Armageddon (21 page)
Many individual German soldiers were likewise unwilling warriors, men born and raised with the same instinctive humanity as their Allied counterparts. But they fought within the framework of an army which was institutionally brutalized. Hitler and his generals demanded of Germany’s soldiers, on pain of savage punishment, far more than the Western allies expected from their men. American and British officers knew that their citizen soldiers were attempting to fulfil tasks which ran profoundly against the grain of their societies’ culture. The Germans and Russians in the Second World War showed themselves better warriors, but worse human beings. This is not a cultural conceit, but a moral truth of the utmost importance to understanding what took place on the battlefield.
Such observations lead in turn, however, to a consideration which might dissuade the democracies from celebrating their own humanity too extravagantly. Western allied scruples made the Americans and British dependent upon the ferocity of their Soviet allies to do the main business of destroying Hitler’s armies. If the Russians had not accepted the casualties necessary to inflict a war-winning level of attrition on the Wehrmacht, the Western allies would have had to pay a far higher price, and the struggle would have continued for much longer.
A
ACHEN, ON THE
Belgian border just forty miles west of Cologne and the Rhine, became the first major German city to fall to the Allies. Hodges’s First Army began its slow, methodical operations to encircle the town in heavy rain on 1 October, after four days’ artillery bombardment of German positions, on a scale that echoed the barrages of the First World War. The first American objective was to breach the West Wall north of the city. Initial air strikes failed. Not merely did they inflict little damage upon the Germans, but a navigational error caused the bombers to kill thirty-four Belgian civilians in a town twenty-seven miles from the target area. The mud made movement tough for infantry and tougher still for tanks. By 7 October, however, the northern arm of the American operation had done its business, piercing the West Wall. 1st Division began to push up behind Aachen from the south. Yet, in the days that followed, repeated German counter-attacks on the American flanks caused grief and delay. Several exposed units of the attacking formation were cut off and destroyed piecemeal.
“Remember those happy days when you stepped out with your best girl ‘going places’?” inquired a propaganda pamphlet of which thousands were fired into the American lines by German artillery. “What is left of all this? Nothing! Nothing but days and nights of the heaviest fighting and for many of you NOTHING BUT A PLAIN WOODEN CROSS IN FOREIGN SOIL!” The Germans daubed a painted message across a house front in one of the villages through which the Americans advanced: “MANY OF YOU WHO COME UP THIS ROAD WON’T BE COMING BACK.”
Huebner, commander of 1st Division, the “Big Red One,” visited one of his regimental colonels. He found this officer in near despair about losses from shellfire: “General,” said the hapless infantryman, “if we don’t get some help pretty soon, the 16th Infantry is just going to cease to exist.” Huebner puffed a pipe with his usual unshakeable calm. “Freddy,” he said finally, “if higher authority has decided that this is the place and the time that the 1st Division is going to cease to exist, then I guess this is where we cease to exist.”
The advance ground painfully on. It was a familiar story: the enemy’s forces were small, but their fierce energy convinced American units of the need for caution. Corlett’s XIX Corps made slow progress. The 30th Division took nine days to advance the last three miles to link up with 1st Division on 16 October. The entire operation cost the 30th some 3,100 casualties, about 20 per cent of its strength. So irked were Bradley and Hodges by XIX Corps’s sluggishness that they sacked Corlett. The emotional Leland Hobbs, commanding 30th Division, burst into tears on hearing the news. He felt that if his men had been able to move faster on the north axis Corlett would not have lost his job.
When the German garrison of Aachen rejected a demand for its surrender, the Americans launched an intense air and artillery bombardment, then committed infantry and tanks. On the evening of 21 October, resistance ended in the devastated city. The operation had exhausted the men of 1st and 30th Divisions. Bradley acknowledged that they would have to be reinforced and rested before they could do more. Allied intelligence estimated that German strength in the west had trebled in the seven weeks since the beginning of September. It is valid to speculate about what might have happened if 30th Division had pressed on eastwards towards the Roer river after piercing the West Wall, as Corlett had suggested to Hodges, instead of pivoting to encircle Aachen. The German garrison of the city presented no significant threat to the Allied advance. The enemy lacked mobility and could have been mopped up at leisure. Once again, vital momentum had been lost for the dogged and doubtful purpose of seizing a landmark.
Just as Montgomery was surely right to bypass the German garrisons of the Channel ports during his dash east in August, so Patton might have left Metz to rot, and Hodges might have driven on eastwards beyond Aachen. Allied operations reflected an unimaginative commitment to winning ground, tidying lines on the map, eliminating ugly bulges and pockets. Commanders sought to gain terrain yard by yard, rather than focus upon the aim of all great generals throughout history—the concentration of combat power for the breaking of the enemy’s main front. On 22 October, Marshall in Washington urged Eisenhower to examine the chances of launching an all-out offensive to end the war by Christmas. Yet by that date realistic prospects of a swift victory had perished. They slipped away when First Army failed to make good its penetration of the West Wall before the enemy and the weather foreclosed the options. Now, Germans were dug deep into the wooded hills that zig-zagged across their frontier with Belgium and Luxembourg. While the Allies retained superiority, the overwhelming dominance of autumn had been lost. The pain that lay ahead for First Army in its winter battles caused many thoughtful officers to lament the opportunity that might have been seized in September, with more imaginative leadership and without the drain of fuel and supplies to Market Garden, Lorraine and Brest.
One further point is worth making. If Germany’s generals had followed the logic of their own fears about what the Russians would do to Germany, they might have saved their own people untold misery by engineering a surrender or even a tactical collapse in the west, to give passage to the Western allies. Of course, they did not do so, and sustained fierce resistance on both fronts. Only in the last weeks of the war did the Wehrmacht in the west give way, while still fighting fiercely in the east. The autumn failure to break into Germany was a mere disappointment for the Americans and British. For the German people, however, it augured disaster. Their fate in 1945 was to prove infinitely more terrible than it would have been had they lost the war in the west in 1944.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Russians at the Vistula
SOVIET WARLORD
L
ONG BEFORE
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin had created within its borders the greatest edifice of repression, mass murder and human suffering the world has ever seen. Hitler possessed greater democratic legitimacy in Germany through the ballot box than did Stalin in the Soviet Union. “Is there still a Tsar?” Winston Churchill’s father, half a century dead, demanded in one of his son’s dreams. “Yes. But he is not a Romanoff,” his son answered. “He is much more powerful, and much more despotic.” Stalin was now sixty-five, visibly worn by the strain of more than three years of war. Yet he retained a prodigious capacity for work. His charm never lost its capacity to inspire terror in the hearts of all who knew how many of those whom “Koba” professed to love he had killed. “Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife,” Stalin observed laconically to Poskrebyshev, his long-serving
chef de cabinet,
when the wretched man’s spouse was dispatched for execution in 1939. Poskrebyshev remained at his post until 1952.
If Stalin did not embark upon a systematic Holocaust, his anti-semitism was almost as profound as that of Hitler. He shared his German counterpart’s sexual prurience, together with an energy in the hours of darkness which seemed wholly appropriate to the nature of his toils. This son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, his face deeply marked by smallpox, had never been a soldier, yet affected military garb from 1941 onwards, to reflect his role as Russia’s supreme warlord. Portraits of Suvurov and Kutuzov, the nation’s great military heroes, were accorded prominent places in his study. Zhukov, however, observed in retirement: “Stalin always somehow remained a civilian.” Like Hitler and in contrast to Churchill, he never visited the fighting fronts—or at any rate never put himself within range of gunfire—not least because he was frightened of flying. He did, however, devote thirty minutes each evening to watching newsreels from the battlefields. “He was of small stature,” wrote Milovan Djilas, “and disproportioned, his trunk too short, his arms too long. His face was pale and rough, ruddy around the cheekbones, his teeth black and irregular, his moustache and hair thin. An admirable head, though, like that of a mountain man, with lively and impish avid yellow eyes . . . One felt the intent, constant activity of the mind.”
Stalin, self-educated, had read obsessively all his life. In the 1930s he and his circle shared an implausible enthusiasm for Galsworthy’s
The Forsyte Saga,
as an exposition of the corruption of capitalism. Now, there was no circle, for Stalin had murdered them all. He stood alone, served only by lackeys: Beria—“our Himmler” as Stalin introduced him—Zhanadov, Voroshilov, Molotov and a handful of others. In contrast to Hitler, Stalin never excelled as a public performer. He broadcast only with reluctance, at moments of crisis. His genius lay in judgement of men, committee management, mastery of the dark recesses of power. He displayed a compulsion to liquidate perceived threats to his authority which was more draconian than that of Germany’s Führer. If the German generals’ attempt to overthrow Hitler in 1944 was feeble, no man ever dared to raise a hand against Stalin. All those who might have done so were dead. Hitler crippled his own war effort by maintaining in power such old Nazi loyalists as Göring, even when their incompetence was plain. Stalin never indulged in sentiment. Those who failed, and suffered mere dismissal, considered themselves fortunate. Most were shot.
In the eyes of the democracies, before 1939 the Soviet Union’s only merit was that it did not practise external aggression in regions of interest to them. Hitler became the enemy of the Western powers not because of what he did within the frontiers of Germany—even to the Jews—but because he sought world dominance. The democracies indulged Stalin, by contrast, because the victims of his tyranny, far more numerous than those of Hitler, were his own people. That perception changed with the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, and Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland and invasion of Finland. As war beckoned in 1941, Stalin embraced a new prototype. “Our benefactor thinks that we have been too sentimental,” wrote Boris Pasternak bitterly. “Peter the Great is no longer an appropriate model. The new passion, openly confessed, is for Ivan the Terrible, the
oprichnina
[tsarist enforcers], and cruelty. This is the subject for new operas, plays and films.” Beyond hundreds of thousands of Russians and inhabitants of the republics whom he killed as state enemies, Stalin’s policies had driven millions more to starvation and even cannibalism. He had gone far towards stripping from the Russian people their heritage of impulsive passion and artistic genius, replacing it with an ice-age universe in which even absolute obedience offered no warranty of survival. Stalin had contrived the destruction of human trust in a society now ruled by terror, manic suspicion and arbitrary injustice. He himself liked to tell a story of Beria, most terrible of secret policemen. Stalin loses a favourite pipe. A few days later, Beria calls to inquire whether it has been recovered. “Yes,” replies Stalin, “I found it under the sofa.” “Impossible!” says Beria. “Three people have already confessed to this crime!”
The German invasion provoked the deportation of entire Soviet subject populations, such as the Chechens and Crimean Tartars, more than two million people whose loyalty to Moscow was deemed suspect. They died in the hundreds of thousands. Stalin’s conduct of his own dominions, in which he had already presided over at least ten million deaths, perhaps twenty million, commanded the respect, even envy, of Hitler. The Georgian shared his German counterpart’s appetite for self-pity in adversity. He was a much cleverer man, however, especially in one vital respect. War made Hitler a fantasist and Stalin a realist.
It is unlikely that any other Soviet leader could have wrung from his own people the sacrifices necessary to defeat the Nazis. “Who but us could have taken on the Germans?” mused a Soviet soldier, Konstantin Mamerdov. Who indeed? Victory demanded the commitment of a tyranny as ruthless as that of Germany, and ultimately more effective militarily and industrially. But for Stalin’s massive pre-war programme to industrialize the Soviet Union, heedless of the cost in millions of peasant lives, it is unlikely that his nation could have manufactured the weapons to resist Hitler in 1941. Once at war, Stalin “was oblivious of the fundamental principle of the military art, that the objective should be gained at minimal cost in human life,” observes one of his modern Russian biographers, General Dmitry Volkogonov. “He believed that both victories and defeats inevitably reaped a bitter harvest . . . It seemed to Stalin quite unnecessary to make the attainment of strategic objectives dependent on the scale of losses.”
The most important “if” of the Second World War is to consider the consequences had Germany not invaded the Soviet Union. The Battle of Britain notwithstanding, Churchill’s island could have been conquered had Hitler’s ambitions not been overwhelmingly fixed upon the creation of an eastern empire. The three years of attrition which followed, before the Western allies invaded France, demanded a price from the Russian people which the democracies were quite incapable of paying. It seems wrong to take for granted the Soviet Union’s passionate resistance to Hitler. It remains extraordinary that its people, who had suffered so terribly from Stalin’s rule, nonetheless rallied to the standard of Mother Russia under his leadership, in a fashion that determined the course of history.
