by Herman Wouk
Like Guderian and Kleist, I was against Citadel. The Anglo-Americans were bound to attack the continent somewhere soon, and we had to stay uncommitted and mobile till we knew where the blow would fall. The sensible course was to straighten our lines in the east, gather strong reserves, let the Russians commit themselves, and then smash them with a counterattack as we did at Kharkov. Manstein was the master of this backhand stroke; * another such bloody setback and the Soviets might have proved more flexible in the secret peace talks. The Russians were showing interest, but their demands were still too cocky and unrealistic. No doubt what Hitler wanted at Kursk was a big victory that would improve his bargaining position with Stalin.
But Manstein and Kluge fell in love with the Citadel plan. As an actor offered a star part in a bad play will take it and hope to pull off a success, so generals become intoxicated by plans for large-scale operations which they will command. In the hinge of our front between Manstein’s Army Group South and Kluge’s Army Group Center, the Russians in their winter counterattacks had punched a deep westward bulge around the city of Kursk. Manstein and Kluge were to drive armored pincers in from north and south, cut off this bulge of territory, bag a reverse Stalingrad of Russian prisoners, and then drive on to God knows what great victories through this gaping hole torn in the Soviet lines.
A charming vision, but we lacked the means.
Hitler loved to reel off figures of divisions available for combat. We had hordes of such “divisions,” but the figures were poppycock. Nearly all these divisions were understrength, and the men they had lost were the best troops, the fighting head, leaving the flabby administrative tail. Other divisions had been wiped out and were mere names on charts. But Hitler had ordered these “reconstituted”; and behold, by the breath of his mouth, they were again — in his mind — the full-strength trained fighting forces he had squandered forever on the Volga, in the Caucasus, and in Tunis. He was retreating into a dream world where he was still the triumphant master of the continent, commanding the strongest army on earth. This retreat went on until it ended in outright paranoia. But out of that private dreamland, until April 1945, there issued a stream of insensate orders which the German fighting man had to carry out on the harsh and bloody field of battle.
Moreover, while the Wehrmacht had been going downhill, the Red Army had been reviving and growing. The Soviet generals had been studying our tactics for two years. American Lend-Lease trucks, canned food, tanks, and planes, together with new Russian tanks from factories behind the Urals, had stiffened the real, not phantom, fresh divisions from Russia’s limitless manpower. Of all these adverse factors our intelligence warned us, but Hitler paid no attention.
Still, the Kursk attack might have had a chance in May, as first planned, when the Russians were worn out by their counterattacks and had not yet dug into the salient. But he put it off for six weeks so as to use our newest tanks. I warned Jodi that this would put Citadel squarely into the time-frame of the probable Anglo-American landing in Europe, but as usual I was ignored. The Russians used the time well to harden up the haunches of the Kursk bulge with mine fields, trenches, and antitank emplacements, while bringing in more and more forces.
Our intelligence spoke of half a million railroad cars entering the salient with troops and matériel! Hitler’s response was to commit more and more divisions and air wings to Citadel. As in an American poker game, the stakes of this gamble kept building up on both sides, until Hitler had thrown in as many tanks as we had used in the entire 1940 campaign in the west. At last, on July 5, despite serious second thoughts of even Manstein and Kluge because of the two-month delay, Hitler unleashed the attack. What ensued was the world’s biggest tank and air battle, and a total fiasco. Our pincers made very heavy weather against the Russian static defenses and swarms of tanks, achieving penetration of only a few miles. The attack was five days old and going very badly, north and south, when the Allies landed in Sicily.
What was Hitler’s reaction? At a hurriedly summoned conference, he announced with great assumed glee that since the Anglo-Americans had now presented him with an opportunity to smash them in the Mediterranean, “the true theatre of decision,” Citadel would be called off! That was his way of wriggling out of his failure. Not a word of apology, regret, or acknowledgment of error. Eighteen of our best remaining armored and motorized divisions, a striking force which we could never replace, and which should have been hoarded as a precious operational reserve, had been thrown away in the Kursk battle on a dreamy echo of the grand summer campaigns of the past. With Citadel all German offensives were over. Any attacks we made for the rest of the war were tactical counterthrusts to stave off defeat.
Hitler soon learned that we could not just “call off” a major offensive. There was the little matter of the enemy. On both sides of the Kursk salient the Russians struck back, and within a month freed the two central anchors of our eastern line, the cities of Orel and Belgorod. After Citadel our whole front slowly and inexorably crumbled before a Russian advance that stopped only at the Brandenburg Gate. If Stalingrad was the psychological turning point in the east, Kursk was the military pivot.
My feelings about my son have no place here. He died advancing at Kursk. Thereafter millions of Germany’s sons were to die retreating, so as to keep the heads of men like Hitler and Goring on their shoulders.
The Fall of Mussolini
Meantime, my inspection trip to Sicily and Rome convinced me that Italy was about to drop out of the war or change sides. I saw that we must cut our losses and form a strong defense line in the Apennines at the northern end of the Italian boot. There was nothing to be gained by trying to hold on to Italy. From the start of the war this nation had been one gigantic bouche inutile, gulping enormous quantities of Germany’s war resources to no result. The southern front was a chronic abscess. The Anglo-Saxons were welcome to occupy and feed Italy, I wrote in my summary report, and our forces thus released would help stabilize the eastern front and defend the west.
When I told this to Keitel at Berchtesgaden, he drew a face like an undertaker’s and warned me to change my tune. But I was past caring. My only son was dead. I was suffering seriously from high blood pressure. To be transferred from Supreme Headquarters to the field seemed to me a welcome prospect.
So at the briefing conference I presented the picture as I had seen it. The Allies had total air superiority over Sicily, and Palermo had been flattened. The Sicilian divisions assigned to defend their island were fading into the countryside. In the German-held sector of Sicily the civilians were cursing and spitting at our soldiers. Rome looked like a city already out of the war, for soldiers were scarcely to be seen on the streets. Our German troops were staying out of sight, and the Italian soldiers were shedding their uniforms wholesale. I had encountered only evasiveness from Badoglio on the whole question of bringing more German divisions into Italy, and the Italians were strengthening their Alpine fortifications, an action which could only be directed against Germany. Such was the situation report I presented to Hitler.
He listened with his head down between his shoulders, glaring at me from under his graying eyebrows, now and then curling one side of his mouth in the half-smile, half-snarl that distorted his mustache, showed his teeth, and signalled extreme displeasure. His only comment was that “there still must be some worthwhile people in Italy. They can’t have all turned rotten.” As for Sicily, his inspiration was to assume command himself. Of course this made not the slightest difference.
Still, my report must have sunk in, because he arranged a meeting with Mussolini. It took place in a country house in northern Italy a few days before II Duce fell, and it was a dismal affair. Hitler had nothing new to offer the sick-looking disheartened Mussolini and his staff. He spewed out optimistic statistics by the hour on manpower, raw materials, arms production, details of improved or new weaponry while the Italians looked at each other with their expressive miserable dark eyes. The end was written on their faces. During the
meeting Mussolini received a dispatch saying that the Allies were making their first air raid on Rome. He handed the message to Hitler, who barely glanced at it, then resumed his boasting about our rising arms production and marvelous new weapons.
The scenes in Supreme Headquarters when Mussolini fell were horrendous. Hitler was beside himself with rage, howling and storming at the treachery of the Italian court, and the Vatican, and the Fascist leaders who had deposed Mussolini. His crude language and his threats were frightful. He would take Rome by force, he said, and get hold of “that rabble, that scum” — by which he meant King Victor Emmanuel, the royal family, and the whole court — and make them creep and crawl. He would seize the Vatican, “clean out all that pus of priests,” shoot the diplomatic corps hiding in there, lay hands on all the secret documents, then say it was a mistake of war.
He kept trying to get Göring on the phone. “There’s an ice-cold fellow,” he said. “Ice-cold. At times like these you need a man who’s ice-cold. Get me Göring, I say! Hard as steel. I’ve been through any number of tough ones with him. Ice-cold, that fellow. Ice-cold.” Göring hurriedly came, but all he did was agree with everything Hitler said, using vulgar language and bad jokes. That constituted being ice-cold.
The hundred urgent decisions and moves for keeping Italy in the war, at least while we peaceably introduced enough German troops to take over the country, were hammered out in our OKW headquarters. Hitler spent that time feverishly plotting a coup d’etat in Rome to restore Mussolini, which was impossible to execute and which he dropped; also the parachute rescue of the imprisoned Duce, which did come off and may have made them both feel better, but accomplished nothing. In fact, the photograph flashed around the world of a jolly uniformed Hitler, greeting the shrunken cringing ex-Duce in an ill-fitting black overcoat and black slouch hat, with a sickly smile on his white face, proclaimed louder than any headlines that the famous Axis was dead, and that Fortress Europe was doomed.
My Rise
All this had the surprising and unwelcome effect of restoring me to Hitler’s favor. He asserted that I had seen through the Italian treachery before anybody else, that “the good Armin has a head on his shoulders,” and so on. Also, he had heard of Helmut’s death, and he put on a tragic face to commiserate with me. He praised me at briefings, and — a rare thing for a General Staff officer in those days — invited me to dinner. Speer, Himmler, and an industrialist were his other guests that night.
It was a miserable experience. Hitler must have talked for five consecutive hours. Nobody else said anything except a perfunctory word of agreement. It was all a high-flown jumble of history and philosophy, with a great deal about the Jews. The real trouble with the Italians, he said, was that the marrow of the nation had been eaten out by the cancer of the Church. Christianity was just a wily Jewish scheme to get control of the world by exalting weakness over strength. Jesus was not a Jew, but the bastard son of a Roman soldier. Paul was the greatest Jewish swindler of all time. And so on, ad nauseam. Late in the evening he made some interesting observations about Charlemagne, but I was too numbed to pay close attention. Everybody was stifling yawns. All in all the verbal flatulence was as unbearable as the physical flatulence. No doubt that was a weakness he could not control, due to his bad diet and irregular habits, but sitting near the Führer at table was no privilege. How a man like Bormann endured it for years I cannot imagine.
I was not asked again, but my hope of escaping from Headquarters and serving in the field went by the board. Jodl and Keitel now were all smiles to me. I did get a month’s medical leave, and so was able to see my wife and console her. By the time I returned to Wolfsschanze, Italy had surrendered and our long-planned Operation Alaric to seize the peninsula was in full swing.
And so the drain to the south was to go on to the last. Adolf Hitler could not face the political setback of giving up Italy. While our armies humiliated the far stronger Anglo-Saxons there, forcing them to inch up the boot with heavy losses, it was all a terrible military mistake. This obtuse political egotism of Hitler, wasting our strength southward when we could have held the Alps barrier with a fraction of Kesselring’s forces, set the stage for total national collapse under the squeeze from east and west.
* * *
67
THOUGH plunged in passion often, Pamela Tudsbury had experienced romantic love just once; and she flew from Washington to Moscow in August for a last glimpse of Captain Henry, the man for whom she felt that love, before she married somebody else.
Long after she had given up on the Soviet Union, in fact after she had given up on journalism and had decided to join Burne-Wilke in New Delhi, the visa suddenly came through. At once she changed her travel route so as to include Moscow, and to justify that, she put off quitting her job with the Observer. If Pamela’s nature was excessively passionate, her head was on fairly straight, and she now knew beyond a doubt that her writing was but a thin echo of a dead man’s. Cobbling up her father’s dispatches when he was ill or weary had been one thing; but producing fresh copy with his insights and his verve was beyond her. She was not a journalist, but a ghost. Nor did she deceive herself about her reasons for marrying Burne-Wilke. Like the attempt at journalism, that decision had whirled into the vacuum left by Tudsbury’s death. He had proposed at a vulnerable moment, when her life had loomed sad and empty. He was a gracious man, an extraordinary catch, and she had consented. She did not regret it. They could be happy enough together, she thought, and she was lucky to have attracted him.
Why then was she detouring to Moscow? Mainly because of what she had seen of Rhoda Henry in casual encounters at dances and parties, usually in the company of a tall gray-haired Army colonel. Rhoda had acted sprightly and cordial toward her, and — so it had struck Pamela — rather proprietary toward the imposing Army man. Before leaving Washington Pam had telephoned her, figuring she had little to lose. Rhoda had told her gaily that Byron was exec of his submarine now; Pamela must be sure to give Pug this news, and “tell him to watch his weight!” Not a trace of jealous concern or artificial sweetness; very puzzling. What had happened to the marriage? Had the reconciliation been so complete that Rhoda could act as she pleased? Or was she betraying Pug again, or working up to it? Pamela had absolutely no idea.
Since Midway she had had no word from him, not so much as a note of condolence on the much-publicized death of her father. Wartime mails were uncertain. In her letter from Egypt about Burne-Wilke, she had invited him to object to the engagement; no answer. But had it reached him before the sinking of the Northampton? Again, she had absolutely no idea. Pamela wanted to know how things stood with Victor Henry, and the only way to find out was to face the man. The thousands of extra miles of wartime travel in midsummer were nothing.
Nothing, yet prostrating. She all but collapsed into the embassy car that met her at the Moscow airport. Flying stop-and-go across North Africa, and then waiting three days in the dusty fly-ridden inferno of Tehran, had done her in. The driver, a little Cockney dressed in proper black, not visibly suffering from the Moscow heat, kept glancing at her in his rearview mirror. Weary though she was, Lord Burne-Wilke’s slim fiancée, so un-Russian and so elegant in a white linen suit and white straw hat, looked to the homesick man every inch a future viscountess, and he was thrilled to be driving her. He was sure she must be doing newspaper work as a lark.
Moscow itself appeared much the same to the exhausted Pamela: flat stretches of drab old buildings, many unfinished structures abandoned to wind and weather because of the war, and fat barrage balloons still floating in the sky. But the people were changed. When she and her father had hastily left in 1941, with the Germans nearing the city and all the big shots skedaddling to Kuibyshev, the bundled-up Muscovites had looked a pinched harassed lot, trudging through the snowdrifts or digging tank traps. Now they strolled the sidewalks in the sunshine, the women in light print dresses, the men in sport shirts and slacks if they were not in uniform; and the pretty children were running
and playing with carefree noise in the streets and the parks. The war was far away.
The British embassy, on a fine river-front site facing the Kremlin, had once been a czarist merchant’s mansion like Spaso House. When Pamela stepped through the french windows in the rear, she came on the ambassador lounging stripped to the waist in the sunshine amid a loudly clucking flock of white chickens. The formal gardens had been turned into an enormous vegetable patch. Philip Rule, slouched on a campstool beside the ambassador, got up with a mock bow. “Ahhh! Lady Burne-Wilke, I presume?”
She returned drily, “Not quite yet, Philip.”
The ambassador gestured around at the garden as he rose to shake hands. “Welcome, Pam. You see some alterations here. One’s most likely to eat regularly in Moscow when food grows in the back yard.”
“I can imagine.”
“We tried to book you into the National, but they’re jammed. Next Friday you’ll get in, and we’ll put you up here meantime.”
“Very kind of you.”
“Why do that?” Rule said. “I didn’t know there was a problem. The U.P. just gave up a suite at the Metropole, Pam. The living room’s an acre in size, and there’s not a fancier bathroom in Moscow.
“Can I get it?”
“Come along, and let’s see. It’s five minutes from here. The manager’s a distant cousin of my wife.”
“The bathroom decides me,” Pamela said, passing a hand over her wet brow. “I’d like to soak for a week.”