World War II: The Autobiography (75 page)

But the two gentlemen did not seem to have a very high standard as far as cleanliness was concerned. With the usual words, “Frau komm!” spoken in a menacing voice, one of them went towards her. I was about to interfere; but the other shouted “Stoi” and jammed his machine-pistol in my chest. In my despair I shouted “Run away, quick”; but that was, of course, impossible. I saw her quietly lay the baby aside, then she said, “Please don’t look, darling.” I turned to the wall.

When the first Russian had had enough they changed places. The second was chattering in Russian all the time. At last it was over. The man patted me on the shoulder: “Nix Angst! Russki Soldat gut!”

BERLIN: SS FANATICS HOLD OUT AT THE REICHSTAG, 28 APRIL–1 MAY 1945

Anonymous German soldier

Nearly half a million Russian troops encircled inner Berlin on 26 April. Resistance by rag-tag elements of the
Wehrmacht,
the SS and
Volksturm
(Home Guard) was fanatical, and it was with heavy cost that the Russians reached the centre of the city. Early on the 29th they closed to a quarter of a mile of Hitler’s bunker. The next day the Führer of the “Thousand Year Reich” committed suicide.

The close combat boys went into action. Their leader was SS-
Obersturmführer
[First Lieutenant] Babick, battle commandant of the
Reichstag.
Babick now waged the kind of war he had always dreamed of. Our two battery commanders, Radloff and Richter, were reduced to taking orders from him. Babick’s command post was not in the
Reichstag
itself but in the cellar of the house on the corner of Dorotheenstrasse and the Hermann Goring Strasse, on the side nearer the Spree. There he ruled from an air-raid shelter measuring some 250 sq ft. Against the wall stood an old sofa and in front of it a dining table on which a map of the center of Berlin was spread out. Sitting on the sofa was an elderly marine commander and next to him two petty officers. There were also a few SS men and, of course, SS-
Obersturmführer
Babick bending over his map. He played the great general and treated everyone present in the dim candle-lit room to great pearls of military wisdom. He kept talking of final victory, cursed all cowards and traitors and left no one in any doubt that he would summarily shoot anyone who abandoned the Führer.

Babick was tremendously proud of his successes. He was hoping for reinforcements. From somewhere or another, marines had come to Berlin on the night of 28 April, led by the very Lieutenant-Commander who was now hanging about the cellar with nothing to say for himself. Babick never moved from his map, plotting the areas from which he expected reinforcements and even the arrival of “Royal Tigers” [heavy tanks]. Babick was still bubbling over with confidence. For one thing, he thought himself perfectly safe in his shelter. SS sentries were posted outside, others barred the corridor to the
Reichstag,
and Royal Tigers, our finest weapons, were apparently just around the corner. He had divided his men into groups of five to ten. One group was commanded by SS
-Untersturmführer
[Second Lieutenant] Undermann; he was posted south of the Moltke Bridge in the Ministry of the Interior (the building the Russians called “Himmler’s House”) and the bridge itself lay in his line of fire.

Then an SS ensign, aged about 19, came to Babick with the report that Undermann and his men had come across some alcohol and that they had got roaring drunk. As a precaution he had brought Undermann along; he was waiting outside. Babick roared out the order: “Have him shot on the spot!” The ensign clicked his heels and ran out. Seconds later we heard a burst of fire from a submachine-gun. The boy reappeared and reported: “Orders carried out.” Babick put him in charge of Undermann’s unit. Our ranks in the
Reichstag
got thinner and thinner. Part of our battery gradually dispersed, and by the night of 30 April, no more than 40 to 50 people, soldiers and civilians, were left in the cellar. This remnant was now busy looking for the safest possible hiding-places. There we intended to sit tight until the Russians came. But they kept us waiting for another 24 hours. At dawn on 1 May, we heard over our portable radio that the Führer had “fallen in the battle for the
Reich
Capital,” his wife at his side. Goebbels and his family had gone the same way. We were our own masters, at long last.

ORDER OF THE DAY NO. 369, 9 MAY 1945

Stalin, Marshal of the Soviet Union

ORDER OF THE DAY NO. 369

On May 8, 1945, in Berlin, representatives of the German High Command signed the Instrument of unconditional surrender of the German armed forces.

The Great Patriotic War which the Soviet people waged against the German-Fascist invaders is victoriously concluded. Germany is utterly routed.

Comrades Red Army men, Red Navy men, Sergeants, Petty Officers, Officers of the Army and Navy, Generals, Admirals and Marshals, I congratulate you upon the victorious termination of the Great Patriotic War.

To mark complete victory over Germany, to-day, May 9, the day of victory, at 22.00 hours (Moscow time), the capital of our Motherland, Moscow, on behalf of the Motherland, shall salute the gallant troops of the Red Army, the ships and units of the Navy, which have won this brilliant victory, by firing thirty artillery salvos from one thousand guns.

Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the fighting for the freedom and independence of our Motherland!

Long live the victorious Red Army and Navy!

STALIN, Marshal of the Soviet Union,

Supreme Commander-in-Chief

Part Eight

Setting Sun

The War in the Pacific, July 1942–September 1945

INTRODUCTION

If, as Winston Churchill later explained, the entry of the US into the war meant that the ‘Japanese would be ground to powder’, this was far from apparent to the Japanese themselves – even after their defeat at Midway in June 1942. Japan’s navy was still strong enough to give the US Navy a close run at Leyte Gulf in 1944 – the greatest naval engagement in history – while Japan’s land forces had ambition enough in the same year to attempt the invasion of India; only remarkably tenacious defensive action by Britain’s ‘Forgotten Army’, at Imphal, at Kohima – where the combatants were separated by the width of an abandoned tennis court – halted the Japanese U-Go campaign.

But Churchill was right; the Japanese
would
be ground to powder, because they had made a gross strategic error. They had attacked the backyard of the USA, the world’s most productive power, with an under-manned army. The Japanese committed a mere eleven mobile divisions to the Pacific and South-East Asian theatre; to their side-show wars in China and Manchuria they deployed 1.78 million men. When the Americans in the Pacific and the British in Burma went onto the counter-offensive in 1944, no amount of fanatical resistance by the Japanese could overcome the sheer weight of enemy numbers; on day one of the invasion of Leyte the Americans deployed four divisions. The Japanese defenders numbered 16,000 men.

The Japanese soldier, sailor and airman was not well served by his imperial master. Aside from the strategic mistake of overstretch in the South, Japanese military commanders were wedded to hopelessly old fashioned forms of warfare; they preferred battleships to carriers (even after Midway); they used the submarine for reconnaissance rather than for offensive actions against Allied supply lines; they failed to build a fighter defence against US fire-bombing of Japan’s cities; and crucially they failed to develop a convoy system to protect their own merchant marine. The American submarine arm brutally exploited this weakness; in 1944 alone US submarines sunk 2.7 million tonnes of Japanese shipping. Even more so than Britain, Japan was dependent on imports, for food and for raw materials. By early 1945 the average Japanese civilian adult was on a diet of less than 1,500 calories a day, while chemicals for armaments had all but become extinct.

Still Japan refused to bow to the obvious. Indeed, as American troops battled their way, island by island, closer to Japan, the more determined Japanese resistance became. After its bloodying at Okinawa, the US military calculated that an invasion of the Japanese home island of Kyushu would cost 268,000 GI and Marine casualties – more than the US had suffered in the war so far everywhere. This sobering figure encouraged US President Hoover to yield to the temptation to end the war quickly and dramatically by dropping a ‘special bomb’ of almost unimaginable destructive capability on Japan. And so, on the morning of 6 August 1945, a uranium 235 bomb was released from the B-29
Enola Gay
above Hiroshima. Some hours later, as 78,000 people lay dying and dead in the city’s ruins, the White House called on Japan to surrender or ‘expect a rain of ruin from the air’. No surrender being received, an A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. It was enough: on 15 August Emperor Hirohito broadcast to his armed forces and people that, since the war had ‘turned out not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’, his government had decided to treat with the enemy.

In other, more direct, words, World War II was over.

THE DEFENCE OF HENDERSON FIELD, GUADALCANAL, 24 OCTOBER 1942

Sergeant Mitchell Paige, USMC

On 7 August 1942 the Americans landed a division of Marines on Guadalcanal in the Eastern Solomons and seized the jungle-strip airfield the Japanese were building there. The Japanese counter-attacked vigorously, and both sides poured men and
matériel
into Guadalcanal. The island was ringed by a series of massive naval confrontations, while the battle on land centred on the struggle for the airbase, now renamed Henderson Field. The peak of the fighting came in October.

Before we could get set up darkness came and it started raining like hell. It was too black to see anything, so I crawled along the ridge-front until it seemed I had come to the nose. To make sure I felt around with my hands and the ridge seemed to drop away on all sides. There we set up.

With the guns set up and the watches arranged, it was time for chow. I passed the word along for the one can of “Spam” and the one can of “borrowed peaches” that we had with us. Then we found out some jerk had dropped the can of peaches and it had rolled down the ridge into the jungle. He had been too scared to tell us what he had done. I shared out the “Spam” by feeling for a hand in the darkness and dropping into it. The next morning I sent out a couple of scouts to “look over the terrain”. So we got our peaches back.

That night Smitty and I crawled out towards the edge of the nose and lay on our backs with the rain driving into our faces. Every so often I would lift up and call some of the boys by name to see if they were still awake and to reassure myself as well as them.

I must have been two o’clock in the morning when I heard a low mumbling. At once I got Smitty up. A few minutes later we heard the same noise again. I crawled over to the men and told them to stand by. I started figuring. The Japs might not know we were on the nose and might be preparing to charge us, or at any moment they might discover our positions. I decided to get it over with. As soon as the men heard the click of my pin coming out of the grenade, they let loose their grenades too.

Smitty was pulling out pins as I threw the grenades. The Japs screamed, so we knew we had hit them. We threw a few more grenades and then there was silence.

All that second day we dug in. We had no entrenching tools so we used bayonets. As night came I told the men we would have a hundred per cent watch and they were not to fire until they saw a Jap.

About the same time as the night before we heard the Japs talking again. They were about a hundred yards from the nose. It was so damned quiet, you could hear anything. I crawled around to the men and told them to keep quiet, look forward and glue their ears to the ground. As the Japs advanced we could hear the bushes rustle. Suddenly all hell broke loose.

All of us must have seen the Japs at the same time. Grenades exploded everywhere on the ridge-nose, followed by shrieks and yells. It would have been death to fire the guns because muzzle flashes would have given away our positions and we could have been smothered and blasted by a hail of grenades. Stansbury, who was lying in the foxhole next to mine, was pulling out grenade-pins with his teeth and rolling the grenades down the side of the nose. Leipart, the smallest guy in the platoon, and my particular boy, was in his foxhole delivering grenades like a star pitcher.

Then I gave the word to fire. Machine-guns and rifles let go and the whole line seemed to light up. Pettyjohn yelled to me that his gun was out of action. In the light from the firing I could see several Japs a few feet away from Leipart. Apparently he had been hit because he was down on one knee. I knocked off two Japs with a rifle but a third drove his bayonet into Leipart. Leipart was dead; seconds later, so was the Jap. After a few minutes, I wouldn’t swear to how long it was, the blitz became a hand-to-hand battle. Gaston was having trouble with a Jap officer, I remember that much. Although his leg was nearly hacked off and his rifle all cut up, Gaston finally connected his boot with the Jap’s chin. The result was one slopehead with one broken neck.

Firing died down a little, so evidently the first wave was a flop. I crawled over to Pettyjohn, and while he and Faust covered me I worked to remove a ruptured cartridge and change the belt-feed pawl. Just as I was getting ready to feed in a belt of ammo, I felt something hot on my hand and a sharp vibration. Some damned slopehead with a light machine-gun had fired a full burst into the feeding mechanism and wrecked the gun.