Armageddon (2 page)

I suggested to Jorg Friedrich in a television debate, however, that it might be wise for a German to hesitate before saying anything which implies a moral equivalence between Allied excesses and the crimes of the Nazis. I admire the attitude of Helmut Schmidt, Germany’s former chancellor, whom I interviewed about his wartime service as a Luftwaffe flak officer. Asked his opinion about the behaviour of the Red Army in East Prussia, he responded: “You will never hear me, as a German, say anything that suggests a comparison between what happened in East Prussia and the behaviour of Germany’s army in the Soviet Union.”

Some of Hitler’s old adherents remain impenitent, of course. Interviewing a former Waffen SS captain at his home, I noticed on the wall of the lounge his medals and unit badges, which twenty years ago would have been discreetly closeted. After listening to his remarkable tale, I said, intending irony, that he seemed to have enjoyed his experience as a soldier. “
Ach,
they were great days!” he exclaimed. “The two biggest moments of my life were taking the oath to Hitler’s bodyguard in 1934, and Nuremberg in 1936. You have seen the films—the searchlights, the crowds, the Führer? I was there! I was there!” Another proud veteran of Hitler’s Leibstandarte inquired whether I might be interested in helping him to write his memoirs.

The vast majority of men and women who witness great events recall these solely in terms of personal experience. I met a German woman whose anger about the occupation of her house by GIs, the casual theft of cherished possessions, remained as great in 2002 as it had been in 1945. It would have been meaningless to suggest that she should set her grievances in the context of the mass murder of the Jews, the devastation of Europe, the destitution of millions. Only personal experience possessed real significance for her.

I have described the military campaign for Germany, but have made no attempt to embrace every action. This book is a portrait, not an official history. It concentrates on episodes which seem especially significant, and individual experiences which illustrate wider truths. My purpose is to consider how and why things happened, or did not happen, rather than to rehearse familiar narratives. I have dealt briefly with matters discussed in
Overlord,
such as the importance of the inferiority of many Allied weapons, and especially tanks, to those of the Germans. There is likewise little here about the Battle of Berlin. That story has been often told, most recently by the admirable Antony Beevor. For the Berlin battle, I have focused chiefly upon material hitherto unpublished, especially from Russian archives. Some episodes which must be discussed, such as Arnhem and the Battle of the Bulge, cannot fail to be familiar. Yet other sagas, such as those of East Prussia and the Dutch
Hongerwinter,
are amazingly little known. It seems fruitless to revisit the last days of Hitler and his fellow gangsters in the bunker, about which a huge popular pornography exists. This is a book chiefly about ordinary human beings, to whom extraordinary things happened. Although a few of the people I have interviewed are today famous men—Dr. Henry Kissinger, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Lord Carrington—most, by intent, are not.

I have devoted a chapter to prisoners of the Reich. Beyond the Jews who were explicitly destined for death, millions of other people were captives or slave labourers in Germany in 1945. It was a revelation to hear a survivor of several concentration camps observe: “In Auschwitz, you were either alive or you were dead. I have been in worse camps.” Some soldiers ask: did it matter that the Allies took so long to liberate Germany? It was an issue of vital moment for hundreds of thousands of Hitler’s subjects and captives who died in 1945, some of whom would have lived if their deliverers had been able to hasten just a very little more. Consider for instance Victor Klemperer, the Dresden Jew whose awesome diary records his fears and expectation of death, through almost every day of the war years. “Perhaps the annihilation of the English ‘air landing division’ at Arnhem is an unimportant, soon to be forgotten episode,” he wrote on 21 September 1944, “but it is extremely important to me today.”

I hope that readers of this book will find much that is new to them, as its discovery was new to me. Even after fifteen years’ exposure to Western historians, Russian archives remain wonderful sources of new material. I feel no embarrassment about sometimes accepting conventional wisdom. After almost sixty years, it is unlikely that great secrets remain to be revealed about the conduct of the Second World War. The challenge is to improve our perspective upon it, and to reinterpret available evidence. Most new books which claim to have uncovered sensational revelations about the war prove to be rubbish. In the eighteenth century Oliver Goldsmith took a view noted by Boswell: “When Goldsmith began to write, he determined to commit to paper nothing but what was new; but he afterwards found that what was new was generally false, and from that time was no longer solicitous about novelty.” I remain “solicitous about novelty,” but follow Goldsmith’s unwillingness to pursue innovation for its own sake. Many of the stories in this book are not state secrets—they simply represent the setting down of experiences which have been unremarked, and discussion of issues which seem neglected. One cautionary note is a commonplace for historians, yet bears rehearsing for readers. The statistics given in the text are the best available, yet many—especially those relating to casualties—are highly speculative. Error is inescapable when covering a huge canvas and addressing points which will never be conclusively resolved. All large numbers relating to the Second World War should be treated with caution.

I have been writing books about this period for twenty-five years. Familiarity does nothing, however, to diminish one’s awe in the face of the summits of courage some men and women attained, the depths of baseness others plumbed. After listening for four hours to the story of a Hungarian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who lives in New York’s Queens, my wife and I waited for a taxi to take us to Kennedy Airport to catch a flight to London. It did not arrive. I grew visibly anxious. “Relax!” cried my hostess cheerfully. “It doesn’t matter. When you have been in a death camp, you come to see that missing an aeroplane is not very important!” I blushed then, and I blush now, that I could have displayed before such a woman a preoccupation with trivia which is characteristic of the twenty-first century, and which our parents and grandparents perforce shed between 1939 and 1945. My own gratitude never diminishes, that our generation has been spared what theirs endured. I believe passionately in the truth of the words inscribed upon so many war memorials in the United States and Britain—“They died that we might live.”

The first part of this book is chiefly about what uniformed combatants did to each other. Later, emphasis shifts to the human experience of all manner of people who found themselves in Germany in 1945. It should never be forgotten, however, that few of those wearing uniforms thought of themselves as soldiers. The tide of history had merely swept them into an unwelcome season’s masquerade as warriors. They, too, were “ordinary people.” It is sometimes suggested that too many books are written about the Second World War. Yet the stories still untold about the conflict’s human sagas are so extraordinary that it seems a privilege to make a modest contribution to recording them, and to setting them in the context of the most significant event of the twentieth century.

Max Hastings

Hungerford, England

January 2004

THE PRINCIPAL COMMANDERS AND THEIR FORCES

Although the names of many military commanders who feature in this story will be familiar, it seems helpful to offer a brief guide to the chief protagonists on both sides, and their responsibilities.

THE WESTERN ALLIES

General Dwight Eisenhower
, as Supreme Commander, directed Anglo-American operations in north-west Europe from SHAEF—Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—located at Granville in Brittany in September 1944; later moved to Versailles and thence to Rheims. His Chief of Staff was U.S.
General Walter Bedell-Smith
. His deputy was the British
Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder.
The British
General Sir Bernard Montgomery
exercised operational control of the Allied armies for D-Day and the Normandy campaign, but surrendered this to Eisenhower on 1 September 1944, with the consolation from Churchill of promotion to field-marshal.

Under SHAEF’s control were the following ground forces:

The U.S. 12th Army Group, led by
General Omar Bradley.
Under his command were the U.S. First Army (
General Courtney Hodges
); the U.S. Third Army (
General George Patton
); and U.S. Ninth Army (
General William Simpson
). The U.S. Fifteenth Army (
General Leonard Gerow
) was activated in February 1945. Command of American corps sometimes shifted within the armies. At various periods of the campaign, the following U.S. corps served in one or other of Bradley’s armies: III (
Major-General John Millikin
, then
Major-General James van Fleet
from 16 March 1945); V (
Major-General Leonard Gerow
, then
Major-General Clarence Huebner
from 16 January 1945); VII (
Lieutenant-General J. Lawton Collins
); VIII (
Major-General Troy Middleton
); XII (
Major-General Manton Eddy
, then
Major-General Stafford Le R. Irwin
from 20 April 1945); XIII (
Major-General Alvan Gillem
); XVI (
Major-General John Anderson
); XVIII Airborne (
Lieutenant-General Matthew Ridgway
); XIX (
Major-General Charles Corlett
, then
Major-General Raymond McLain
from 17 October 1944); XX (
Major-General Walton Walker
); XXII (
Major-General Ernest Harmon
); XXIII (
Major-General James Van Fleet
, then
Major-General Hugh Gaffey
from 17 March 1945).

The U.S. 6th Army Group in southern France and later southern Germany was commanded by
General Jacob Devers.
It comprised the U.S. Seventh Army (
General Alexander Patch
) and First French Army (
General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny
). For most of the north-west Europe campaign, 6th Army Group—much smaller than 12th—contained five corps: U.S. VI (
Major-General Lucian Truscott
, then
Major-General Edward Brooks
from 25 October 1944); XV (
Major-General Wade Haislip
); XXI (
Major-General Frank Milburn
), together with the French I (
Lieutenant-General Emile Bethouart
) and II (
Lieutenant-General Goislard de Montsabert
).

American corps normally contained three divisions. Each infantry division consisted of three fighting regiments plus support troops. A U.S. infantry regiment of 3,000 men was the equivalent of a British brigade. An American armoured division was normally divided for operational purposes into two “combat commands”—heavy brigades. Among all the combatants, field artillery was integrated into divisions, while heavier guns came under the orders of corps or armies.

The Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group was led by
Field-Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery
, whose chief of staff was
Major-General Frederick de Guingand.
Under its command was the British Second Army, commanded by
General Sir Miles Dempsey.
For most of the campaign, Second Army possessed four corps—I, VIII, XII and XXX, led respectively by
Lieutenant-General John Crocker
,
Lieutenant-General Sir Richard O’Connor
,
Lieutenant-General Neil Ritchie
and
Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks.

First Canadian Army was commanded by
Lieutenant-General Harry Crerar
, and comprised I Canadian Corps (
Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes
) and II Canadian Corps (
Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds
). A Polish armoured division served under Canadian command.

A British or Canadian corps normally comprised two or three divisions, plus specialist troops—engineers, support and logistics personnel. Montgomery’s two army commanders also possessed six independent armoured brigades, which were deployed according to operational requirements. A division—at full strength about 15,000 men, much less for an armoured division—normally fielded three brigades, each composed of three battalions or armoured regiments. The triangular pattern persisted down the hierarchy, so that a battalion comprised three fighting companies, and each company three fighting platoons or tank troops.

Eisenhower also possessed a strategic reserve, First Allied Airborne Army (
Lieutenant-General Lewis Brereton
), comprising I British (
Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning
) and XVIII U.S. Airborne Corps (
Lieutenant-General Matthew Ridgway
). In September 1944, Brereton’s force contained two American and two British divisions. Two more American divisions were added in the spring of 1945, while the British 1st Airborne was removed from the order of battle after Arnhem. Brereton never exercised field command of his formations. These were placed under the orders of local commanders in north-west Europe as operational requirements demanded.

THE SOVIET UNION

Supreme Commander-in-Chief:
Marshal Joseph Stalin

Each Soviet “front”—the equivalent of a Western Allied army group—comprised anything from three to ten armies of 100,000 men, up to a million men in all. The “fronts” in 1944–45 are listed here in north–south descending geographical order, from the Baltic to Yugoslavia:

Leningrad Front:
Marshal Leonid Govorov