it, the wood blew away in a burning mass, and there in the wreckage was the body of a Spandau . . . The gunner gripped his trigger. Swinging the turret down the front of the burning village, he began firing off the seventy-five at point-blank range. Where, oh where, was the infantry? As always in action, he lost count of time. Wherever he swung the cupola, he saw fire and smoke and the track of destruction . . . Then all at once it was over. By the barn a little group of grey-clad Germans appeared, without helmets or weapons, waving a sheet on a pole. He gave the order to stop firing and opened the hatches. The air was full of smuts and the sickly-sweet smell of fuel. He made a sign for the Germans to come out into the open. They moved slowly. At first there were ten; then there were 30 or 40. In the hush of the moment, he felt a great elation; if ordered, he could have driven through the smoking village and right on to the enemy’s divisional headquarters. Nothing could have stopped him; he couldn’t be harmed. Then the infantry came swarming into the village, dodging the mortar shells which the enemy had started dropping now. In the confusion, the Germans began to bring out their wounded, blinded and burned, roughly bandaged beneath their charred uniforms. Some of them looked at the Crocodile. What were they thinking? He went back to refuel, and remembered his letters. One was from his mother. It said: “We are proud of you.”

Total casualties in the British 21st Army Group for February and March were 5,180 men killed, 21,170 wounded and 2,850 missing. Such numbers did not indicate fighting of great intensity, by the standards of the European war. Yet they represented the equivalent of thirty-five or forty infantry battalions lost to the British order of battle. The overwhelming preponderance of Americans was still increasing. On 15 December 1944, there were 3.24 million men in Eisenhower’s armies, including 1,965,601 U.S. troops in Europe, 810,584 British, 293,411 French and 116,411 Canadians. On 4 February 1945, overall Allied strength had risen to 3.38 million. By the end of March, there were four million uniformed men under Eisenhower’s command, of whom 2,550,037 were American and 866,575 British. In these final weeks of the war, at last the divide between the manpower commitment of the Western allies and that of the Soviets was narrowing. Churchill feared that the world would soon forget the scale of Britain’s sacrifice. He told the Cabinet Office: “Get me the best figures available of the losses sustained by the English in this war . . . Another calculation which might be made would refer to the loss of cockneys. Would it perhaps be true to say the citizens of London, military and civil, have lost more than the whole of the British Empire?”

The prime minister received in response statistics of relative mortality among the Western allied nations in the Second World War: by April 1945, one in 165 Englishmen had died, one in 130 Londoners, one in 385 Australians, one in 385 Canadians, one in 175 New Zealanders and one in 775 Americans. The Western allies possessed no idea of how many Russians had been killed, and no one in Moscow was likely to tell them. The dying was not over yet, but at last the men of the Allied armies were beginning to dare to hope that they might live. By April 1945, Captain David Fraser spoke for millions of his comrades when he observed: “The sense that, with luck, one might be able to see the end became a dominant emotion.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Prisoners of the Reich

T
HOSE INVOLVED
in the cataclysmic struggle for Germany fell into three categories. First, there were perhaps twenty-five million active participants, who fought in the uniforms of one army or another. These men were subject to orders and vulnerable to the brutal fortunes of the battlefield, yet they were protagonists in determining the fate of Europe. Then there were the onlookers—the civilian inhabitants of Germany. Wilfully or no, they had brought a terrible evil upon the world. Yet now they found themselves supine, impotent, mesmerized, as catastrophe descended. The third group were victims—prisoners of many nations held in thrall by Hitler and his minions, powerless to influence their own fates save by the act of survival. This, for most, was challenge enough. It is hard to bridge the cultural abyss between the mannered, comfortable, fatly fed, impeccably uniformed ethos of Eisenhower’s headquarters, from which the liberation of Europe was being directed, and the conditions of animal subjection in which Hitler’s prisoners in their millions waited for Eisenhower’s soldiers to come. Until the very end, the Nazis continued to inflict suffering and death upon the innocent as if the Thousand-Year Reich remained a realistic prospect.

By 1945, the custody, exploitation and murder of prisoners had become the largest activities in Germany beyond the military struggle. In computing scale, it is impossible to distinguish accurately between voluntary and forced labourers. Only approximate estimates are feasible. Even after the killing of nine million German captives since 1939, between eight and ten million foreign men, women and children remained in Hitler’s dominions, held in varying degrees of proximity to death. These figures take no account of entire nations still held captive, such as the Dutch. From every country which fell under Hitler’s sway after 1939, the Nazis herded men and women in vast numbers into the Greater Reich. The circumstances of their bondage varied greatly. First, there were American and British military PoWs. Although these suffered hunger and intermittent brutality, most were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Their captivity was relatively humane until the last months of the war. Many were then marched hundreds of miles under dreadful conditions, as the Germans sought to prevent their liberation. Some thousands died in consequence.

Next down the hierarchy came French, Polish and Italian PoWs, who were treated less well. Many were sent to work for German factories and farms in conditions that ranged between tolerable and barbaric. Some 1.8 million PoWs were directly employed in the German war economy. Beyond these, some 7.8 million paid and forced labourers from all over Europe sustained German industry in the absence at the front or in the grave of much of its workforce. Some 500,000 Ukrainian women, for instance, were shipped to Germany between 1942 and 1944 to boost civilian morale by reinforcing the ranks of domestic servants. Nothing gave greater impetus to Resistance movements throughout occupied Europe than the anxiety of young men to escape deportation for forced labour. Many of those shipped to Germany were treated as slaves. Hundreds of thousands died. Six hundred thousand Italian “military internees” were treated with special cruelty by Germans embittered about the perceived betrayal of the Reich by Italy’s 1943 surrender.

Beyond these again were the last categories: Jews, together with political prisoners and Russians. The Jews were singled out for extermination, and in that sense their fate was unique. In the last year of the war, the pace of killing quickened. Those who survived did so merely by accident, because the Nazi death machine faltered amid the disruptions and administrative inconveniences imposed by defeat. But in considering Nazi servitude as a phenomenon it should be remembered that Germany also presided over the killing of a host of people who were not Jewish. At least three million Russians and hundreds of thousands of other enemies of Hitler died in captivity. Two million Soviet prisoners, Poles, Gypsies and other “anti-social elements” were killed at Auschwitz alone, in addition to two million Jews. Many victims were merely allowed to perish in the concentration-camp system, rather than being deliberately gassed. Every Western allied prisoner who glimpsed a compound inhabited by Russians recognized how fortunate were his own circumstances in comparison. Germany’s excuse was that the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention, and thus that Stalin’s soldiers could not expect its protection. Every day in every camp in which Russians were held, men died of disease, hunger or cruelty.