Europe: A History (213 page)

The Triumph of the Grand Alliance (July 1943-May 1945)
. From mid-1943 the Grand Alliance held the upper hand in almost every sphere. The Reich, though fighting hard, was under siege. The Soviets held the initiative on land. The Anglo-Americans held mastery of sea and air. The combined resources of American industrial strength, of Russian manpower, and of the British Empire could not be matched by Hitler’s shrinking realm. There was still no Second Front beyond Italy, and no sign of serious opposition inside Germany. Save for the
Wunderwaffen
or ‘wonder weapons’ which were supposed to reverse the Führer’s fading fortunes, the demise of the Reich grew ever more likely.

Despite exaggerated rumours, the intense competition over weapon development was real enough. It focused on jet engines, on rocketry, and on the atomic bomb. German scientists won two of the three contests outright. A prototype of the jet-powered Messerschmitt 262 flew in 1942. The
Vergeitung
or ‘revenge’ rockets, the Vi and V2, were developed at Peenemunde on the Baltic, and targeted on London from June 1944. But the race for the atomic bomb was won by the Allies’ Manhattan Project in distant New Mexico. Its success, in July 1945, came too late for the European war.

For the Allies, the most acute problems lay in the realm of political and strategic co-ordination. To this end, three personal meetings of the ‘Big Three’ were organized—at Teheran (December 1943), at Yalta (February 1945), and at Potsdam (June 1945). Three major issues underlay their discussions—the definition of war aims, the priorities of the Pacific and the European War, and the plans for post-war Europe. On war aims, the Grand Alliance decided to insist on the unconditional surrender of the Reich. This was done partly in deference to Stalin’s suspicions about a Second Front, partly in recognition of the mistakes of 1918. The effect, whilst binding the Alliance together, was to give the Soviet Union a licence for its totalitarian designs in the East. Once the Western leaders had renounced the possibility of withdrawing from the conflict, they surrendered the strongest lever for moderating Soviet conduct.

The clash of priorities between the war against Germany and the war against Japan was especially acute for the Americans, who alone were carrying a major share in both conflicts. It was to come to a head at Yalta. The Soviets had observed strict neutrality towards Japan since 1941, and were not likely to change their position until the European war was over. The British, in contrast, were deeply involved in the Japanese war. Their fragile lines to the Far East were stretched very thin, and great reliance had to be placed on the independent war effort of the dominions, especially of Australia and New Zealand. Singapore had fallen, dramatically, at an early stage. Thereafter, Britain’s participation was confined to Burma (where the Japanese sphere lapped the borders of British India) and to auxiliary support for the Americans.

Plans for the future of Europe never reached full agreement. The Western Allies excluded Stalin from considerations about Western Europe, starting with Italy, and Stalin pressed on regardless with his own dispositions in the East. An important exception lay in the so-called ‘Percentages Agreement’ which Churchill discussed
with Stalin during his visit to Moscow in October 1944. It was never formally adopted; but there is some reason to think that both sides regarded it as a working guideline for the Balkans. Pulling half a sheet of paper from his pocket, Churchill is said to have written down a short list of countries and alongside it a series of percentages representing the expected balance of Western and Russian influence. After puffing on his pipe, Stalin is said to have placed a neat blue tick against the following:

The ‘naughty document’, as Churchill called it, has not survived in the public section of Britain’s Public Record Office, and its existence has been questioned. What it meant in practice, however, is that Greece was marked down as the sole country on the list where Western influence was supposed to prevail. And that is what happened.

Poland was the one country whose future could not be agreed even in unofficial outline. Its plight is often seen as the source of the later Cold War. Poland, like France, was a member of the original alliance of 1939. Its Government in London was fully recognized, its soldiers, sailors, and airmen were serving with distinction under both British and Soviet command. In April 1943 Stalin used the pretext of the Nazis’ revelations about Katyń to sever relations with the Polish Government. At the same time, in Moscow, he recognized the ineptly named Union of Polish Patriots, the core of a Soviet puppet regime. In July the Polish Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, General Sikorski, the one Polish politician enjoying universal confidence, was killed in an air crash at Gibraltar. From then on the Polish tragedy moved to its nemesis. Soviet propaganda was demanding a return to the Ribbentrop-Molotov frontier, now conveniently referred to as the Curzon Line. On no sound authority, the population of eastern Poland were said to be clamouring for union with the USSR; and a Polish Government ‘friendly’ to Soviet interests was said to be essential. These claims bore no close examination; but Western opinion, whose admiration for the magnificent Soviet war effort knew no bounds, was well disposed to believe them. So, as the Red Army rolled ever deeper into Poland, the Western powers pressed their wretched Polish allies to concede.

Teheran lay at the mid-point of the wartime air route between London and Moscow; and it was there from 28 November to 1 December 1943, that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held their first meeting. They made sufficient progress to ensure the continued prosecution of the war. They agreed on the urgency of opening the Second Front in France, and on the post-war independence of Iran. But they disagreed quite violently over Poland. During a blazing row between
Eden and Molotov, President Roosevelt ‘slept in his chair’. The Western leaders conceded that Poland’s territory should be moved bodily to the West at Germany’s expense, to compensate for Stalin’s claims; but they kept it secret from the Poles. The occasion was hardly auspicious—but it achieved enough to restore confidence in the prospect of a joint Allied assault on the Reich in the coming year.

The Red Army’s offensives of 1943–5 sustained a masterly drum-beat that kept the Wehrmacht constantly reeling. They began in the middle of the Baltic States, Byelorussia, and Ukraine and ended with the siege of Berlin. They were organized in a series of huge forward leaps, in which colossal concentrations of men and material would be massed in front of the Germans’ over-stretched lines, then unleashed in an irresistible flood. The second such offensive, after Kursk, was aimed at the Dnieper, which was defended by the Germans with a wide zone of scorched earth. The third, launched in January 1944, was aimed at the distant Vistula. The fourth, beginning in August 1944, turned south into the Balkans and was aimed at the Danube. The fifth, in January 1945, was aimed at the Oder and beyond.

In each of these movements, the basic tactic was to surround and to envelop the points of resistance. Once a defensive fortress was cut off and isolated, it could safely be left for destruction at a later date. In this way, several German armies were cut off in Courland and left undefeated till the end of the war. Major German fortresses in the East, such as Breslau, were still intact when Berlin fell. The main thing was to prevent the Wehrmacht from preparing a counter-blow, and hence to harry, to harass, and to maul. The Russians knew war on the steppes: aggression usually paid off, fixed defence could usually be outflanked. As the Plain narrowed, the Wehrmacht’s temptation to stand and fight grew stronger. Three such choke-points occurred at the Dukla Pass in the Carpathians, in the battle for Budapest, and at the line of the Pomeranian Wall. Here Soviet and German blood was spilled in profusion.

The reputation of the Red Army—renamed the Soviet Army in 1944—went before it. Given the memories of 1939–41, it was often regarded as an alien force even in the Soviet Union. In the Balkans, it was received at best with mixed feelings. In Germany, where the troopers were encouraged to murder and rape, it provoked panic. The first German village to be freed from the Nazis was martyred. Pictures of German women crucified on barn doors were circulated by the Nazis to stiffen resistance. Instead, in the winter of 1944–5, the mass of the German population took flight.

The Soviet drive into central Europe was one of the grandest and most terrible military operations of modern history. One of the soldiers in its ranks, who was himself arrested at the front, wrote of’the Juggernaut of Comintern’ crushing all beneath its wheels.
¹¹⁷
For, if the Soviet Army brought liberation from the hated Nazis, it also brought subjugation to Stalinism. With it came looting, rape, common violence, and official terror on a horrific scale. For those who saw it, it was an unforgettable sight. As the battered German formations pulled back, wave after wave of liberators passed through. First came the front-line troops, alert, well-clothed,
heavily armed. Next came the second-class units and punishment battalions, who marched with ammunition but no food. Behind them the flotsam of the front—stragglers, camp followers, walking wounded, refugees trapped between the lines. At the back rolled the cordon of the NKVD in their smart uniforms and American jeeps, shooting all who failed to keep going. Finally there came ‘the hordes of Asia’, the endless supply columns riding on anything that would move westwards—broken-down trucks, hijacked peasant carts, ponies, even camels. The contrast between the red-eyed, bandaged, and weary German soldiery and the endless truck-loads of fresh-faced Slavonic and Asiatic lads told its own story. The Soviet advance into the Balkans in August 1944 had important political consequences. Romania changed sides, and took the field against her erstwhile Nazi patrons; Hungary was occupied by the German army to prevent Budapest from following Bucharest’s example. In Bulgaria, the royal government was toppled in September. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans joined up with Soviet troops and freed Belgrade in October. In Greece and Albania, both of which lay beyond the line of Soviet occupation, the communist underground made preparations to take over. At which point, in December, the Soviets ran into the obstinate defence of Budapest; and the advance came to a halt until the New Year.

In the West, the Second Front was finally opened on 6 June 1944, D-Day, when British, Canadian, Polish, and American troops landed on the beaches of Normandy. Operation Overlord undoubtedly involved the greatest technical feat of the war. It demanded the safe disembarkation of hundreds of thousands of men and their weapons on a heavily fortified coast, whose defenders had been preparing the reception for four years. It succeeded because good planning was matched by good luck. Deception measures, which included the bombing of false targets in the Pas-de-Calais, confused the German Staff about the location of the landings. Hitler, whose hunch about Normandy had been correct, was overruled. Air supremacy ensured close support on the beaches and, still more importantly, the interdiction of the Germans’ powerful armoured reserve. The technological marvels included the huge floating dockyards called ‘Mulberry Harbours’ that were towed into position off the Normandy coast, and Pluto (Pipeline Under The Ocean) which guaranteed an unlimited supply of petrol. A change in the weather, which produced the biggest Channel storm for 25 years, ensured that the German commander, General Rommel, went home for the vital weekend.

Rommel’s opponent, US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, knew that he would only be allowed one throw of the dice. The start was twice postponed. With the favourable moon fast on the wane, 156,000 men, 2,000 warships, 4,000 landing craft, and 10,000 warplanes were held on the alert for days. But then, amidst great trepidation, the order was given. In the middle of the night, in the subsiding gale, American paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions jumped into the middle of the German lines. One of them, from Kansas, feigned death as he hung suspended from the spire of the Sainte-Mère Eglise. Further west, at ‘Pegasus Bridge’, the first British soldier on French soil, Sgt. Jim Wallwork, silently landed
his Horsa glider at 00.16 hrs within 30 yards of the target, knocking himself unconscious on impact. D Company of the 2nd Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry then shot their way across the bridge, captured the lock on the Orne Canal, entered the café of M. et Mme. Gondrée, and spoke the words of Liberation: ‘It’s all right, chum.’
¹¹⁸

Then, in the grey dawn, the steel doors of the landing craft were thrown open and the main force waded ashore onto five code-named beaches. Seventy-three thousand men of the US 1st Army hit Utah and Omaha; 83,000 men of the Second British and First Canadian armies stormed on to Gold, Juno and Sword. The shocked German defenders lay low in their bunkers, bombarded by heavy shells from unseen warships and mercilessly strafed from the air. Only at ‘bloody Omaha’ did they manage to raise a screen of fire to pin the attackers down. There, the Texas Rangers heroically scaled the cliff under fire, only to find that the gun position on the top had been dismantled. But the setback was local. D-Day worked. In addition to their toehold in Italy, the Allies had won their fingerhold in France. The Reich could now be pincered from all sides.

Overlord, however, was slow to develop. When the Wehrmacht recovered from its surprise, resistance was fierce. The Americans could not take Cherbourg, the principal port of the invasion coast, for three weeks. The British, who should have entered Caen on the evening of D-Day, fought their way in on D + 34 (9 July). But the logistics outmatched anything that was seen in the East. Reinforcements poured into the Mulberries; the petrol flowed smoothly through Pluto. When the Americans finally broke through to the rear, the Germans had nothing to do but run. Caught at Falaise in an ever-shrinking gap, they ran the gauntlet amidst scenes of slaughter. After that, the Allies’ road was clear for the race to Paris and the drive for the Rhine.