Storming the Eagle's Nest (35 page)

The following day was Wednesday 9 May. The Rheims surrender document committed all German forces to a complete capitulation – unconditional surrender – by 23:01 on Tuesday 8 May. This midnight hour found Löhr's Army Group still in limbo, and Carinthia occupied by two armies. When the capitulation came into force, Field Marshal Alexander requested Marshal Tito to withdraw the JANL. The Marshal refused, arguing that the Germans had invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 and that his armies were merely pursuing them back to their own territory.

In the face of this impasse and as relations between the JANL and the British Eighth deteriorated, plans were made to turn the forces of the Anglo-Saxon Allies on the JANL. An amphibious assault of Istria was put in hand, RAF and USAAF bomber groups were briefed, and Churchill asked Alexander, as Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean, whether his armies would be prepared to fight the JANL. It was by no means an open-
and-shut
case. Eventually Alexander cabled Churchill: ‘My soldiers will obey orders, but I doubt whether they will fight against Tito with as much enthusiasm as they did against the hated Germans.'
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Churchill attempted to resolve the matter through President Truman and Marshal Stalin. The former stated that the US would not support territorial claims pursued by force; Stalin advised Tito to withdraw his troops. The Yugoslav leader was by now his own man, less mindful of Moscow. He artfully offered to place the JANL troops under British command. Meanwhile, tension grew on the ground between the British and Yugoslav forces.

Churchill refused to take the JANL under Eighth Army command, and Tito thought better of pushing the point. On 18 May 1945, the JANL trooped out of Klagenfurt, defiantly singing partisan songs. They headed south, and had soon crossed the river Drau and the frontier with Yugoslavia. A similar impasse between Alexander's and Tito's forces in the Adriatic city of Trieste was settled when JANL forces left on 12 June 1945. Both incidents are sometimes billed as the last battles of the Second World War and the first of the Cold War.

Yet it was not quite over. If an expansionist policy in the Alps was to be expected of Tito, it was not entirely anticipated of de Gaulle. As the General – now very much in charge in France as Prime Minister of the provisional government – had remarked when conferring the Compagnon de la Libération in Grenoble, he had plans for his Alpine specialists. These turned out to be the seizure of the Italian province of Cuneo in the Alpes-Maritimes. It was from here in December 1943, from Borgo San Dalmazzo, that the 328 refugees from Saint-Martin-Vésubie had been sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

In the closing days of the fighting in early May 1945, de Gaulle had ordered units of the French First Army to cross the Alpine
border into Cuneo. The frontier here between France and Italy had long been disputed, not least in June 1940 when Mussolini's troops had invaded the Alpes-Maritimes. Here, towards the end of the month of May 1945, the French were surprised by the US IV Corps. This was charged with setting up military government in north-west Italy. Lieutenant General Paul-André Doyen, the commander of the French Armée des Alpes, was most put out. He wrote a surprising letter to the commander of the IV Corps, Major General Willis D. Crittenberger, objecting to the US Corps's presence in Cuneo.

On 2 June 1945 the moustached Doyen followed this with another letter to Crittenberger in which he stated that he had been ordered by General de Gaulle to prevent the setting up of an Allied military government in Cuneo ‘by all necessary means without exception'. Meaning that – like the case of JANL and the British Eighth Army in Carinthia – the supposed Allies were poised to become foes.

In Cuneo the job of resolving the matter once again fell to Alexander. The Field Marshal called in Churchill. The Prime Minister wrote to President Truman with nice understatement, ‘Is it not rather disagreeable for us to be addressed in these terms by General de Gaulle, whom we have reinstated in liberated France at some expense of American and British blood and treasure?' Truman wrote at once to de Gaulle. The General climbed down, Doyen withdrew the French First Army and Cuneo remained Italian.

Endsieg at last had come, final victory, but not for the Third Reich. In Germany, Victory in Europe Day was Stunde Null: zero hour. A vivid picture has been painted of this German apocalypse:

Out of the 18.2 million men in Germany's armed services, 5.3 million had died: a million more than the total population of Switzerland.

London was a rather different story. ‘Chips' Channon recorded the occasion of VE Day – 8 May 1945 – in the House of Commons:

One final task in Europe remained for Churchill as war leader. This was to attend the last of the great Allied war conferences, held two and a half months after VE Day in Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin. The ambitions of Hitler for a new European order were perfectly symbolised by the smoking rubble and
human detritus of the Reich's sometime capital. A new order had arisen nonetheless. As President Truman's secretary of state Dean Acheson would later put it, ‘The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone.'
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The United States – as Truman himself observed – ‘emerged from this war the most powerful nation in the world';
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and both Great Britain and France had been reduced to the rank of second-class powers. Potsdam was not a rerun of Versailles, where Lloyd George for Great Britain, Georges Clemenceau for France, and Woodrow Wilson for the United States had between them divided up Europe's plum pudding. To Potsdam the French were not even invited.

Two topics dominated the July conference: the war with Japan and the post-war future of what was once the Reich – within which lay her Alps.

At Potsdam the three principal Allies agreed on the aims of their joint occupation of Germany. She was to be demilitarised, denazified, democratised, decentralised and decartelised – the last the process of replacing monopolies with a free-market economy. In short, Germany was to be turned into a liberal democracy, based on the models of Great Britain and the United States. At the same time all her annexations in Europe were to revert to their former identities, these including Austria. Both Germany and Austria would be partitioned into four, thence to be governed by the Americans, the British, the Soviets and the French. The Reich's Alps, Bavaria and Alpine Austria, were to exchange totalitarianism for occupation, albeit largely under democratic governance.

As to the rest of the Alps, those in the east in Yugoslavia were now firmly under Tito's communist control, those to the south in Italy under Allied military control, and those in France under the impress of General de Gaulle's provisional government.

This left Switzerland, the heart of the Alps. The great stone walls that formed her eastern, western and southern borders had been the shields of her democracy. In July 1945, as Churchill left London for Potsdam, General Henri Guisan finally demobilised
the Swiss citizen army. For the Swiss, the war that in some sense had never begun was over.

That same month the British Alpinist Arnold Lunn returned to Switzerland for the first time since May 1940. He was travelling to Zermatt to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the first ascent of the Matterhorn by the Englishman Edward Whymper. It was Lunn who in 1940 had been horrified by the prospect of the swastika flying over the roofs of Berne. Five years had passed:

The shadow of the swastika had been lifted from the Alps. The Third Reich, as William Shirer would later put it, had passed into history.