Armageddon (104 page)

The battle for Germany began as the largest single military event of the twentieth century, and ended as its greatest human tragedy. More than half a century later, we may be profoundly grateful that its worst consequences have been undone without another war. The men who fought and died for the freedom of Europe received their final reward with the collapse of the Soviet tyranny, two generations after the destruction of its Nazi counterpart.

ENDNOTES

* 
¹
Some modern estimates now place this figure as high as forty million, and it is unlikely that any conclusive total will be agreed.

* 
²
All military ranks given in the text are those held at the time of the events described.

* 
³
Patton had been dismissed from command of the U.S. Seventh Army after two episodes in which he lost patience with combat-fatigue cases whom he encountered in field hospitals. He slapped the men and abused them as cowards. The story eventually broke in the U.S. press, provoking outrage. Months later, when it was decided that Patton was indispensable for the north-west Europe campaign and re-employed, he became the subordinate of his former junior, Omar Bradley.

* 
⁴
One Arnhem wireless-operator suggested afterwards that the disastrous communications failure stemmed not from poor radio terrain, as apologists suggested, but laziness about recharging radio batteries after the many “stand-tos” for airborne operations that were subsequently aborted. This could not be a complete explanation for the disaster—it is known that many wireless sets were sent with the wrong crystals—but may have been a contributory factor.

* 
⁵
All times relating to military operations in the text are given in accordance with the twenty-four-hour clock, while those concerning civilian life are given on the twelve-hour clock—that is, 2 a.m. rather than 0200.

* 
⁶
G-1 is a U.S. Army staff designation. It signifies the staff officer responsible for operations at a divisional or corps headquarters (at regimental level he was known as S-1). Likewise a G-2 was responsible for intelligence, a G-3 for supply. British and German staff organization was similar.

* 
⁷
On 20 July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in a briefcase during a meeting at Hitler’s headquarters, before returning to Berlin to participate in a poorly organized military coup. Hitler suffered severe shock but only superficial injuries when the bomb exploded, while the coup was quickly and ruthlessly suppressed. Investigations, purges, trials and executions of actual and supposed plotters continued until the end of the war.

* 
⁸
General Andrei Vlassov was a very able and experienced Soviet officer prominent in the defence of Moscow, before being captured by the Germans in July 1942. Vlassov, embittered by what he saw as Moscow’s betrayal of his army in the field, and seduced by the Germans’ judiciously humane treatment, agreed to raise an anti-Stalinist force from Russian PoWs. He was successful in recruiting several infantry divisions, whose members preferred German service to certain misery and likely death in German camps. They were notorious for indiscipline and indeed brutality in Italy and Yugoslavia, though some fought with fierce determination in the last phase of the war, knowing what their fate would be in Soviet hands. Vlassov himself was hanged in 1946, aged forty-six. Most of his men who had served in Wehrmacht uniform were either summarily executed or died in the Gulag.

* 
⁹
First Belorussian Front, 179,490 casualties; 2nd Belorussian Front, 59,110; 1st Ukrainian Front, 113,825.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

With a book of this kind, a bibliography would represent a mere virility parade. The published literature is vast, and I have been reading about this period for forty years. Such a list would become a catalogue of hundreds of books on my own shelves, and many more besides. Instead, it seems more useful and relevant to detail books as sources for specific passages of text, and of course for quotations, where appropriate.

Major sources of documents are abbreviated as follows: works from the Public Record Office in London—PRO; the Imperial War Museum—IWM; the Liddell Hart Archive—LHA; the German Bundesarchiv—BA; the U.S. National Archive—NA; the United States Army’s Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania—USAMHI; the Stephen Ambrose manuscript collection at the U.S. National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana—SA; material quoted from the British Second Army’s daily Intelligence Reports, of which a full set is held in the papers of General Sir Miles Dempsey in the Liddell Hart Archive at King’s College, London—Second Army MD; Russian Ministry of Defence Archives—RMDA; Russian State Archives—RSA. A special difficulty exists in the latter case. A foreign researcher is overwhelmingly dependent upon requesting specified material of which photocopies are supplied by RSA staff. Luba Vinogradova has translated aloud for me many hundreds of pages of such material. Some of these documents bear file numbers. Others do not, for which I apologize to students who wish to follow in my wake.

Several German documents quoted in my text were captured by the Russians, and are today held in Moscow archives in Russian translation. No doubt there are linguistic oddities about some of this material, which appears here after yet another transition, into English. I have quoted from several Russian and German published works which I have not myself read, and which are reproduced in other works. I have given references to the original texts, which seems most helpful to students.

A note is due about the source of some German civilian letters from which I have used extracts. Especially in the last months of the war, advancing Allied troops captured large quantities of mail destined for the Wehrmacht or removed from the bodies of German soldiers. The most interesting and vivid of these were translated and circulated among the intelligence reports of the American and British armies. Many of the German letters from which I quote are derived from this source. There is no reason to doubt their authenticity, but names and addresses are sometimes incomplete or inaccurate.

I should draw special attention to the manuscript of the Danish journalist Paul von Stemann. Von Stemann after the war made his home in Britain, and married an Englishwoman. To his deep sadness, he never found a publisher for the memoir of his wartime experiences, which now reposes in the Imperial War Museum. I have written relatively little about the battle for Berlin in my own text, because the story is so well known. But I have quoted extensively from von Stemann’s remarkable description of life in Hitler’s capital, which as far as I know has never been exploited by an historian. I am most grateful to his widow for permission to do so.

Much of the quoted material in this book is derived from personal interviews with the individuals concerned. This raises an issue which is hotly debated among modern historians: how far is oral testimony to be relied upon, especially when it is taken from very elderly men and women? My own answer is that it forms a fascinating, almost indispensable part of the jigsaw, so long as one recognizes its limitations. It would be absurd to rely upon oral evidence for facts and dates. The remarks of many Russian veterans are still deeply coloured by national pride. A reluctance persists to discuss issues which are perceived as national embarrassments. For instance, I asked every Russian Jewish veteran I met about their experience of anti-semitism in the Red Army. All denied its existence, which defies credibility. Likewise, I would not care to offer on oath in a court of law the evidence of some German veterans with heavy consciences.

What personal recollection does for me, as a writer, is to clothe with the flesh and blood of humanity the dry detail of official records and written narratives. At their best, personal memories give a sense of how people thought and behaved, and marginal details of experience which are unrecorded in any official file—the discomforts of a certain tank, what men did in off-duty hours, how they felt about their allies and their enemies, vivid snapshots of personal recollection. Some witnesses, of course, weave fantasies. Others are highly selective about what they choose to remember or to recount. Any experienced researcher develops some instinct about these things, but it would be naive not to acknowledge that a few witnesses’ untruths probably survive into my published narrative. If this is so, I do not believe that they are of a character to significantly distort the text. I never rely upon unsupported oral testimony to make a case on a matter of substance.

A key point, it seems to me, is that it is wrong to suppose that written evidence possesses an intrinsic reliability absent in oral testimony. The scientist Solly Zuckerman once told me that when he wrote his memoirs he researched the minutes of important wartime meetings he had attended in the British Public Record Office. These documents, he said, bore scant relationship to his own recollection of what took place. They merely reflected the personal prejudices of whoever was responsible for keeping the record. It does not matter here whether Zuckerman’s memory was correct or the minutes of which he was so sceptical. The point is that written “evidence” about matters of life and death, which all documentation about the Second World War is, should be treated with at least as much caution and scepticism as interviews with witnesses. Over the years, I have encountered extraordinary deceits in official war diaries and suchlike, often designed to achieve post-facto rationalization of what was, to those who took part, merely a “cock-up” which cost lives. Many wartime military commanders exercised a baleful influence upon the writing of their country’s official histories after 1945. I am an unstinting admirer of Winston Churchill, but his history of the Second World War is wildly unreliable. The essence of all these things is, of course, to strive for a balance of evidence.

This book’s sources reflect a mingling of official records, published accounts, unpublished narratives and oral testimony, as detailed below. I have given references for all original or unpublished material, and for direct quotations from published authors. I have not given sources for oft-published and familiar quotations from leading figures and material in the public domain, which seem redundant.

INTRODUCTION

“Some twenty-seven million”: Antony Beevor,
The Fall of Berlin
(Viking: 2002).

“Perhaps the annihilation”: Victor Klemperer,
To the Bitter End
(Phoenix: 2000), p. 443.

CHAPTER ONE: TIME OF HOPE

“Allies of a Kind”: I have borrowed this heading from the title of my friend the late Christopher Thorne’s magnificent work on wartime Anglo-American relations, which should be compulsory reading for anyone studying this theme:
Allies of a Kind
(Hamish Hamilton: 1978).

“he considered the Russians ‘so foul’ ”: Quoted Sir John Kennedy,
The Business of War
(Hutchinson: 1957), p. 147.

“So we had won after all!”: Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War,
vol. iii,
The Grand Alliance
(Cassell: 1951), p. 539.

“I didn’t work up a great hate”: AI Nicholas Kafkalas.

“Unfortunately [for the British]”: Forrest C. Pogue,
Pogue’s War
(University of Kentucky Press: 2001), pp. 189–90.

“Up till Overlord”: John Colville,
The Fringes of Power
(Hodder & Stoughton: 1985), 3.20.45.

“Up to July 1944”: Lord Moran,
Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–65
(Constable: 1966), 7.5.54.

“Roosevelt envied Churchill’s genius”: John Grigg reviewing Roy Jenkins’s
Churchill
in
The Times,
10.3.01.

“a more perceptive and less romantic”: Conrad Black,
Roosevelt
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 2003), p. 996.

“As [Roosevelt’s] grip slackened”: Thorne, op. cit., p. 395.

“American opinion on the landing”: Kennedy, op. cit., p. 299.

“One got the impression”: AI Lord Carrington.

“Once he and his platoon”: AI Vitold Kubashevsky.

“When correspondents reported”: Quoted Alexander Werth,
Russia at War
(Barrie & Rockcliffe: 1964), p. 898.

“A watching six-year-old”: AI Dr. Galya Vinogradova.

“Yet a Western correspondent”: Werth, op. cit., p. 863.

“A recent American study”: Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett,
A War to Be Won
(Harvard University Press: 2000), p. 451.

“What were you looking for”: Michel Sebastian,
Journals 1935–44
(Heinemann: 2001), p. 618.

“In Bucharest, the Rumanian”: Ibid., p. 611.