The World at War (42 page)

WILLY FELDHEIM

Hitler Youth

I was a member of the Hitler Youth and in 1945 I was fifteen years old. As the Russians came through Poland to the border I felt I had to do something because the Russians are coming and this is my homeland. And so I went back to the military training camp and there, after maybe two weeks, came a commission of Army and SS and asked for Hitler Youths to form a special force anti-tank brigade and we would shoot tanks with a kind of bazooka, a small one. Mostly we had to go backwards, we had to go back and then we came in the
Berlin area. It was early in the morning and we had to hold this area of very small gardens and wooden houses, we had to defend this line. I had the right corner with three other guys and had to go back to my battalion chief for some ammunition and I was very close to the wooden house and about thirty or forty metres from the street and I hear a very, very big noise and four Russian tanks were coming with Russian infantry on top. I saw some of our young boys, they jumped out of their holes and they were shooting to the tanks and destroyed one of the tanks, and others were shooting with their guns and killed all the Russian soldiers. And the Russians must have been in a sweet factory because they had all their arms full of sweets and chocolates. They were falling on the street and all the little boys – because everybody in our unit was fifteen or sixteen – they were running on to the street for the chocolate and the sweets.

MAJOR GENERAL SIEGFRIED WESTPHAL

Chief of Staff to Commander in Chief West

The German soldier was exhausted, he had only one desire, to end the war, but he was willing to fight further on because to cover the rear of the Eastern Front.

DR STEPHEN AMBROSE

American historian

There was a great celebration at
Torgau where they met, dancing and embracing, exchanging of gifts – very happy times. The United States during the war had been propagandised into seeing Russia as a democracy, a land of freedom-lovers with essentially broad social aims about the same as those of the West, which seemed to make sense since they were clearly an enemy of the Nazis and we were an enemy of the Nazis, thus it appeared we had a great deal in common. The leaders, especially the British leaders, and most especially Churchill, never agreed with this view, but this was the view of most of the ordinary soldiers and the citizenry of the United States. I don't know how people felt in Britain about the Russians during the war, but in the United States we had the attitude that it would be quite possible to get along with the Russians after the war in the creation of a better world. The vacuum in central Europe had been filled by Russia and American and, to a certain extent, British troops, and we could now decide the fate of Europe, create a Europe that would no longer disturb the peace but which would be dedicated to democracy and material progress, a better life for everyone.

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM ROBERTSON

US Army

Everybody was very happy and a good deal of celebration was going on right at the river bank. There must have been a platoon of Russian troops came forward; they had schnapps and we toasted each other's success, we toasted everybody else's success. The Russians were overjoyed, we also; there was handshaking and back-slapping and exchange of souvenirs. I have a Russian watch and somebody else's wedding band and I lost my watch, I lost all sorts of insignia from my uniform. I have a Russian cap ornament as well, a lot of this. The Russians were fascinated – by this time they'd gone across to the west side of the Elbe, wandering through the town – they were fascinated with the Jeep. They would commandeer vehicles as they were going so they had a motley type of equipment, and they were very interested in the Jeep, so at that point we thought it would be best to take some of them back with us to establish a meeting at noon the next day for our regimental and divisional commanders to meet.

GENERAL ANTONOV

We were full of feelings. Our first feelings were ones of vexation for the German people. We saw destroyed towns, destroyed streets, squares, white flags in the windows, we thought how awful a disgrace and tragedy the Fascists had inflicted on the German people. We walked and thought about the unhappiness the Soviet people had delivered us from, having defeated the Fascist Germany under the leadership of the Leninist Communist Party. On 9th May in the sports area of Treptow Park the Commanders of the Corps took part in the victory demonstration. After all we had suffered in the preceding four years, it is written in detail in my memoirs. It is a good thing that people write down in books what they suffered at the hands of the Fascist aggression.

DR AMBROSE

The war ends on 8th May and within two months the Soviets gave up more than two-thirds of the city to the British and Americans and of course gave up a part of the city to the French. So the first thing they did was to live up to their agreement that Berlin would be a tripartite occupation and, eventually, four powers. I think the thing that stands out was that the Russians lived up to their agreement to let the West into Berlin after they had paid the price in blood for capturing it. Most estimates are a hundred thousand casualties to take the city. The Americans hadn't gone as far into the zones that had been assigned to the Russians as the Russians had come into zones assigned to the West. The Russians had to do more pulling back than the West did. Eisenhower at the very end of the war refused Churchill, who wanted 'to shake hands with the Russians as far into the east as possible' in order to use territory that was taken in Germany and that was already assigned to the Russians for trading purposes.

CHAPTER 17
STRATEGIC BOMBING: ROYAL AIR FORCE

Britain's part in the bombing campaign against Germany was a product of strategic thinking dating back to the First World War. It became the only way of striking back at Germany after the Fall of France, and area bombing was repeatedly endorsed not only by the Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but by the Anglo-American Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not, then, the independent creation of its most active protagonist, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris of the RAF's Bomber Command. Remarkably, some of the most vocal critics of Bomber Command clamoured for a premature invasion of Europe, even though as Albert Speer observes in the following pages – and as Stalin himself acknowledged – the bombing campaign constituted, in itself, a Second Front. It was brave of
The World at War
series to challenge the pious assumptions that held almost unchallenged sway in the 1960s, but as late as 1992, when a statue of Harris was unveiled outside the RAF's church, St Clement Danes in London, it had to be placed under twenty-four-hour guard to protect it from vandalism. I met Sir Arthur near the end of his life and it struck me then, and remains my conviction today, that he was the victim of the same sort of sleight of hand by which the political elite diverted blame for the shocking losses of the First World War on to Field Marshal Haig and his generals. It is grotesque to blame service personnel compelled to redeem the errors of politicians for the casualties they incur and inflict. One may also fairly wonder about the ethics of those who only voiced objections to the bombing campaign once it finally began to kill more Germans than it did Commonwealth aircrew, and who so
strongly advocated, as an alternative the sacrifice of countless Allied lives in a premature invasion of Europe.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR ARTHUR HARRIS

Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command

Night bombing was necessary because we had no armament that could face up to fighters in daylight, we only had the .303 machine guns. You can't really put a .303 machine gun against fighter cannon, which is the sort of thing that the Germans learned in the Battle of Britain.

GROUP CAPTAIN 'HAMISH' MAHADDIE

RAF Bomber Command Pathfinder Force

We started with a very small, compact Air Force of quite experienced people – but experienced in the basic flying sense, not to any degree in wartime flying. So we had to learn from the very first day and this was a very expensive business in aircrew and aircraft.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

There was hardly any Bomber Command to be efficient at that time. They had few aircraft, they had no
navigational aids at all and if you try to be with no navigational aids in daylight it's a bit difficult, but in the darkness it's impossible. The first of the navigational aids arrived just after I got to Bomber Command. What had happened before then was no surprise to me at all, it wouldn't have surprised anybody who's ever flown an aeroplane in the dark or in the daylight. People talk a lot about picking out targets and bombing them, individual small targets – in the European climate? I've come to the conclusion that people who say that sort of thing not only have never been outside, but they've never looked out of a window. We've had in the past two months a very nice mild English winter – how many occasions, looking out of the window or walking out in the garden, could you see up to eighteen to twenty thousand feet? Maybe on two or three days at the most. On how many occasions can you guarantee that you could see down through it, four or five hundred miles away in the other end of Europe? That was the situation – there was no possibility of hitting individual targets consistently until we'd got the navigational, electronic aids that would show those targets up in the dark or through clouds.

MAJOR WILHELM HERGET

German fighter ace with 58 night kills

I did night-fighting from January 1942 and in the beginning you came very often during the full moon and during moonlit times. And that was bad because when the moon was there we could easily see the bomber but the bomber could see us exactly as easily. You had to know what you were attacking, that it was a bomber and not another Messerschmitt or a Junkers 88. I followed a Ju 88 for twenty minutes thinking it was a Lancaster and got very close before I saw it was a Ju 88. I saw underneath only four exhaust flames and thought, Ah, four motors. Nearly a terrible mistake, but that's how it was.

GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE

In the first bombing year, into 1940, three bombs in every hundred got within five miles of the aiming point but not very much more. It wasn't very much better for the next two years until it was quite obvious that we could not find German targets in the face of increased German opposition and all the devices that the Germans had invented by that time. So we had to have a very highly professional look at the method of navigating to the target, then identifying the target and then leaving the load that was carried on the target.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

People easily forget the fact that for over a third of the year we could hardly get in Germany at all because there wasn't any darkness that would take you any further than the German north coast. So if you started on a system of targets you find yourself confronted by these very short summer nights, you can't get to the far distant ones. If you succeed in knocking five out of six, and the sixth one is a very important one, you spend the whole of your time standing by to try and get a favourable opportunity to get at the sixth one, then the nights got too short again, all the first five that you got at would be rebuilt and you had to start all over again.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler's Armaments Minister

In some way the most important mistake was to get us accustomed from attack to attack to the heavier bombing. If there would have been a longer time between raids and you would have done with one stroke, very heavy bombing, then possibly the result on our morale would have been heavier.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

I never engaged in these idiotic pamphlet-
dropping exercises. They only served two purposes really – they gave the German defences endless practice in getting ready for it, and apart from that they supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans.

GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE

At the time the Chiefs of Staff were almost committed to carving up
Bomber Command as we knew it. It wasn't a very big force, just a few hundred aircraft, but the majority of the aircraft were obviously destined for the Navy through Coastal Command and the majority of the remainder would have gone to the Middle East. Harris devised this 'Thousand Plan' – he scraped up a thousand aircraft, not only from his command but he begged and borrowed them from every command, and he was able to demonstrate with that one raid on
Cologne how valuable strategic bombing could be to the war effort.
^*39

MAJOR HERGET

About your British pilots – I really can say they were more than brave, and what they did in reality helped you win the war. Once when they won the Battle of Britain, when only the pilots of the Spitfires and the Hurricanes were defending their country, and the next time the bombing campaign because they were destroying in the night, which was very harmful because the people couldn't sleep. The difficulty in what you had to do at first was starting as early as possible, flying one after another – we had it very easy, we could just shoot down one after another. So you made the bomber stream shorter – in twenty minutes they were gone.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

There was no greater risk than putting up a thousand than there was in putting up twenty or thirty, except the proportion of casualties would probably be less, and that proved to be the case. I was trying to show them what could be achieved with something approaching an adequate force, and that it would be achieved without abnormal casualties. Actually the casualties turned out precisely the same as my operation-research people said would occur, and they were considerably lower than anybody else expected. The risk would be heavier sending over fewer machines for the defences to compete with. One of the main ideas of sending over the bigger attack was to overwhelm the defences, and that's exactly what occurred.