Armageddon (33 page)

Thanks to the chronic British shortage of manpower, rear units were combed to provide infantry replacements. Some of those who now found their way unwillingly to rifle companies would never have been accepted for front-line service earlier in the war, and were often poorly trained. “Many men are weak in handling their weapons,” reported a company commander. “I know several who did not even know that a grenade had to be primed. Some NCOs cannot map-read, even on roads.” While every week brought new American formations into the line, in the British Army battalions and even divisions were being broken up to maintain the strengths of others. This was a painful business for those concerned, given the strong loyalties bred into British soldiers by the regimental system. It was also worrying to those at the summit of command, who saw Britain’s order of battle visibly shrinking. Churchill complained testily to Montgomery: “It is very difficult to understand this cutting-up of first-rate units.” Platoon commanders, who bore the brunt of officer casualties, were desperately hard to replace. 21st Army Group sent a signal to the adjutant-general late in October: “Deficiencies in infantry officers now such as to seriously prejudice future operations.” This provoked a blunt response, asserting that there was no possibility of finding more officers without cannibalizing existing units.

The gulf was almost unimaginably wide, between the life of the front-line soldier and that of hundreds of thousands of supporting troops, manning heavy gun batteries, maintenance depots, post offices, mobile laundries, rear headquarters, signal centres, field hospitals, who faced negligible peril and much lesser discomforts. Staff-Sergeant Harold Fennema from Wisconsin, serving with the U.S. 66th Signal Battalion, wrote to his wife: “I don’t think this outfit will ever go anywhere that might be dangerous. I’m not at all sorry about it, because I want to come home in one piece.” Stan Proctor, a brigade headquarters wireless-operator with 43rd (Wessex) Division, wrote in his diary, at a time when bitter fighting was taking place further forward: “A very pleasant day. Signals Office duty in the morning, and an afternoon relaxing with the Heynens girls . . . sold 250 cigarettes for 25 guilders . . . to see Bing Crosby in
Going My Way
.” Proctor was disconcerted to be told that his services were required with an infantry battalion. He protested vociferously, pointing out that while he had already served time with a line unit, others had served continuously at headquarters since D-Day: “I had by this time lost the wish for the comradeship with the infantryman . . . My time at Brigade had been during some of the quieter spells. Now that things were going to hot up, I was to go back. I objected—to the extent of offering back my stripe, but it made no difference.”

When front-line soldiers escaped from imminent peril for a few hours, their desires were usually pathetically simple. Soldiers talk much about women, but on the battlefield their private cravings are seldom sexual. A British officer described his men’s priorities as “char, wad, flick and kip”—tea, food, a movie and sleep. “We thought about girls much less than about food and sleep in a bed,” said Edwin Bramall. Once out of the line for a time, however, women and alcohol became obvious magnets for many men. Visiting a brothel offered the most realistic prospect of sexual congress. A post-war U.S. Army report on the disciplinary difficulties of controlling rape deplored the fact that brothels were officially off-limits to GIs. The same establishments which had serviced the German Army during its occupation now welcomed the Allies. Green crosses by day and green lights by night guided soldiers to condom-issuing stations, which did not prevent the U.S. Third Army from achieving an average monthly VD rate of 12.41 per 1,000, comfortably exceeded by the Canadian score of 54.6 per 1,000. In a nice exercise of official hypocrisy by the British Army, it was adjudged a moral bridge too far for medical officers to undertake inspections of prostitutes. The incidence of venereal disease among all troops rose sharply after the liberation of France and Belgium where, as a disciplinary report observed sardonically, “the civil population accorded the army a comprehensive welcome.”

A
S THE RELENTLESS
rain of autumn gave way to winter ice and snow, it was hard for British officers, as well as their men, to escape despondency. Far from ending the war in 1944, there were now fears that the Germans might be capable of protracting their resistance through 1945, a shocking prospect. “There is a feeling of optimism at SHAEF,” Montgomery wrote to Brooke on 21 November. “There are no grounds for such optimism.” A gloomy 21st Army Group assessment on 24 November emphasized the steady arrival of German reinforcements, and the natural strength of many hostile terrain features: “Let us therefore face a situation in which the enemy gets stronger every day. His strategic reserve is very limited, and he is in doubt where to use it first.” Two days later, Montgomery’s staff estimated German strength in the west at seventy-one weak divisions, equivalent to thirty-five full-strength formations: “This is a larger total than we have had to face for many a long while.” Most of the allied soldiers who landed in France on 6 June and in the weeks thereafter were imbued with a sense of mission, even crusade. Now, however, this had been displaced by mere acknowledgement of a bloody task to be completed, and if possible survived.

CHAPTER SIX

Germany Besieged

SHADOWS OF DEFEAT

M
OST OF THE
German people had not wanted war in 1939, but gained greater satisfaction than they expected from the early years of victory. Lieutenant Leopold Goesse, a young Austrian cavalry officer, thoroughly enjoyed the 1940 Norway campaign, in which finally he watched British soldiers fleeing to their boats. Heinz Knoke, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot, felt himself “enraptured” by an encounter with his triumphant Führer in December 1940. When Knoke heard rumours of the impending German invasion of Russia in June 1941, he wrote in his diary: “The idea appeals to me. Bolshevism is the arch-enemy of Europe and of European civilization.” Eleonore Burgsdorf and her family filled the cellars of their home in East Prussia with Scotch whisky, French cognac and champagne brought to them as presents by the heroes of Germany’s campaigns in the west. Many German soldiers revelled in Paris leaves, and rejoiced at their distant glimpse of Moscow.

All sensations of that kind perished, however, with Stalingrad. By the winter of 1944, the reality of war seeped into almost every corner of the Reich. Few households had been spared some personal sacrifice to the demented ambitions of Adolf Hitler. It was a custom in bereaved German families to distribute among friends a black-bordered memorial card, bearing a photograph and brief details of a lost son. Millions of such souvenirs of death now stood above fireplaces in millions of homes. Katharina Minniger, a twenty-two-year-old from the village of Hausach in the Schwartzwald, lost her brother Ludwig soon after Stalingrad. Her parents sent out the customary tokens of remembrance for him. Over the two years that followed, she was dismayed to see the neatly printed cards arrive again and again to mark the passing of old schoolfriends: “Joseph Mehrfeld—Stalingrad”; “Victor Mehrfeld—Stalingrad”; “Willi Enders—lost on a ship to Africa”; “Willi Webers—died Eastern Front aged 19.5,” and likewise for many more. Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, a Luftwaffe flak officer, now believed that when the Allies completed their triumph all Germans of working age would be deported to become slaves in Russia. Eighteen-year-old Klaus Salzer, a tall, serious, classically handsome middle-class Königsberger, was unwillingly conscripted to the paratroops in October 1944. As the boy left home, he lingered in the hall, gazing at its heavy, familiar furniture. “Why are you looking at everything like that?” demanded his mother. “Because I shall never see it all again,” said Klaus sadly. Indeed he did not, for he was killed in action a few months later.

“The vain hope that the war would end before Christmas 1944 faded out as the autumn dragged along,” wrote Paul von Stemann, a Danish correspondent in Berlin. Rationing tightened: “housewives counted potatoes as if they were gold nuggets.” The fat porter at the city’s grand Esplanade Hotel began to look like a circus clown, his uniform hanging in loose folds on his shrunken frame. Smart folk drank a lot, because there was little else to do—no books to buy, no films or theatres to visit, no sport or radio entertainment or social life. Privileged people seized opportunities to escape to the countryside for weekends. Yet even in great houses the small talk was bleak. When von Stemann went to stay with friends in Bavaria and asked his hostess how life was treating her, she responded tersely: “My uncle was hanged the other day.” This was Berlin Police President Graf Wolf Heinrich von Helldorff, one of the July plotters against Hitler.* 
⁷
“Missie” Vassiltchikov, a young White Russian aristocrat who maintained a diary of wartime life in Berlin, shocked her old cook Martha by dossing down on one sofa in the drawing room one night, while a young man slept on another.
“In meiner Jugend kam so etwas nicht vor, aber dieser 20. Juli stellt alles aus den Kopf!”
sniffed Martha, “In my young days that couldn’t have happened, but this 20 July has turned everything topsy-turvy.” So it had for Missie Vassiltchikov, some of whose closest friends had already been executed.

Even in the face of looming catastrophe, most German civilians focused their minds upon the small details of their own daily lives, because that is human nature. Maria Hustreiter was troubled by the difficulty of getting shoes. She was a fourteen-year-old small farmer’s daughter living at Landshut, thirty miles north-east of Munich. In the country, there was usually enough to eat. The household received a steady stream of city visitors, who walked miles to farmhouse doors hoping to barter their household goods for food. The people of Landshut were all conscious of the town’s only Jew, a kettle-seller. Somehow, in that isolated rural community, the man was left alone to survive the war, which afterwards became a source of relief and even pride to his neighbours. Maria’s two elder brothers were in the army. Her mother prayed constantly to Our Lady for their deliverance, but one would never return.

There was church every Sunday and the inevitable Nazi school parades, but no parties, no dancing. In that simple community in those simple days, she was too young to think about boys. Two French prisoners, amiable young men, lived with them and helped to till their eighty acres. The family knew very little about events beyond their small world. “I understood that the war was not good, but life went on.” Her immediate awareness of the conflict stemmed from watching the distant glow of Munich, Regensburg, Nuremberg, lit up by flames under bombing. Sometimes, the family found their fields littered with “window,” the tinfoil strips dropped by Allied planes to baffle German radar. There was once a terrible time after a big raid, when the railway was cut. A train loaded with livestock en route to the slaughterhouse in Munich was obliged to halt for days on the track beside the Hustreiter farm. The sounds of pigs squealing and cattle lowing in despair haunted even a country girl like Maria, familiar with the traumas of animals.

The countryside was full of evacuees from the bombed cities. Ten-year-old Jutta Dietze from Leipzig lived on a farm in Saxony with her mother and three siblings for more than a year after their home was destroyed. They were expected to work hard in the fields, for the local farmers tolerated rather than welcomed their uninvited guests. They ate each day at a big table among a mixed gathering of French PoWs from a nearby camp and Russian labourers who slept above the stables. The bathroom of the farmhouse was crammed with every kind of household valuable from carpets to grandfather clocks, bartered for food by families who had trudged out from nearby Chemnitz. Unsurprisingly, the children adapted to their new circumstances more easily than the adults. Dietze family photographs of the period show the young ones grinning cheerfully as they posed among the animals in their rural idyll, even as Germany plunged towards final disaster.

Cities in the east of the country, hitherto immune from air attack, were now experiencing the devastating bombardments with which western Germany was already familiar. The tempo of destruction increased relentlessly. A Darmstadt housewife wrote to her husband at the front after a raid by the RAF’s 5 Group on 12 September which precipitated a firestorm and killed 12,000 people: “This is now a dead town.” Another woman reported from Wiesbaden: “13 full alerts and 18 warnings last week. We all broke down. 13 people were killed in one shelter.” Emmy Suppanz wrote to her son from Marburg on 23 November: “Yesterday, against my will I had to go through one part of the town. Sepp, it was dreadful. Luckily I didn’t have to go through the quarter where the station is, for it is said to be much worse there . . . Everyone is now talking such a lot about the new weapons, even Karl-Ludwig who is usually so discreet, so perhaps they really will come soon. Do you still believe in them?”

The first time Melany Borck, a sixteen-year-old evacuee in Schleswig-Holstein, saw British bombers’ pyrotechnic markers drift down through the night sky towards Hamburg fifteen miles away, she merely watched curiously, without great emotion. When a burning British aircraft plunged into the sea nearby, she and her parents, watching, felt a shock of revulsion untinged by partisan satisfaction. “We simply said: ‘Oh, my God.’ ” Yet with each month, their own circumstances worsened. They found that the experience of war made everyone abandon thought for the future. Like
Frontsoldaten
, they occupied themselves solely with demands of the moment: how to find food for the next meal, bandages for the next trainload of wounded arriving at the local hospital, electricity to cook with, space to sleep in a house crammed with twenty-two evacuees and refugees. As the horrors increased, everyone in Melany’s small world became imbued, like the rest of Germany, with the same desperate yearning: “Please God, let it be over.” There was one significant variation of this sentiment: some Germans yearned for peace on any terms; others still craved victory, and believed that this might be attained.