Armageddon (26 page)

The most notable slaughter, however, was to come later during the purge trials between 1936 and 1939. A reign of terror paralleled only by the Spanish Inquisition, by the Nazis, or by the Mongol hordes was clamped on the Soviet Union. One half to three quarters of the teachers, lawyers, doctors, writers, scientists, military men, intellectuals were hauled before “People’s Courts” after confessions for alleged crimes had been brutally beaten from them. They were then taken out and shot or hanged. No one was safe from the mania of Stalin. Crimes had such alluring names as “deviationism,” “cosmopolitanism,” “Trotskyism,” “adventurism,” “speculationism.”

In the beginning of the war many Ukrainians, White Russians, and even Russians themselves had looked upon the German as a liberator. When the Russians reconquered these lands the carnage of vengeance was epic. Hansen believed Stalin to be the supreme monster of all ages.

The final chapter of the Polish tragedy was played out in 1944, just before the Allied landing in Normandy. Russia rolled back the German lines, moved into the Balkans, and in the north came to the Vistula River directly across from Warsaw.

As the Russians advanced on Warsaw they urged the Polish Underground Home Army to stage a rebellion. The Home Army was the official military arm of the London Poles ... fairly large in numbers and fairly well armed with light weapons. In Warsaw, some 40,000 of the Home Army seized the strong points and controlled the city as the Russian “liberators” approached.

Then followed the epitome of treachery. The Russians halted their offensive on the Vistula, opposite Warsaw, and did nothing to help the Home Army, which they had urged to rebel. The Germans returned to Warsaw with a pair of SS Panzer Divisions and commenced to butcher the city, the Home Army, and the citizenry as the Russians watched.

London and Washington demanded that Moscow help the Poles. At first Stalin stalled by claiming the Poles had exaggerated their strength and doubted if they controlled Warsaw.

The next stall was to claim the Russian armies were exhausted from their offense and needed to regroup and resupply.

Churchill continued to press the issue. Stalin at last showed his bloody hand. In the end Stalin let it be known he had no intention of helping the embattled Poles on the grounds that the Home Army were “military adventurers.” Stalin obviously wanted the Home Army destroyed because it was attached to the London Poles and might stand in the way of his postwar plans for Poland.

In final desperation Churchill asked for permission to airdrop supplies into Warsaw. Because the distances were great it would necessitate Allied planes landing on Russian airfields after they made their drops.

The Russians refused to allow either American or British aircraft to land on their soil.

And so, Warsaw was destroyed and nearly 200,000 of her people killed.

Hansen had continually sided with the British in their demands to be tough with Stalin and to plan Allied campaigns with a political objective also in mind. At the time of the finale in Warsaw, Roosevelt was a very sick man and the State Department, held in low esteem by Hansen, floundered aimlessly.

Earlier, the British wanted the Southern France landing canceled and instead have a landing made in the Balkans. Hansen backed this idea. It took no fool to realize that France, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, and Luxembourg were going to remain in the West. However, the entire Balkans were in doubt.

Hansen contended that if the Allies had landed in the Balkans and placed an army between Russia and Germany we would be in a position to stop future seizures like Poland. As it stood, the West might default Roumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and perhaps even Czechoslovakia. Moreover, eastern Germany and Austria were in danger.

Russian agents had stirred up revolutions in Greece and Italy, but fortunately, Hansen thought, the British commanded that area of the war and weren’t going to let them get by with it.

The final card of Poland was played. After full refusal to even deal with the London Poles, the Russians installed their own “Liberation Committee” out of Moscow to rule the country.

Having thrown Sean into a quandary with stories he had never known before, Hansen pressed his case home recalling an experience with which Sean was intimate.

When the Allies landed in France, in many towns the French Underground staged an uprising to coincide with the Allied attack. As soon as the town was liberated the Frenchmen were too busy celebrating in accepted French fashions and too relieved with the war ending for them to keep a Gallic eye on their city hall.

In fact, some French troops advanced into towns with women in their tanks and fought the last battle with one hand around a bottle or a woman. And while the Allies and the Underground were getting buried in wine and flowers and bosoms the Communists inside the French Underground quietly seized the mayoralities and police machinery of dozens of French cities. It was Hansen who issued the order to disarm the Communists, however French they claimed to be, and eject them from office.

Hansen poo-pooed the asinine “brotherhood” proclamations that followed the “big three” conferences, particularly from Yalta. The Russians subscribed to glowing statements about democracy which they did not understand and free elections which they had never held. At the same moment they paid this lip service to freedom, their hand-picked henchmen closed the book on Poland as a clear and bright signal of things to come.

Hansen decried the fact that the American General Staff had little mentality for the political situation. While the Russians and British knew enough to plan their battles in line with political advantages, the Americans walked a path of purity and innocence. This stemmed from the fact that America never was threatened by strong neighbors on her borders or even needed to keep a balance of power in her hemisphere.

Consistent with American shortsightedness, the British had to plead for permission to move across northern Germany to block it off and keep the Russians from “liberating” Denmark.

In the end American forces concentrated on an envelopment of the German Army in the Ruhr instead of choosing a rapid advance to Berlin, and Patton was called back out of Czechoslovakia. When Churchill made the last desperate plea for the Americans to dash for Berlin he was answered that Berlin had ceased to have strategic value!

When American forces pulled in back of the Elbe River, their Russian allies of the day before had begun the erection of barbed-wire barriers.

Both Russia and America had been isolationist by nature but the war changed that. Russia had become powerful. The long-smoldering giant began his move to the West. America alone could block him now.

In order to gain a right to be in Berlin, America surrendered two German provinces in another of Stalin’s typical, shrewd moves.

Hansen felt that it took no genius to figure out what would happen in Berlin when the giants met head-on. Yet, an America tired of war, unready to believe their ally of yesterday was the enemy of today, unready to accept their new status of world power would call Hansen an alarmist, a man who cried “wolf.”

And until their countrymen understood what was happening a few Hansens and a few O’Sullivans would have to step into the breach ... and halt a tide in an arena named Berlin.

Chapter Thirty-six

T
HE MOMENT OF DECISION
is the loneliest in human life. It must be come upon in stillness and darkness and brooding thoughts and doubts torn out from the deep reaches of the soul.

Sean O’Sullivan was a political scientist. He knew that if Hansen had spoken the truth on the Polish affair then his fears about Berlin were not only reasonable but valid. Now he labored over stacks of supporting documents, weeding truth from fiction.

We have ordered that Berlin’s main radio transmitter, namely the Funkturm, be spared from bombing. Allied liaison with the Russians is so poor that we often times have to find out where the front lines are in the East from the transmission of German newscasts.

Legendary Russian secrecy and suspicion.... Only Churchill seemed to understand it all. In the very beginning he understood Hitler, but his warnings fell on the ears of the appeasers. And, in the end, he understood Stalin. America was suddenly without leadership. Churchill wanted us to make a physical presence in the Balkans and he wanted us to hold fast in Czechoslovakia. Churchill understood the meaning of having our forces reach Berlin first. We, in a sense, had committed the same blunder Hitler committed when he failed to recognize the importance of Moscow in the beginning of the war and turned his armies on the oil fields in southern Russia. One could now speculate seriously if Russia could have recovered from the capture of Moscow.

In our case we turned to the southern German provinces and to hacking up an already beaten German Army in the Ruhr with the fateful pronouncement that “Berlin ceases to have strategic value.”

Yes, human beings make human errors. However, other human sweat and human blood must pay for those errors. As yet, no one would admit an error had been committed; and few, unlike Hansen, understood the dimensions of the error or the gravity of the situation.

In the classroom Sean would have argued that the Russian is a decent human being, peaceful by nature, gifted with scientific genius, driven by normal desires. Sean, in a classroom, might have questioned the Purge Trial statistics or whether the Kulaks were truly liquidated or deserved to be broken up. Such things as Katyn massacres, the deliberate butchery of Warsaw simply did not exist in a civilized world. Yes, a teacher would question and he would theorize.

But Sean’s ability to theorize had been impaired by the months of study in Queen Mother’s Gate. He learned not to hold CIC reports as fantasy. For the most part they were cold-blooded, nonpolitical in viewpoint, nontheoretical, and filled with facts which had to be accurate by the very nature and function of CIC.

Any former ideas or ideals of humanism among peoples had been destroyed the moment Sean O’Sullivan walked through the gates of the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp.

The death of Poland and the fears about Russia were truth:

Warsaw is eighty-five per cent destroyed. A quarter of a million people, mostly civilians were killed. It is positive beyond doubt that a Russian crossing of the Vistula River could have been made and prevented the entire carnage. The destruction of Warsaw and particularly the Home Army was a deliberate, calculated political move on the part of the Russians.

Was General Andrew Jackson Hansen a ranting Red baiter? For ten solid years Hansen had pleaded with the Army to form a large and effective Russian study section. He wanted to train men to speak Russian, to understand the people and the motives and the methods of dealing with them. But, like so many of Hansen’s ideas, this one also hit a brass wall. The time was not fashionable. An American Army with such a department in the days before World War II would have brought the instant wrath of the liberals on their heads. Well, A. J. Hansen would have his Russian study section now, in the flesh, in Berlin.

Sean found himself hypnotized by the summations on Russian characteristics and behavior during the war.

“In the beginning,” Sean read, “the Red Army had been demoralized by the loss of more than half of their entire officer corps by the Purge Trials of 1936–38. A staggering total of 90 per cent of the colonels and generals had been liquidated by Stalin.

“In 1940, the Russian expedition against Finland bared the state of disaster facing the Red Army. The Russians fought in Finland with little heart or stamina. They were mauled and outfought by the Finns. This shocking revelation and the sudden realization by the Russian people that their “Red Army” was far from invincible brought about a frantic reorganization.

“Soviet Political Commissars are attached to each unit of size. In addition, any officer and soldier who is also a member of the Communist Party oftentimes holds the power over the actual military commander. In essence, the Red Army has a dual command; the officers on one side and the commissars and members of the party on the other. The commissars, whose existence depends upon ultimate performance, used every known fear tactic to whip the Army into a fighting mood.

“The Red Army is essentially a peasant army. The soldiers of the Red Army understand one basic plea ... save the soil ... and save the motherland. When Germany attacked and the Red Army reeled back the commissars were clever enough not to appeal to save Communism or the Soviet ‘way of life.’ As in the old days of Bread, Land, Peace ... the commissars cried, ‘Save the motherland!’ Commissars, officers, and party members within the Army literally stood behind their troops with machine guns pointed at their backs to keep them from further retreat.

“The soldier from the West is fairly predictable. One can surmise what a German or a French or Italian group of men will do under certain circumstances. However, the Russian soldier is an Asian, an oriental of sorts and he is completely unpredictable by Western standards. He will fight like a wild man on a given day. On another day, under the same circumstances, he will break and run.

“In the beginning of the war, victory was within German grasp. Hitler, however, balked at ordering a frontal assault and street fight to take Leningrad, setting siege instead. The second great error was the decision not to press for the capture of Moscow but instead to drive for the oil fields in the south. Capture of Leningrad and Moscow, it is believed, would have collapsed Russian morale beyond redemption.

“Furthermore, the Ukrainians, White Russians, Georgians, and other captive states within the Soviet Union have always breathed a fire of nationalism and desire for independence of Moscow and Russia. At first, these, along with thousands of Russian intellectuals, embraced the Germans as liberators. Free from the mental prison of Communism the reception toward the Germans was a startling revelation.

“However, the honeymoon was short. The basic Nazi stock in trade was to consider the Russians and other Slavs as “subhumans.” This Nazi (and German) behavior played right into the desperate Russian propaganda mills. Now, for the first time, the Russian understood fully that the Germans meant to liquidate them as a people or reduce them to serfdom. Out of sheer fear for survival the Russians rallied.