In Europe (80 page)

‘The place of the invasion was no surprise, but the moment of the invasion was,’ said Winrich Behr, Rommel's adjutant at the time. ‘Those of us on the Western staff had always suspected that there would be a landing at Normandy, but Hitler and his strategists were taken completely by surprise. For a long time they believed it was a tactical feint. They refused to send reinforcements for the first three or four days, convinced as they were that the main body of the invasion would arrive at Calais.’

The meteorologists of the
Kriegsmarine
had predicted that, in view of the weather and the tides, an Allied landing during the first days of June could virtually be ruled out. Rommel, therefore, saw no reason not to go on holiday on 5 June. He had to return in very short order.

Behr: ‘Of course, our intelligence was flawed. Remember, it had been four or five months since a German reconnaissance plane had been able to cross the Channel. We were blind. The radio broadcasters on both sides were constantly playing games with misleading information via news reports, radio plays, music programmes, all peppered with codes and messages. Later on I heard that a Scottish station had accidentally broadcast the pre-recorded announcement of the invasion, one day early. Our intelligence people picked up on that as well. But they didn't do anything with it. They thought it was just another ruse.’

Once the Allies had finally established their bridgehead, they still had to penetrate the German defence. That went much slower than expected; the German resistance was tough, experienced and effective, the Allied losses were huge, the destruction in the countryside and the cities – Caen, Bayeux, Cherbourg, Saint-LÔ – enormous. The battle for Normandy lasted two and a half months, rather than the three weeks originally planned. It was not until 21 August that the road to Paris and the rest of Western Europe was clear.

From that moment on, troops and supplies were pumped from Normandy to the fronts on a massive scale along the Red Ball Express, the Allies’ lifeline, an improvised, one-way road to Brussels. The fuel needed for all these army units was brought in from the Isle of Wight, a hundred kilometres from Cherbourg, through the Pluto pipeline. Pluto, built with breathtaking speed, was the world's first undersea oil pipeline, and by late 1944 it was transporting a million litres a day.

Winrich Behr spent days driving with Rommel along the Normandy fronts. ‘I was twenty-six at the time, he was around fifty-five, and he was like a father to me.’ According to Behr, Rommel was actually a very down-to-earth man. ‘He said what was on his mind. “Hitler expects us to advance! Things can't go on like this!” he would say sometimes. But then he would come back a little later and say: “Well, Behr, we mustn't forget, Adolf Hitler is a great man.” Then he would sleep on it a night, and the next morning he would say: “What a terrible person, what a windbag!” And he would pound his fists on his stomach in rage.’

Rommel, Behr believed, was not in favour of assassinating Hitler. ‘He wanted the whole clique to be imprisoned, taken to trial, anything, but murder them, no. It wasn't in him to be a Brutus. But, like most of the other generals, he wanted peace to come quickly. The fatherland had to be saved. In that sense he saw himself as a second Hindenburg, who had played a conciliatory role after the First World War. After all, both friend and foe saw Rommel as a respectable German, and he knew that.’

To the east of Germany, the second great European front congealed. On 22 June, 1944, a little more than two weeks after D-Day, the Soviets began their own counteroffensive. Operation Bagration has been allocated only a tiny role in Western textbooks, but was at least as decisive as Normandy for the outcome of the war. The senior German command was once more taken unawares. They had been expecting the next great offensive to take place along the Black Sea, with the oilfields of Pripet and Ploieşs as prizes. But now the fronts were suddenly moving towards the Baltic States, East Prussia, Poland, and ultimately towards Germany itself.

The size of the Soviet force came as such a shock that Hitler, like Stalin in 1941, at first refused to believe the reports: 166 divisions, 30,000 cannons, mortars and rocket launchers, 4,000 tanks, 6,000 planes. The
Soviets had twice as many soldiers as the Germans, almost three times as many cannons and mortars, and more than four times as many tanks and planes. The Russian ‘steamroller’, once a favourite source of speculation by paranoid military officers, had become reality.

Once Germany was caught between these two enemy armies, things went quickly. After the breakthrough of the Allied forces in Normandy, the Germans – as someone wrote later – ‘started losing faster than the Allies could win’. The Allied Western offensive, however, soon ‘choked on its own success’: the supply lines from Normandy became overex-tended. Despite the Pluto pipeline and the thousands of Red Ball Express trucks driving bumper to bumper, supplies grew short. On the evening of 2 September, the advance positions bogged down. A few American Sherman tanks drove up the hill at the Belgian town of Tournai, but instead of entering the city they ground to a halt: out of fuel. A few more Shermans came up from behind and had just enough fuel to reach the centre of the town before their own engines sputtered and died.

‘My men can eat their belts,’ General Patton thundered, ‘but my tanks gotta have gas!’ The fuel crisis spread like wildfire. Only four days later were the tanks able to roll out of Tournai. At Brussels they were forced to spend another idle day. In Limburg Province they were still able to shoot, but not to advance. The Siegfried Line and the German border lay just over the horizon. In the Dutch cities, ‘Crazy Tuesday’ arrived on 5 September: in a panic, collaborators and German officials packed their bags and fled east. Victory seemed close at hand.

The Allied leaders were ecstatic as well, and that resulted in an understandable, but fatal, error of judgement. The British had taken Antwerp, but that did not mean they could use the port: the banks of the River Scheldt were still firmly in German hands. But after all, if the war would be over by winter anyway – and even the cautious Eisenhower was counting on that – there was no need to liberate the port of Antwerp. Commander G. P. B. Roberts of the British 11th Tank Division waited in vain for orders to deal with the German 15th Army which had fled to the Dutch island of Walcheren. Almost 80,000 Germans escaped in the meantime, and in the weeks that followed they had all the time they needed to throw up a strong line of defence. For months they were able to block all shipments along the Antwerp route.

By the time the Allies became bogged down along the Rhine a few weeks later, it was too late. Antwerp's was the only harbour suitable for the short-distance supply of munitions, supplies and fuel for an army of several million troops, but the River Scheldt had been skilfully blockaded. The mistake could only be set right by a second storming of the Atlantic Wall at Flushing and Westkapelle, in late October 1944. According to the commandos involved, that landing was more treacherous than the one at Normandy. Landing craft were shelled and burned while still at sea, the water was icy, and the troops hit the beach unprotected from the ‘most concentrated barrage of fire in the world’. More than 17,000 Britons, Canadians, Norwegians, French and Poles were wounded in the battle for the Scheldt, more than 6,000 were killed.

In a display case in the Cabinet War Rooms in London hangs a dog-eared map of Europe, taped to a hinged plank with a black tarpaulin around it, covered with sheets of tracing paper full of lines and notes. It is the political map Churchill used during the war. The remarkable thing is that those scratchings already trace the fault lines which were to divide the continent for more than forty years, and which were based in part on the front lines as they were in winter 1944–5.

During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviet troops were on the Weichsel, the Allies on the Rhine. In February 1945, the American Shermans were still in almost the same positions where they had become stuck in September 1944. Meanwhile the Soviets had taken Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and part of Czechoslovakia, and by early 1945 they had reached the Oder. They were poised to enter Berlin. The delay in the West and those lines drawn at Yalta had much, if not everything, to do with Antwerp and Walcheren.

Normandy and Omaha Beach have been brought back to the public eye by Steven Spielberg's D-Day film
Saving Private Ryan
. Yet at Flushing and Westkapelle, the pennants of the herring boats flap in the wind as though nothing ever happened. The Allied campaign of 1944 can now be driven across in a day. After Antwerp it starts to rain, on Walcheren the water blows in waves across the road. The names of the villages I drive through in Zeeland Province remind me of the staunch radio voices of the 1950s, of my parents’ worried faces as they huddled near the set, of the preachers
who spoke of ‘the punitive breath of God’ moving over the precious, ‘worldly’ Netherlands, of the two Dinky toys I had to offer up to the poor, drowned children.

The years 1944 and 1953 are chiselled in stone everywhere in the cemeteries here. Flushing, along with Rotterdam and Venlo the most heavily bombed cities in the Netherlands: more than 250 graves, plus a section full of Britons, Canadians, Poles and Australians. Westkapelle: forty-four victims from just one bombed cellar beneath an old mill. Oude Tonge: about 300 graves, all bearing the date 1 February, 1953. Nieuwerkerk: ‘Maria van Klinken, born 1951, missing’, the rest of the family dead as well. Hundreds of family dramas lie buried here amid the clumps of clay.

First there were the May days of 1940 and the bombardment of Middelburg – after the Dutch capitulated, the French and the Belgians fought on bitterly in Zeeland Province – then, on 3 October, 1944, the Allies inundated Walcheren to drive out the Germans. Then came the battle for Walcheren, and less than ten years later, on 1 February, 1953, this piece of the Netherlands – with the exception of Walcheren, this time – was once again swallowed up by the sea with the loss of 1,836 lives.

The sea dyke at Westkapelle was bombed by the Allies in 1944 to smoke out the German positions, and the survivors always finish their accounts with the line: ‘And then we found ourselves staring right into the sea.’ I can see the present-day dyke down at the end of the main street, higher than the newest houses, and I can imagine how terrifying that breach must have been for those who lived there below sea level. In the churchyard lie the victims of all the bombs that went astray, ten per cent of the village population then. No one talks about it now.

Flushing, too, has girded itself against God's wrath with order and technology. A downpour races along the boulevard, a man in a bronze oilskin tries to light a cigarette in the lee of it, behind the windows of Strandveste the elderly take shelter in their apartments. Just past the city lies the tidiest beach in Europe, a row of locked bathing cubicles, a sign saying ‘Surveillance’, a long line of rubbish bins, and not a soul in sight.

But still, I am walking along the most important European battlefield of autumn 1944, a normal stretch of coastline that once, briefly, was what it was all about.

WHAT IF D-DAY HAD FAILED? OR WHAT IF, IN 1931, A NEW YORK
taxi driver had not just clipped the fat man crossing the street, but killed him? Or if the Americans had not dawdled for two years before starting the Manhattan Project, and the atom bomb had actually been available to the Allies in 1943?

And what about the Netherlands in 1944? What if Hitler had been unable to profit from the three-month respite provided him by Walcheren? Or if the Allies had won the Battle of Arnhem and been able to race across the almost defenceless German lowlands to Berlin in autumn 1944? There would have been no starvation that winter in the Netherlands, no offensive in the Ardennes, Anne Frank would have become a great writer, and at Yalta Stalin would never have been in a position to claim all of Eastern Europe. But could the British and Americans really have driven on so much further after a breakthrough at Arnhem, without sufficient fuel, without a good chain of supply from Antwerp? Wouldn't they have choked on their own success once again? What if …

By chance, Winrich Behr, now a major on Field Marshal Model's staff, was there at the start of the Battle of Arnhem. ‘Our headquarters were at Hotel Hartenstein, in Oosterbeek. It was a lovely, quiet Sunday, we were having lunch, and suddenly we heard machine guns and the loud buzzing of planes. One of our superiors had the soup spoon shot out of his hand. I went outside and couldn't believe my eyes: floating gently down out of the sky were paratroopers. At first I thought it was a British special commando team out to liquidate a couple of generals. But the landing was so huge that I soon realised that this was something very different.’

Today there are still rumors that Operation Market Garden was betrayed to the Germans beforehand. According to Winrich Behr, no such information ever reached the German command: ‘The simple fact is that we were sitting there, the whole general staff. That I was sitting there calmly, eating an egg.’ The problem, Behr says, lay with the Allies: they simply had too little information. ‘The British didn't know that there were a couple of SS armoured divisions at Arnhem. From what I heard later, the Dutch resistance had reported that, but Montgomery didn't trust their information; he thought we had infiltrated the resistance. Actually, our armoured divisions were there by accident. They had fought in Normandy, and then been sent to Arnhem to rest up and repair their equipment. But they were soldiers with experience at the front. And they went into action right away.’

Today, the most important landing field is covered in corn and the occasional sunflower. It was here that they came down on that lovely Sunday afternoon of 17 September, 1944, those thousands of paratroopers, those countless gliders full of infantrymen, that entire overwhelming aerial caravan some 400 kilometres long. And over there, across from the Albert Heijn supermarket in Oosterbeek, close to the patio of restaurant Schoonoord, beside the Gall & Gall off-licence and Klimop florists, is where there were mowed down.