Armageddon (98 page)
Teenagers often fought on under circumstances in which adult soldiers would have quit. The British found Wunsdorf airfield near Hanover defended by Hitler Youth manning 40mm flak guns, who shot up the point platoon of 13 Para. Sergeant Scott, one of the battalion medical team, rode forward on a motorcycle prominently displaying a red cross. A German bullet shattered his head. Dr. David Tibbs drove forward. A wounded man said: “Please sir, would you remove Sergeant Scott’s brain from my tunic.” Tibbs laid the ghastly object reverently on the roadside. A Sherman disposed of the German flak-gunners. When Tibbs soon afterwards found himself trying to treat one of the enemy wounded, the teenager spat at him and rolled away. Here, indeed, was a triumph for Goebbels.
On 6 May, a “frightful thug” appeared at the HQ of the British 13th/18th Hussars, wearing a Red Cross armband and claiming to be a refugee. On being searched, he was found to have a pistol, and admitted to being a German marine. The adjutant wrote: “After a certain amount of argument, we decided he was a proper wrong ’un, and he was duly dispatched by firing squad in the garage.” Some soldiers’ attitudes to such exercises bemused their comrades. Private Ron Gladman noticed that several men in his company of the Hampshires seemed to enjoy service with firing squads to execute alleged spies and malefactors: “They always put on their best battledress.”
Field-Marshal von Manstein, perhaps the most brilliant of all Hitler’s commanders, disgraced since 1944, had retired to a house in Schleswig-Holstein to await the end. On 3 May, he invited Field-Marshal von Bock to come to tea. Von Manstein’s adjutant was standing outside his commander’s manor-house when he saw British fighters machine-gunning a road nearby. Soon after, von Manstein was summoned to a hospital. The strafing aircraft had hit von Bock’s car, killing his wife and daughter and mortally wounding the old field-marshal. Von Bock, swathed in bandages, lived long enough to murmur to his visitor: “Manstein, save Germany!”
As late as 3 May, in Hungary German troops were still fighting fiercely. A moment of black farce took place in Valentin Krulik’s unit of Sixth Guards Tank Army. The company commander was frying a pan of eggs for some fellow officers when he glanced through the window and saw men running for their lives in the street outside. He told Krulik to investigate. The lieutenant returned to report that German troops were advancing towards their positions. The company commander threw down the skillet and ran outside to check his fleeing soldiers. He fired a tommy-gun burst in the air, which caused them to halt in their tracks. “Boys!” he shouted. “Don’t you know what today is? State Loan Day! Unless you get back to your positions, you won’t get a kopek!” They returned to the line. “We went on taking casualties right to the very end,” said Krulik. “If we hadn’t been willing to take the losses, the war might have gone on much longer. We wanted to get this over. Everyone was now desperate to go home.”
In those days, the innocence of childhood seemed to assume a quality of madness. An onlooker in the village of Niemegle, in the path of the Soviet advance, saw grim German soldiers trudging up the main street towards the line, watched by children who chattered and laughed euphorically, their lips caked chocolate brown. A local confectionery factory had thrown open its gates and distributed its entire stocks to the villagers before the Russians could reach them.
Gottfried Selzer, a young artilleryman deployed on the Czech border, thanked God that the Russians were too busy with Prague and Berlin to trouble much with his own area. On 6 May, a rumour swept through the unit, in common with much of the Wehrmacht at this time, that the British and Americans intended to arm the Germans to fight the Russians. Two days later, as dusk fell, their commanding officer summoned them all. “It’s over, men,” he said. “It’s every man for himself now, so get home as best you can.” The officers rode away on their horses. The soldiers stripped off their insignia and put on white armbands. Then they started walking, among many thousands of others. Selzer was disconcerted “to watch the mighty Wehrmacht falling to pieces in such a fashion.” He and a handful of others crossed the Neisse, were briefly imprisoned by Poles from whom they escaped, then were fortunate enough to be ignored by the Russians as they crossed the Elbe. “We fell happily into the hands of the Americans.” He reached home to discover that his only surviving brother Alois had died in the battle for Berlin on 29 April. His parents were distraught with mingled grief for one son and relief that another, at least, had come home. “I simply thanked God for being alive myself.”
On the morning of 4 May, a delegation of Breslau churchmen called on the military commandant to urge the surrender of the city. Two days later, the city’s commander Hermann von Niehoff went out to meet his Soviet counterpart and offered capitulation in return for assurances about the safety of the garrison. That night, the guns fell silent. About a quarter of the inhabitants of Breslau had been killed or wounded in the siege, 30,000 in all. They had inflicted some 60,000 casualties on the Russians. Little of the great old city survived. Von Niehoff refused the chance of escape in a Storch aircraft, preferring to accept captivity with his men. Gauleiter Hanke, however, eagerly seized the opportunity and fled, never to be heard of again. The Soviet occupying forces embarked upon an orgy of plunder and rape in the ruins of Breslau.
In Czechoslovakia, Field-Marshal Schörner, that dedicated Nazi, maintained the struggle to defend the Reich’s last important industrial region, at the head of a million men of Army Group Centre. On his western front, Patton’s Third Army was already at the Czech border. Russian armies of 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts pressed on Schörner from the north and east. Yet still the battle continued. On 6 May, as the German perimeter narrowed, Czech partisans rose in revolt in Prague and other cities still held by the Germans. They gained the support of General Vlassov, the most senior Russian officer to have entered Hitler’s service, at the head of one of his divisions of mostly Ukrainian soldiers. Vlassov’s men, in those last days, made a belated and futile bid to save themselves from Soviet vengeance by turning on the Germans. Czech radio appealed to the nation to rise.
What followed was similar in kind, if not in scale, to earlier events in Warsaw. The Germans, motivated partly by self-preservation and partly by the culture of massacre which now held sway among the doomed fanatics, found means to suppress the revolt with the same energy with which they had addressed previous risings of Poles and Slovaks. A last tragedy, involving the deaths of 3,000 Czechs and terrible damage to their capital, thus took place even after Hitler’s death. SS men herded civilians out of their houses into the street, where they were mown down. A senior Wehrmacht officer announced that he cared nothing for armistices, that his men would fight on until they were granted passage westwards. German radio in Prague continued to broadcast signals of defiance and to threaten draconian reprisals against any civilian found in possession of arms. Here was another example of the folly of inciting civilian insurrection against regular troops. The Allies, through the BBC’s Czech Service, should surely have sought to deter the insurgents, rather than allow them to immolate themselves. The uprising could not conceivably influence events.
On 8 May, the Russians launched an assault on Prague. They entered the city the next day, too late for a substantial number of its citizens. Churchill suffered a new spasm of dismay when he saw that the Czech capital, too, must fall into communist thraldom. He had raised the issue of Prague with Eisenhower a fortnight before. The Supreme Commander responded that the Czech capital had never played any part in his military plans. “I thought it was too late now to bring the political aspect before him,” observed Churchill sadly to the British Chiefs of Staff. In truth, it was never realistic to suppose that the Czechs’ political destiny could have altered. The Czech government in exile, profoundly alienated since Czechoslovakia’s 1938 betrayal at Munich by Britain and France, had already determined that their nation’s future must lie in alliance with the Soviet Union.
But the Czechs might have been spared their immediate misfortunes by a modest military effort. Bradley believed that Patton’s formations could have reached Prague in twenty-four hours, in time to save the Czechs from the tragedy in their capital. Twelfth Army Group’s commander was probably right. Yet it was Marshall who told Eisenhower to ignore British urging for a push on Prague. “Personally,” said the U.S. Chief of Staff, “and aside from all logistic, tactical or strategical implications, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.”
On 10 May Schörner surrendered his forces, before himself discarding uniform in favour of Bavarian national costume and escaping westwards in a Storch. He was later captured and imprisoned as a war criminal. Some of his men continued to resist the Russians, even after the formal capitulation. In the fighting around Prague, between 6 and 11 May alone the Russian 1st, 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts reported casualties of 23,383, 14,436 and 11,529 respectively.
Though the struggle persisted in the east for days longer, the formal end of the war between Germany and the Allies came on 8 May 1945. Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, former Chief of Staff of OKW and Hitler’s principal military lackey, was brought to a technical school in Karlhorst, one of the few surviving buildings in Russian-occupied Berlin, just before midnight to confirm the surrenders already made to Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath and to Eisenhower at Rheims. Indeed, the ceremony at Karlhorst was rendered necessary by Soviet rage that Keitel had already performed a submission at SHAEF. On 8 May, twenty-four hours later, Allied commanders led by Zhukov were waiting. Tedder, as Eisenhower’s deputy, demanded: “Have you received the document of unconditional surrender? Are you ready to execute its provisions?” Keitel fixed his monocle into his left eye and held up the document agreed at Rheims the previous day: “
Ja. In Ordnung
.” In addition to his medals, Hitler’s chief soldier still wore his National Socialist Party golden emblem. His aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Karl Brehm, was in tears. Keitel removed a glove, signed the surrender and said drily to Brehm: “You can make your fortune after the war writing a book about this—‘With Keitel in the Russian camp.’ ” The Germans departed back to their cells. The Russians spread the table for one of their prodigious banquets, which lasted until 0400. “When those men left this room,” said Andrei Vyshinsky, Soviet deputy commissar for foreign affairs, “Germany was torn from the pages of history. We shall never forgive and never forget.” When General Johannes von Blaskowitz surrendered the German forces in Holland to First Canadian Army, an onlooker wrote that the German delegation “looked like men in a dream, dazed, stupefied and unable to realise that their world was utterly finished.” As a result of Soviet refusal to recognize the validity of the earlier Rheims surrender, the Russians celebrated “Victory Europe,” VE-Day, twenty-four hours after the rest of the world.
SHAEF’s Supreme Commander dispatched a wonderfully succinct cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff: “The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th 1945//signed//Eisenhower.” The leader of the Western allied forces had staked no claims to greatness as a field commander during the campaign in north-west Europe, but he earned the gratitude of history by the forbearance, wisdom and generosity of spirit with which he had managed the march of the Allied armies to victory.
Winston Churchill, to whom more than any other human being the world owed its escape from Nazi domination, broadcast to the British people:
The German war is therefore at an end . . . After gallant France had been struck down we, from this island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia, and later by the overwhelming powers and resources of the United States. Finally almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us. We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing . . .
Flight-Lieutenant Richard Hough was reclining on a heap of kitbags in the belly of a Dakota over the Channel, going home on completing his tour as an RAF Typhoon pilot, when a crewman suddenly pulled open the cockpit door and shouted down the fuselage: “It’s fucking over!” The passengers went mad, hurling kitbags wildly at each other in an orgy of celebration. An RAF “erk,” one of the crew, glanced at the motionless Hough: “Come on, sir, the war’s over. Aren’t you glad?”
“I shut my eyes, swallowed painfully, and lay very still.”
Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov heard the news in the tiny apartment in Leningrad to which he had returned after losing a foot in his T-34 a few months earlier. “I felt a great sadness not to be with my unit,” he said. “I thought of all the things I might have accomplished that I hadn’t. I could have done so much more.” His father had been killed as a supply officer on the Baltic Front in 1944. He himself had lost four crews in action. His family’s home had been destroyed in the siege of Leningrad. “I still felt a terrible anger towards the Germans,” he said.
“It’s over! Europe is at peace!” shouted a signaller at 0200, after picking up a plain-language transmission at the headquarters near Berlin where Yulia Pozdnyakova was serving. She celebrated by drinking some condensed milk, because her corporal would not allow a seventeen-year-old to drink alcohol. “For me, the whole war had been like some terrible fairytale. Now, we laughed and we cried and we wrote letters about how wonderful it was to be alive.”
“We didn’t celebrate the end of the war,” said Private Ron Gladman of the 1st Hampshires. “It was reward enough to have survived.” On 8 May, “three beautiful Red Army reconnaissance men” appeared at the Latvian farm where ten-year-old Gennady Trofimov, together with his mother, grandmother and sister, had spent the last icy, starving months of the war in slavery. The soldiers asked suspiciously: “Who are you?” Every Russian had been conditioned to treat every citizen of the motherland whom he met in German hands as an actual or potential traitor. The Germans in their area had fought to the very last day. The liberated family walked to the local Soviet headquarters and asked how they might get home. An officer said: “Well, mother—you see this horse and cart? You take it, and drive yourselves back to Novgorod.” And so they did, performing a journey of a thousand miles. They returned to find themselves outcasts, the children tormented as “fritzies” because they had lived among the Germans. Not only was Gennady’s father lost, but two uncles were dead. His aunt and her fifteen-year-old daughter had been hanged by the Germans in Latvia in April 1945. They later found one seven-year-old cousin alive in an orphanage, unaware of her own age or identity. The city of Novgorod was a ruin. Yet these indomitable people survived.