Armageddon (5 page)

It is the nature of every soldier in every war to focus overwhelmingly upon his own prospects of life and death, rather than to think much about distant battlefields. The men of the Red Army cared little for the doings of their allies, save that they were thankful for American trucks and canned meat. Among many other commodities, the United States supplied to the Soviet Union 500,000 vehicles, 35,000 radio sets, 380,000 field telephones and a million miles of signal wire. Few Russians were ever allowed to know that they marched to Berlin in boots manufactured by the U.S. under Lend–Lease, or that much of the Soviet Union’s aircraft production was made possible by American aluminium supplies. Moscow never acknowledged that, from late 1943 onwards, only 20 per cent of the Luftwaffe was deployed on the Eastern Front, because the remainder was fighting the Western allies over Germany.

American ships which delivered vast consignments of equipment were rigidly quarantined in Russian ports. Every member of their crews was treated as a prospective spy and political seducer of Soviet citizens. “Three of our agents have been introduced into the dock unloading crews,” the local NKVD chief reported to Lavrenti Beria, overlord of Stalin’s security apparatus, when an American freighter docked at Sebastopol. “The main purpose is to prevent possible attempts to plant U.S. agents in the port, and to prevent possible provocation by hostile elements among the crew, and to prevent any contact between port staff and the crew. Female agents who have received most detailed briefings will be kept in close touch with officers who come ashore.” Yet Roosevelt continued to believe that he could do business with Stalin in a way that Churchill could not. The U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, who had become converted to a deeply sombre view of the Soviet Union, visited Roosevelt in November 1944 to urge the need for much greater American toughness towards Stalin. He emerged despondent: “I do not believe that I have convinced the President of the importance of a vigilant, firm policy,” he wrote. Many Americans were more troubled by the residual imperial ambitions of their British ally than by the designs of their Russian one upon eastern Europe. “The British would take land anywhere in the world, even if it were a rock or a sandbar,” Roosevelt observed caustically to his secretary of state. A letter-writer to the
San Francisco Chronicle
complained that “American boys spilled their blood in Europe to protect the mighty Empire . . . Yesterday in her dark hour England whimpered for aid against the arrogant. Today, the winning of her battle made certain by the blood and wealth of America, England is arrogant.” Washington strove manfully to sustain a working relationship with Moscow, despite relentless Soviet slights.

Russians nursed a contempt, not discouraged by Stalin, for the belated achievement of Overlord. “We spoke very little about the Second Front,” said artillery officer Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “We never felt any weakening of German pressure because of what the Western allies were doing—indeed, we didn’t feel they were doing much. Their campaign was merely a splinter in Germany’s side.” “It was a pity the Americans and British did not start fighting sooner,” said Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov sardonically, observing that he himself had been wounded in action three times before the first Allied soldier stepped ashore on D-Day.

Soviet behaviour towards the West throughout the Second World War conformed to an historic pattern identified by the historian Orlando Figes: “Complex feelings of insecurity, of envy and resentment towards Europe . . . define the Russian national consciousness.” A Rumanian who visited Russia in September 1944 was awed by the hardships being endured by the population, and noted a mixture of arrogance and inferiority complex in Russian attitudes towards the world: “They are aware of their great victories but at the same time fear they are not being shown sufficient respect. This upsets them.” The Russians scorned the political hypocrisy which they perceived in their Western allies. The Anglo-Americans exercised their consciences about the future governance of Bulgaria and Rumania while appearing wholly indifferent to Soviet expressions of concern about continuing fascist dictatorship in Spain. Here were characteristic bourgeois double standards. The Yugoslav partisan leader Milovan Djilas wrote after a meeting with Stalin in June 1944: “I was filled with admiration for the ruthless, inexhaustible will of the Soviet leaders. And with horror for the endlessness of the cunning and evil that surrounded Russia.” John Erickson, British chronicler of the Red Army, speaks of a mood of “embattled isolation” among both Soviet soldiers and civilians.

The Russians revealed to the Western allies next to nothing about their operational plans. American pleas to deploy liaison officers at Soviet Army headquarters were summarily rejected. For all the public courtesies exchanged between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, a spiritual divide separated Russia from its Western partners, which would become an abyss as the season approached to garner the spoils of victory. That majestic wartime phrase “the Grand Alliance” masked the reality that the Anglo-Americans and Russians were joined only by the purpose of destroying Hitler. Whatever Roosevelt’s suspicions of Churchill, the war aims of the United States and Britain were largely unselfish. Those of the Soviet Union were not. Stalin’s ambitions now embraced a lust for vengeance and conquest on a colossal scale. This was understood by every German who had participated in his nation’s three-year rampage across the Soviet Union, or who was aware of what had taken place. It sometimes seemed that the Western allies were mere intruders, uncomprehending eavesdroppers, upon the death struggle taking place between the two rival tyrannies in eastern Europe.

At no time during the autumn and winter was the entire Eastern Front tranquil. But, for five months between mid-August 1944 and mid-January 1945, the line in Poland remained almost static. The Red Army could not have sustained simultaneous operations in Poland, on the Baltic Front and in the Balkans. The Russians needed hard ground to move tanks, and precious little was available in Europe before the turn of the year. It remains just plausible that Stalin could have pushed towards Berlin, and thus ended the war sooner, had the Soviet Union conducted strategy solely in accordance with military objectives. Instead, however, Stalin chose to secure the Balkans before amassing munitions for a new offensive on the Vistula river in central Poland, the decisive front against the Wehrmacht. Zhukov’s armies began an autumn and winter of patient preparation, gathering their strength and extending their immense supply lines before launching Russia’s mighty blow, towards the heart of Germany.

“EVERYTHING IS GOING SO WONDERFULLY WELL”

T
HE PEOPLES OF
the democracies liked to suppose themselves better informed than those of the tyrannies concerning both the war and the world in which they lived. Yet in the autumn of 1944 many American and British soldiers fighting in the west shared an indifference and an ignorance about the misty struggle in the east which mirrored attitudes within the Red Army towards the Western allies. “In those days, we knew so little about the Russians,” said Major William Deedes of 12th King’s Royal Rifle Corps. “We were amazingly ignorant about what they were doing. We were much more interested in listening to Vera Lynn on the radio.” Field-Marshal Montgomery, visiting the Polish division under his command, blithely inquired of its commander whether, at home, Poles communicated with each other in the Russian or German language. He would no doubt have been amazed to be informed that Poland had a longer independent history than Russia. American and British generals were aware of Soviet victories, but knew nothing of Soviet intentions. They were entirely preoccupied with the next phase of their own war, the thrust towards the Rhine. They took for granted the pre-eminence of their own operations, because such is human nature.

American and British soldiers had fought battles in France through June and July which inflicted sufferings upon the infantry as grievous as any of the war, and which indeed matched the unit casualties of some 1916 actions. The British 4th Wiltshires, for instance, had been gravely depleted. In September the battalion’s companies were reduced to eighty-odd men apiece, and many platoons were led by NCOs rather than officers. Captain “Dim” Robbins, a company commander, said: “Normandy had been a shattering experience for us. We hadn’t realized the Germans were quite that good, even though they had nothing like what we had.”

Many men of the British Army were very tired. A few had fought through France in 1940. More had served in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia in 1941 and 1942, through Sicily and Italy in 1943. Even those who remained in England without seeing combat had lived for years amid bombing and rationing, squalor and ruins and family separation. Most felt that they had “done their bit” and, in the case of the Mediterranean veterans, more than their bit. Before D-Day, in 3rd Royal Tanks a mutiny was only narrowly averted. Returning home after three years with the Eighth Army, they were told that they must fight another great battle, and were deeply distressed. Sixth Green Howards, who had campaigned through the desert, Sicily and Normandy, were so depleted by September that the unit was broken up. “We thought: that’s it then. Some other buggers can carry on now,” wrote one of the survivors, Private George Jackson. “But no, we were all split up and sent to reinforce other units that were desperately short of personnel. It seemed unfair, to say the least. Some of my mates were not really young, had wives and kids, while fit young men were still in England driving lorries or doing army accounts.”

Meanwhile American sensitivity about the relative feebleness of the British contribution was growing. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana complained in Congress: “It is hard for me to understand why we, with the biggest army in the world, should find it necessary to draft more men when we have four times as many in the war as the British.” Some important Americans, their president foremost among them, were morbidly suspicious of what they perceived as Churchillian attempts to sacrifice American lives in support of the restoration of the British Empire. The United States had accepted in 1942 the policy urged upon it by the British of “Germany first.” But many Americans, including a few at the summits of command, regarded the European war as regrettable business to be concluded before their country settled accounts with its principal enemy, Japan.

The divide between the Western allies and the Germans and Russians was most strikingly reflected in their attitude to casualties. Stalin’s commanders looked forward to the last phase of the struggle for Europe with their customary indifference to death and suffering, save insofar as these influenced the Red Army’s ability to fight its next battle. The leaders of Germany had conducted a romance with death for more than a decade. They still cherished hopes of final victory, though it was already plain that Hitler would settle almost equally willingly for a climactic bloodbath worthy of the Third Reich’s place in history.

General Dwight Eisenhower’s citizen soldiers, by contrast, were united in September 1944 by relief that after Normandy the end was in sight. Enough blood had been shed. It was good to believe that now it was a matter of mopping up. After the breakout in France, in Captain “Dim” Robbins’s words: “we were told that the German Army was wrecked. It was just a question of crossing the Rhine.” Men thanked their stars for approaching deliverance, and many resolved to take as few chances as possible in the last days. On 28 August, the British Air Ministry circulated a memorandum to all RAF commands about precautionary measures for celebrations of the end of the war. There should be no extravagant or destructive displays, it warned. Commanding officers should ensure that personnel had no unauthorized access to firearms, explosives or pyrotechnics. “Everything is going so wonderfully well,” Colonel George Turner-Cain, commanding the British 1st Herefords, wrote in his diary on 1 September, “with the Huns showing little fight. Most seem content to give themselves up.” Four days later, he recorded: “Rumours flying in streams. Swiss radio says Hitler has gone to Spain and peace has been declared.”

Many Germans seemed eager to abandon the struggle. “A Jerry gives himself up to us in a cabbage field,” Trooper John Thorpe of the 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry wrote in his diary on 2 September. “The water is running out of his clothes, he’s covered in mud and shaking with cold and fright. We give him a biscuit and hand him over to our infantry.” “Dear Mum,” Lieutenant Michael Gow of the Scots Guards wrote home on 1 September, “Isn’t the news splendid? At last it seems that the German withdrawal, which in many respects was as masterly as our advance, has turned into a rout.”

The weary remnants of I SS Panzer Corps found themselves approaching the little town of Troisvierges, just inside Luxembourg, on their retreat into Germany. “We could not believe our eyes,” said Captain Herbert Rink, one of its battle-group commanders.

Down in the town stood the entire population along the main street, flowers and drinks in hand. They were clearly waiting for the liberation forces . . . We did not have much time, if we wanted to beat the Americans to the town . . . We raced out of the forest . . . turned down the main street, keeping a watch to the south, and drove slowly past the waiting people . . . Never in my life have I seen people so quiet and embarrassed. They did not know what to do with their flowers. They looked at the ground. Their hands sank in a helpless gesture.

Fortunately for the people of Troisvierges, the Americans were indeed close behind the SS half-tracks.

A Dutch doctor, Fritz van den Broek, was on holiday with his family near Maastricht. He gazed in wonder upon the spectacle of German occupation troops fleeing eastward on
dolle Dinsdag
—“Crazy Tuesday,” as the Dutch christened 5 September—laden with the booty of half Europe—paintings, furniture, carpets, clocks, even pigs. The doctor thought, “Well, that’s it then,” and took the train complacently home to Dordrecht, untroubled even by the interruptions to his journey caused by strafing Spitfires, to wait out the few days that seemed likely to intervene before liberation. “It was a glorious feeling when we heard of the Allied breakout,” said twenty-year-old Theodore Wempe, a Dutch Resistance worker in Appeldoorn. “The Germans seemed completely panic-stricken. We expected each day to be the last of the war.”