The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Even a medical Obergefreiter with no access to staff maps could clearly see the bitter irony of their situation. ‘The enemy’, he wrote, ‘has now done what we did in ’41: encirclement to encirclement.’ A Luftwaffe Obergefreiter observed in a letter to his wife in East Prussia that he was now only 200 kilometres away from her. ‘If the Russians keep up the direction of their attack it will not be long before they are standing at your door.’

  Vengeance was exacted in Minsk, especially against any former Red Army soldiers who had served as Hiwis with the Wehrmacht. Others took personal revenge after the savage repression in Belorussia which had killed a quarter of its population. ‘A partisan, a small man,’ wrote Grossman, ‘has killed two Germans with a stake. He had pleaded with the guards of the column to give him these Germans. He had convinced himself that they were the ones who had killed his daughter Olya, and his sons, his two boys. He broke all their bones, and smashed their skulls, and while he was beating them, he was crying and shouting: “Here you are–for Olya! Here you are–for Kolya!” When they were dead, he propped the bodies up against a tree stump and continued to beat them.’

  The mechanized armies of Rokossovsky and Chernyakhovsky pushed on, while rifle divisions behind crushed the trapped German forces. Soviet commanders knew by now the advantage of a headlong charge when the enemy was in full flight. The Germans should not be allowed time to recover and prepare new defence lines. The 5th Guards Tank Army headed for Vilnius, while other formations went for Baranovichi. Vilnius fell on 13 July after heavy fighting. Kaunas was their next objective. German territory in the form of East Prussia lay just beyond.

  The Stavka now planned a strike up to the Gulf of Riga, to trap Army Group North in Estonia and Latvia. The army group struggled desperately to hold open a corridor to the west, while fighting back eight Soviet armies on the east. South of the Pripet Marshes on 13 July, Marshal Konev’s armies of the 1st Ukrainian Front began their offensive later known as the Lwów–Sandomierz Operation. After smashing through weakly held German lines, Konev’s formations advanced to encircle Lwów. Their assault on the city ten days later was helped by 3,000 men of the Polish Home Army, led by Colonel Wadysaw Filipkowski. But as soon as the city had been seized the NKVD, which had already secured Gestapo headquarters and its files, arrested the Home Army officers and forced the soldiers to join the Communist 1st Polish Army.

  After taking Lwów Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front headed west all the way to the Vistula, yet it was the thought of Soviet formations approaching East Prussia–‘old Reich’ territory–which struck most fear into German hearts. The only grounds for hope, as in Normandy, were the V-weapons, especially the V-2. ‘Their effect should be many times more powerful than the V-1,’ a Luftwaffe Obergefreiter wrote home, but he was not alone in fearing that the Allies would retaliate with gas. One or two even advised their families at home to buy gas-masks if necessary. Others began to fear that their own side ‘might start to use gas (as a last resort)’.

  Some German units were pulled back into one defensive line after another in the vain hope of halting the onrush. ‘The Russians are attacking constantly,’ wrote a construction company Gefreiter drafted into the infantry. ‘A bombardment has been going on since 05.00 hours. They want to break through. Their ground-attack aircraft are well coordinated with their artillery fire. Impact follows impact. I am sitting in our good bunker and writing what is perhaps the last little letter.’ Almost every soldier was praying privately that he would get home alive, but not really believing it.

  Events were moving so rapidly, as an Obergefreiter thrown into another improvised Kampfgruppe observed, that ‘one can no longer talk of a front’. He went on: ‘I can only let you know that we are now not far from East Prussia, and perhaps then the worst will come.’ In East Prussia itself, civilians observed the busy roads with mounting anxiety. A woman close to the eastern border watched ‘columns of soldiers and refugees from Tilsit, which has been heavily bombed’, pass her door. Soviet bombing raids forced civilians to shelter in their cellars, and they had to board up their smashed windows. Workshops and factories had virtually ceased functioning because so few women came to work. Travel over 100 kilometres was forbidden. The Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, did not want civilians fleeing westwards, as that would be defeatist.

  Konev’s advance continued rapidly from Lublin, where the concentration camp of Majdanek had been discovered just to the west of it. Grossman had joined General Chuikov whose Stalingrad army, now the 8th Guards, had seized the city. Chuikov’s main concern was that he might miss out on the advance to Berlin, which for him was as important as Rome had been to General Mark Clark. ‘It’s perfect logic and common sense,’ Chuikov argued. ‘Just think: stalingradtsy advancing on Berlin!’ Grossman, disgusted with the egomania of commanders and angry that Konstantin Simonov had been sent to cover the Majdanek story instead of him, moved north towards Treblinka, which had just been discovered.

  Simonov was with a large group of foreign correspondents sent to Majdanek by the Main Political Department of the Red Army to witness Nazi crimes. Stalin’s position, with the slogan ‘Do Not Divide the Dead’, was clear. No mention was to be made of Jews as a special category when it came to suffering. The victims of Majdanek were to be described only as Soviet and Polish citizens. Hans Frank, the head of the Nazi Generalgouvernement, was horrified when details of the extermination facilities at Majdanek appeared in the foreign press. The rapidity of the Soviet advance had taken the SS by surprise, leaving them no chance to destroy the incriminating evidence. It brought home to him and others for the first time that a noose awaited them at the end of the war.

  The SS had a little more time at Treblinka. On 23 July, when Konev’s artillery could be heard in the distance, the commandant at Treblinka I received the order to liquidate the last survivors of the camp. Schnapps was issued to the SS and the Ukrainian Wachmänner before they began to execute the remaining prisoner work details. Max Levit, a carpenter from Warsaw, was the only survivor. Wounded in the first fusillade, he had been covered by other bodies. He managed to crawl into the forest from where he listened to the ragged volleys. ‘Stalin will avenge us!’ a group of Russian boys had cried just before they were shot.

  Shortly before Operation Bagration crashed into his armies in the east, Hitler had transferred the II SS Panzer Corps to Normandy, with the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen and the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. Ultra intercepts had warned the Allied leaders in Normandy that they were on their way. Eisenhower fumed with impatience, because Montgomery’s next offensive against Caen after Villers-Bocage was not ready until 26 June. This was hardly Montgomery’s fault since the great storm had delayed his build-up of forces for what was known as Operation Epsom. He intended once more to attack west of Caen and swing round to encircle the city.

  On 25 June a diversionary attack began even further to the west, with XXX Corps renewing its battle with the Panzer Lehr Division. The 49th Division, known as the Polar Bear Division because of its insignia, managed to force the Panzer Lehr back to the villages of Tessel and Rauray, where the fighting was particularly savage. Ever since the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend had begun killing prisoners, little mercy was shown on either side. Just before the attack on Tessel Wood, Sergeant Kuhlmann, a mortar platoon commander in the 1/4th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, recorded the orders in his field message book. At the end is written ‘NPT below rank major’, which stood for ‘no prisoners to be taken below the rank of major’. Others also recalled getting a ‘no prisoners’ order, and claim that this was why German propaganda began to call the 49th Division ‘the Polar Bear Butchers’. An Ultra intercept confirmed that the Panzer Lehr suffered ‘heavy losses’.

  Montgomery spoke of Operation Epsom to Eisenhower as the ‘showdown’, while clearly having every intention of conducting the battle as cautiously as usual. The official history of the Italian campaign later observed that Montgomery ‘had the unusual gift of per
suasively combining very bold speech and very cautious action’. This was particularly true in Normandy.

  The newly arrived VIII Corps launched the main attack with the 15th Scottish Division and the 43rd Wessex Division in front, and the 11th Armoured Division ready to exploit a breakthrough behind. The opening bombardment combined divisional and corps artillery as well as the main armament of the battleships offshore. The 15th Scottish advanced rapidly, but the 43rd Division on the left found itself having to fight off a counter-attack by the 12th SS Panzer Division. By nightfall, the Scots had reached the valley of the Odon. Although movement was slow because vehicles became dangerously congested on the narrow Norman roads, the advance continued. Next day the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, wisely ignoring current tactical doctrine, slipped across the Odon in small groups and captured a bridge.

  On 28 June Lieutenant General Sir Richard O’Connor, who had escaped from a prison camp in Italy and now commanded VIII Corps, wanted to push far ahead with the 11th Armoured Division and seize a bridgehead over the River Orne beyond the Odon. General Sir Miles Dempsey, the commander of the British Second Army, knew from Ultra of the imminent arrival of II SS Panzer Corps, and with Montgomery at his elbow decided to play safe. He might have been rather more robust if he had known of the developments on the German side.

  Hitler had just summoned Rommel to the Berghof, an extraordinary act in the middle of a battle. To compound the confusion the commander-in-chief of Seventh Army, Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, had just died–officially of a heart attack–but most German officers suspected suicide after the surrender of Cherbourg. Without consulting Rommel, Hitler appointed Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, the commander of II SS Panzer Corps, to take over Seventh Army. Hausser, who had been ordered to counter-attack the British offensive with the Hohenstaufen and the Frundsberg SS Panzer Divisions, had to hand over to his deputy and hurry to his new headquarters in Le Mans.

  On 29 June the 11th Armoured Division, led by its outstanding commander Major General Philip ‘Pip’ Roberts, managed to put its leading tanks on to Hill 112, the key feature between the Odon and the Orne. It then proceeded to fight off counter-attacks by the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, part of the 21st Panzer, and the 7th Mortar Brigade with its Nebelwerfer multi-barrelled launchers, which screamed like braying donkeys. The Germans recognized the significance of the capture of Hill 112. Urgent orders were passed to Gruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich, Hausser’s replacement, to attack on the other flank within one hour, using his SS Panzer Corps reinforced with a battle-group from the SS Panzer Division Das Reich. The British Second Army thus found itself under attack by seven panzer divisions, including four SS panzer divisions and part of a fifth. At that very moment, the whole of Army Group Centre in Belorussia had just three panzer divisions, and that was after being reinforced. So Ilya Ehrenburg’s sarcastic remark that the Allies in Normandy were fighting the dregs of the German army could hardly have been further from the truth.

  Montgomery faced the bulk of the German panzer divisions for very simple reasons, as he had been warned before the invasion. The British Second Army on the eastern side was closest to Paris. If the British and Canadians were to break through, then the German Seventh Army further west and the formations in Brittany would all be cut off.

  The strength of German resistance on the British sector had forced Montgomery to reassess his ideas about seizing the flat ground south of Caen for airfields. He tried to turn a painful necessity into a virtue by claiming that he was holding down the panzer divisions to give the Americans the chance to break out further west. Neither the Americans nor the Royal Air Force, desperate for their landing strips, were convinced.

  Despite his fighting words to Eisenhower, Montgomery had indicated to Major General George Erskine of the 7th Armoured Division that he was not looking for a ‘show-down’ after all. ‘Complete change so far as we are concerned,’ Erskine’s intelligence officer noted in his diary just before Epsom, ‘as Monty doesn’t want us to make ground. Satisfied that Second Army has drawn all enemy panzer divisions, now wants Caen only on this front and Americans to press on for Brittany ports. So VIII Corps attack goes in but we have very limited objective.’

  The German counter-attack during the afternoon of 29 June was aimed mainly against the 15th Scottish Division on the western side of the salient. The Scots fought well, but the real damage to the newly arrived SS Panzer Corps came from the Royal Navy. Dempsey, fearing a greater counter-attack on the south-eastern side round Hill 112, told O’Connor to pull back his tanks. Montgomery halted the offensive the next day because VIII Corps had lost more than 4,000 men. Once again the British command had failed to reinforce success rapidly. Tragically, the fighting over the next few weeks to recapture Hill 112 was to cause far more deaths than defending it would have done.

  Both Rommel and General Geyr von Schweppenburg were appalled when they saw the effects of naval gunfire from thirty kilometres away on the Hohenstaufen and Frundsberg. The craters were four metres across and two metres deep. The need to persuade Hitler that they must withdraw their forces behind the River Orne became even more urgent. Geyr was shaken by the losses in this defensive battle, when he would have preferred to use his panzer divisions in a massive counter-attack. They had been drawn into the battle to act as ‘corset-stiffeners’ to the weak infantry divisions, and now there were not enough incoming infantry divisions to enable him to pull out his panzer formations to refit. So Montgomery, far from ‘calling the tune’ on the battlefield as he liked to claim, had in fact been trapped in this battle of attrition by the German army’s own problems.

  Geyr wrote a highly critical report of German strategy in Normandy which called for a flexible defence and the withdrawal of their forces behind the Orne. His comments on OKW interference, which clearly meant Hitler, led to his swift dismissal. He was replaced by General der Panzertruppen Hans Eberbach. The next senior casualty was Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt himself, who had warned Keitel that they would not be able to hold the Allies in Normandy. ‘You should make an end to the whole war,’ he told Keitel. Rundstedt, who had also endorsed Geyr’s report, was then replaced by Generalfeldmarschall Hans von Kluge. Hitler would have liked to replace Rommel as well, but that would have created a disastrous impression both in Germany and abroad.

  Kluge arrived at Rommel’s headquarters, the Château de La Roche-Guyon on the Seine, and made derisive comments about the conduct of the battle so far. Rommel exploded and told him to visit the front first to see the situation for himself. Over the following days Kluge did so and was shaken by what he found. It was very different to the picture which had been painted for him at Führer headquarters, where they had claimed that Rommel was unduly pessimistic about Allied air power.

  Slightly further west, Bradley’s US First Army was bogged down in its own bloody battles in the marshes south of the Cotentin Peninsula and in the bocage countryside north of Saint-Lô. The constant battalion-size attacks against the German II Paratroop Corps cost many casualties. ‘The Germans haven’t much left,’ an American divisional commander observed with wry respect, ‘but they sure as hell know how to use it.’

  Using lessons learned on the eastern front, the Germans managed to make up for their inferiority in numbers, artillery and above all aircraft. They dug little bunkers into the raised base of the impenetrable hedge-rows, a hard and laborious task given the tangle of ancient roots, to make machine-gun nests for the first line of defence. Further back, the main line would contain enough troops for an immediate counter-attack. Behind them, usually on rising ground, an 88mm gun would be sited to knock out any Shermans supporting an infantry attack. Every position and vehicle was meticulously camouflaged, which meant that Allied fighter-bombers could do comparatively little to help. Artillery was the arm on which Bradley and his commanders relied: the French civilians, not surprisingly, felt that they did so to excess.

  The Germans themselves described fighting in the bocage
as ‘a dirty bush war’. They would plant mines at the bottom of shell craters in front of their positions so that an American soldier, throwing himself in to take cover, would have his legs blown off. Alongside tracks they rigged what the Americans called castrator mines or ‘bouncing Bettys’, which jumped up and exploded at crotch height. Their tanks and field gunners became expert at firing tree-bursts, which meant exploding a shell in the crown of a tree to blast splinters of wood into anyone sheltering below.

  American tactics tended to rely on ‘marching fire’ as infantry advanced, which meant constant firing at any likely enemy positions ahead. The amount of ammunition used was truly staggering as a result. The Germans needed to be more efficient. Tied to a tree, a German rifleman would wait for the infantrymen to pass, then shoot one of them in the back. This prompted the others to throw themselves flat in the open, and German mortar teams would then shell them with air-bursts as they lay there with the full length of their bodies exposed. Aid men who went to help the wounded were shot down deliberately. Quite often a single German would emerge with his hands up to surrender, and when some Americans moved forward to take him prisoner, he would throw himself sideways and hidden machine guns would shoot them down. Not surprisingly, few American soldiers took prisoners after such incidents.

  Combat exhaustion was not recognized as a condition in the German army; it was treated as cowardice. Soldiers who attempted to evade fighting with self-inflicted wounds were simply shot. The American, Canadian and British armies were extraordinarily enlightened by comparison. Most of the psychoneurotic casualties had occurred as a result of the fighting in the bocage, and the majority of victims were replacements, thrown in ill trained and unprepared to step into the boots of battle casualties. Some 30,000 men in the US First Army were accounted psychological casualties by the end of the campaign. The surgeon-general of the US Army estimated that American front-line forces suffered a 10 per cent rate of psychiatric breakdown.