The World at War (63 page)

AIR GUNNER COCHRANE

I think perhaps my most vivid recollection is the first time [8 March 1944] that my Group went to Berlin. After we had dropped our bombs there's a manoeuvre as you turn away, one Group has to cross above the other, and the Group on top dropped their bombs right smack on to our squadron. We lost one aeroplane and that was a terrifying memory and an incident mat I'll never forget.

MAJOR SCHROER

I had two Fortresses and one Mustang in two-hour fight on a Berlin raid. But this was a very good attack as far as our fighters were concerned. We had at that time, for one of the very few times, managed to assemble a quantity of more than a hundred fighters in one formation and attack the American bombers with that strength, which had never happened before. And I was in front of that formation and I had the best chances.

GENERAL HASSO-ECCARD FREIHERR VON MANTEUFFEL

Commanding Fifth Panzer Army 1944–45

The population of Germany, especially in the big cities and in the industrial areas, the houses and rooms were destroyed, the family were separated, no fuel or coal for heating, the food supply was insufficient, they received no mail by their dependants who were on the front line. The propaganda machine by Goebbels and the promise of Hitler's new weapons, improved aircraft types and submarines and the increase production of German industry – expectations for this were raised to a higher pitch therefore failure was all the greater.

GENERAL GALLAND

We have lost one good opportunity when we discovered that we had a fighter which was superior by at least 100 miles over other enemy fighters. This had been the
jet fighter Me-262, which came so late because Hitler at the beginning of the war had not allowed long-term developments to continue. He has ordered that all developments which in one year's time would not be ready to be used in operations should be dropped from the drawing board. And this had led to a very limited effort only to continue the development. When in 1943 it became know that enemy superiority was increasing tremendously in air power, only at this time Messerschmitt got the order to show the proof of this jet fighter. But then Hitler made a second terrible mistake. He ordered that this superior fighter should be used as a Blitz bomber and not as a fighter. We have lost a good opportunity to stop at least the daylight raids in good weather conditions. More than twelve hundred Me-262 had been used but only a very small number had been used as fighters and the effect of the Blitz bomber was about zero.

ALBERT SPEER

You succeeded in November 1944 to besiege the whole Ruhr valley by just striking on the transport. There is a memorandum of Hitler from November in which I am telling him that now the oil industry is as much as no more existing for us, that we have no more coal transports for the other parts of Germany and that without coal the other industry will cease to produce. And this was really true. You can see it on our own production: production was highest peak in July and then it dropped very quickly to only a percentage of what we did in the utmost in the peak of our production.

GEORGE BALL

Director of the US Strategic Bombing Survey

We came up with a rather complicated set of conclusions which I don't think were agreed, at least not with the same degree of enthusiasm, by everyone on the Board. By and large one of the most effective things that the bombing had done was to force the German Air Force into the sky in order to defend the targets in Germany and this enabled the Allies to kill the German Air Force, which gave command of the air to the Allies for the invasion of Normandy. This was fully indispensable. The second thing was that much of the bombing we had done was not as effective as it might have been because of the great over-supply of general-purpose machine tools in the German economy. Sometimes we only succeeded in rationalising production, which was otherwise out of phase. By June of 1944 German war production was three hundred per cent of what it had been in 1939. Beginning in June of 1944 when we began to strike the hydrogenation plants which produce the synthetic gasoline, the whole situation began to change and this has been made clear by Albert Speer, who I interviewed with some of my colleagues in May 1945. Then in September 1944 we started the massive bombing of the Rhineland and the effect of this was to disrupt production enormously, not so much by smashed-up plants and knocking down a lot of bricks and mortar but by interrupting the movement of supplies and goods within the plants, that is from one building to another on the little railroads that they had, and the thing finally ground to a considerable halt and the Germans were in terrible trouble by the end of 1944.

ALBERT SPEER

This was in November 1944 and again there is a memorandum to Hitler which is still in the files, and I told Hitler that the Ruhr valley is blocked, which meant that we haven't had no more supply of coal for other parts of Germany, that the production of parts and of steel parts in the Ruhr valley didn't come to the factories in other Germany, so the production in a short while would be nil. Then we introduced a new system: we said we shall try to complete tanks and guns as much as possible with the parts which are already there, distributed over many factories, and all the factories had to report to central offices what parts they have and then we shifted parts around and could get along. But I had to give Hitler a list of what he has expected, and I told him there are the last weapons you are getting, then it's finished because without the Ruhr valley we can't do it any more. I gave him a second memo in 30 January 1945 and told him, said things have gone worse and said he can only get so and so many weapons, and in this statement was a sentence running like: 'With this the war is lost even if the courage of the German soldiers is superior to the soldiers of the others.' And this was distributed, six copied to the General Staff, to the six departments of the General Staff of the Army, and Hitler first has no reaction at all, he didn't ask me to come. For a few days I didn't know what his opinion is and then he asked me together with my deputy and he told me very bluntly that's not up to you to tell me the war is lost or not lost, that's my decision; you can tell me what your situation on your field is and no more. And if you do it again I won't accept it any more. He was quite angry and turned to my deputy and continued talking with him and 1 was sitting at the side.

URSULA GRAY

Dresden resident, post-war wife of author J Glenn Gray

The third raid was by the Americans and they concentrated on strafing people. There was no defence, we had no defence at all, and they concentrated on getting these people who were trying to save their lives and get out into the suburbs and go into the country. All the people who were gathered on the meadows along the river, they went right down and strafed the people and killed them one by one. It was such a terrible feeling because you were so helpless. Here was this machine above you and it hit you or it hit the next one and there was no defence.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL EAKER

I don't agree there was overkill. There may have been in Dresden, but bear in mind we'd been asked by the Russians to destroy that great railroad complex because most of the German weapons and supplies and reinforcements going to the central section of the Eastern Front were going through there. Well, we lit some fires one afternoon and the British sent a thousand bombers over that night and we followed up next day with a thousand bombers, and of course it created a great fire which killed fifty thousand or so Germans – but it eliminated that great bottleneck that we were asked to destroy. No commanders knew what amount of resources the weather and other things would permit you to get on that target. It was always better to put up more than you needed in order to saturate defences than to send not enough and suffer heavier losses and not accomplish your mission, and have to go back.

CHAPTER 25
THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN

Veterans of the Italian campaign felt that they had as good a claim as the men in Burma to be considered the 'Forgotten Army'. There was a good case for not invading Italy at all, and another in favour of a wholehearted commitment of the men and resources available in the Mediterranean to leapfrog rapidly up the Italian peninsula. It is harder to justify what actually took place: an invasion foisted by the British on the reluctant Americans, who regarded it at best as a strategic distraction to draw German troop away from France in preparation for the main invasion of Europe, and at worst as a scheme designed by Churchill and his generals to postpone the Normandy landing still further.

The last Axis troops in North Africa surrendered on 13 May 1943, the conquest of Sicily was accomplished between 10 July and 17 August, and the Italians overthrew Mussolini on 25 July. The first Allied landings were made on 3 September: Italy surrendered on 8 September and on the following day the Allies landed in strength at Salerno, only to be viciously counter-attacked by the Germans. Naples fell on 10 October and then the Allies reached the formidable German Gustav Line behind the Sangro, Rapido and Garigliano rivers, whose strongest point was the town of Cassino at the mouth of the Liri valley, one of the few in Italy that runs along rather than across the peninsula. In January 1944 a landing was made at Anzio to the north, intended to outflank the Gustav Line. Instead it was ferociously counter-attacked and became an increasingly miserable beachhead until, in combination with a major assault on the Gustav Line in May, the Allies were at last able to break
out. Controversially, US Lieutenant General Mark Clark chose not to trap the Germans falling back from the Gustav Line and went for Rome, which he entered on 5 June, the day before D-Day in Normandy. Clark makes it clear, in the pages that follow, that, whatever the orders of British General Alexander, his military superior, he had political top cover for his action. Another eleven months of grinding combat followed, with the terrain always strongly favouring the defence, before all German forces in Italy surrendered on 2 May 1945.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL MARK CLARK

Commander US Fifth Army

The whole thing was – they were Churchill's babies. I was a great admirer of his and I think they were good babies. He decided that we should go from North Africa, he sold it to Roosevelt and then we did it. I can see him now at his map and at his persuasive way, with his pointer, pointing out the soft underbelly of the Mediterranean – and after we got there I often thought what a tough old gut it was instead of the soft belly that he had led us to believe.

TOM DRIBERG

British Independent Labour MP

Aneurin Bevan always attacked Churchill for his North African and Italian strategy: Churchill had spoken of Italy as being the soft underbelly of the Axis. Nye pointed out after we'd been there for some months fighting slowly up, that it wasn't the underbelly at all, it was the hardcore or the carapace or whatever word he used. He was always very good at words too.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL BRIAN HORROCKS

Commander XIII Corps, Eighth Army

Monty was in charge of the invasion of
Sicily but the plan for it was made in Algiers because Monty was still fighting in the desert. When he got it, he didn't like it and he changed the plan at the last minute. This caused fury in Algiers and they summoned Monty to come along and explain why he'd made all these alterations. So he flew in and when he landed at the airport [Major] General Bedell Smith, who was Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, was waiting for him. Monty said cheerfully, 'I suppose I'm a bit unpopular up here, aren't I?' Bedell looked at him and said, 'General, to serve under you would be a privilege, anywhere. To serve alongside you is not too bad. But, General, to serve over you is hell.'

MAJOR GENERAL KENNETH STRONG

Eisenhower's Chief of Intelligence

There was a big difference of opinion between the Americans and the British about how the war should be fought. The British believed that after they'd captured Sicily and landed in Italy the right strategy was to push through Italy, through Yugoslavia, through the Balkans into Germany, link up with the Russians and destroy the German forces in that way.

DREW MIDDLETON

American journalist

By then the troops had reached the point where they realised that the Italians were not the main enemy, that there were still a lot of Germans around and it was going to be tough. Combat troops after a certain period become extremely sceptical and cynical about statements by their Commanders-in-Chief and really, you know, the fellow in the rifle company doesn't look beyond his company commander. That's his leader and in some cases if anything else comes down, well, fine, I'm interested to hear it but we've got to take that bridge and Captain So-and-So is the man who will help us take it, not General Eisenhower sitting back in headquarters.

MAJOR GENERAL STRONG

On 18 August 1943 I was suddenly told that I must leave at once for Lisbon with the American Chief of Staff, [Major] General Bedell Smith, in order to meet Italian emissaries who were coming to talk about Italian armistice conditions. When we met them General Smith said, 'We've come to give you the armistice terms,' whereupon General Castellano said, 'That's not why we came here at all, we came to discover how we could join with the Allies in clearing the Germans out of Italy.' Bedell Smith said, 'We can't discuss that, we'll do it later – I'll read you the armistice terms.' Castellano asked some questions and then retired to discuss them. It was quite clear that one of Castellano's main objects at this conversation was to find out what the British plans were, where were they going to land and how strong they were going to be, because this would determine the Italians, about the attitude they would adopt. And we decided we couldn't tell them that, it was too dangerous, too many lives at risk.