The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Both British and American army psychiatrists wrote after the war that they had been struck by how few cases of combat exhaustion they had found among German prisoners of war, although they had suffered far more from Allied bombing and shelling. They concluded that the Nazi regime’s propaganda since 1933 had almost certainly helped prepare their soldiers psychologically. In a fairly similar fashion, one could say that the great hardships of life in the Soviet Union had toughened all those who served in the Red Army. The armies of western democracies could not be expected to withstand the same levels of hardship.

  While Rommel and Kluge assumed that the main breakthrough in Normandy would come from the British–Canadian sector on the Caen front, they also imagined that an American attack would come down close to the Atlantic coast. Bradley, however, had focused on Saint-Lô as the eastern end for his forming-up area for the big attack.

  After the disappointing results of Epsom Montgomery did little to confide in Eisenhower, who became increasingly exasperated by his apparent complacency. Montgomery could never admit that any of his campaigns were not going according to his ‘master plan’. Yet he was aware of the resentment building both at Eisenhower’s headquarters and back in London at his lack of progress. He was also acutely conscious of the country’s manpower shortages. Churchill feared that, if their military strength was whittled away, Britain would have little say in the post-war settlement.

  In an attempt to achieve a breakthrough without losing many more men, Montgomery was prepared to contradict a favourite dictum. In a briefing to war correspondents the previous autumn in Italy, he had stated categorically that ‘heavy bombers cannot participate intimately in a land battle against the front line’. On 6 July, he proceeded to request precisely that from the RAF to help him take Caen. Eisenhower, desperate for movement, fully supported him and met Air Chief Marshal Harris the next day. Harris agreed to send 467 Lancaster and Halifax bombers that evening over the northern suburbs of Caen, defended by the 12th SS Hitler Jugend. But the attack suffered from target creep.

  As at Omaha, the bomb-aimers delayed a moment or two before dropping to be sure of not hitting their own forward troops. The result was that the bulk of their loads dropped on the centre of the ancient Norman city. German casualties were light in comparison to those of French civilians, who were the unsung victims of the fighting in Normandy. A terrible paradox emerged from the campaign. In an attempt to reduce their own casualties, commanders from western democracies were likely to kill more civilians by their excessive use of high explosive.

  The British and Canadian attack went in the following morning. This delay gave the Hitler Jugend Division nearly twelve hours to recover, and their fearsome resistance inflicted many casualties. Then suddenly they disappeared, having received orders to pull back south of the Orne. The British and Canadians rapidly secured the north and centre of Caen. But even this very partial Allied success did not solve the Second Army’s key problem. It still lacked the space to build sufficient forward airfields, and to deploy the rest of the First Canadian Army waiting back in Britain.

  With great reluctance, Montgomery then agreed to Dempsey’s plan to use all three armoured divisions–the 7th, the 11th and the newly arrived Guards Armoured–to smash through towards Falaise from the bridgehead east of the Orne. Montgomery’s doubts had more to do with his anti-cavalry prejudices against armoured formations ‘swanning around’. As a profound military conservative it was not his idea of a setpiece offensive, but he could not afford more infantry casualties, and he had to do something. Complaints and jibes were not just coming from the Americans. The RAF was furious. Mutterings that Montgomery should be sacked now came from Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, and from Air Marshal Coningham, who had never forgiven Montgomery for hogging all the glory in North Africa and seldom mentioning his Desert Air Force.

  Operation Goodwood, launched on 18 July, proved the most outstanding example of ‘very bold speech and very cautious action’ in Montgomery’s career. He sold the possibility of a decisive breakthrough to Eisenhower so strongly that the supreme commander replied: ‘I am viewing the prospects with the most tremendous optimism and enthusiasm. I would not be at all surprised to see you gaining a victory that will make some of the “old classics” look like a skirmish between patrols.’ Montgomery had also given the same impression to Field Marshal Brooke back in London, but the very next day he presented Dempsey and O’Connor with a far more modest objective, which was to advance a third of the way to Falaise and see how things stood. Unfortunately, briefings to officers implied that this was going to be a bigger breakthrough than Alamein, and press correspondents were told of a ‘Russian style’ breakthrough which might take the Second Army forward a hundred miles. Astonished journalists pointed out that a hundred miles meant all the way to Paris.

  The RAF, still desperate for its forward airfields, was again prepared to provide bombers. So at 05.30 hours on 18 July 2,600 RAF and USAAF bombers dropped 7,567 tons of bombs on a frontage of 7,000 metres. Unfortunately, Second Army intelligence had failed to detect that the lines of German defence extended back in five lines all the way to the Bourgébus Ridge, which had to be taken if the Second Army was to advance to Falaise. To make matters worse, the complicated approach march of the three armoured divisions took them over Bailey bridges across the Caen Canal and the River Orne into the restricted bridgehead beyond, where the 51st Highland Division had laid a very thick minefield. Afraid of alerting the enemy, O’Connor ordered lanes to be cleared through it only at the very last moment, instead of removing the lot. But the Germans were well aware of the impending attack. They had seen the preparations from tall factory buildings further east and from air reconnaissance. Ultra had picked up the fact that the Luftwaffe knew of the operation, yet Second Army stuck with its plan.

  Troops stood on their tanks to stare in wonder and excitement at the destruction caused by the bombers, but the traffic jams which built up behind because of the narrow lanes in the minefields meant that the attack was fatally slowed. In fact the delays were so great that O’Connor halted the truck-borne infantry to allow the tanks to get through first. The 11th Armoured Division advanced quickly once they were through, but then found themselves ambushed by well-concealed anti-tank guns in stone farms and hamlets. These were objectives for their infantry to deal with, but the tanks were on their own and suffered terrible losses. The division had also lost their air liaison officer as an early casualty and so were not able to call for help from the Typhoon squadrons circling above. They then came under devastating fire from 88mm guns on Bourgébus Ridge and were counter-attacked by the 1st SS Panzer Division. The 11th and the Guards Armoured Divisions between them lost more than 200 tanks that day.

  General Eberbach had expected the British armoured punch to break through his over-extended forces completely, and he could hardly believe his luck. The Second Army and the Canadians managed to push forward in a number of places the next day, extending their hold south of Caen, but the Bourgébus Ridge remained entirely in German hands. Torrential rain soon began to fall. Montgomery had an excuse to call off the attack, but the damage to his reputation was done.

  The Americans and the RAF were made even angrier by his premature claims and self-satisfaction afterwards, when so little had been achieved. On the other hand this very unglorious Goodwood had succeeded in confirming the belief of both Kluge and Eberbach that the main attack in Normandy would still come up the Falaise road. As a result, when General Bradley finally launched Operation Cobra five days later, Kluge did not at first transfer any panzer divisions to face it. And on 20 July, the morning when the rains came to Normandy, a bomb went off in the Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg.

  40

  Berlin, Warsaw and Paris

  JULY–OCTOBER 1944

  Once the war had started, only the German army was likely to provide conspirators to overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime. Its officers had access to him and they controlled forces which might
ensure the security of a replacement regime. The tentative plans of some generals in 1938 and early in the war to remove the dictator had all collapsed through timidity or misplaced notions of obedience and honour.

  Firm plans to assassinate Hitler were first suggested during the Stalingrad disaster in the winter of 1942. The discussion took place at the headquarters of Army Group Centre under Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow. The first attempt took place in March 1943 when explosives provided by Admiral Canaris were placed on Hitler’s Focke-Wulf Condor. The detonator failed to work, probably due to the intense cold, and the bomb, disguised as a bottle of Cointreau, was retrieved. Two more attempts that year failed, including that of Hauptmann Axel von dem Bussche, who was ready to act as a suicide bomber at a planned inspection of new uniforms by Hitler.

  Oberst Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg provided a new impetus when he was posted to the headquarters of the Ersatzheer, or Replacement Army, in the Bendlerstrasse on the northern edge of the Tiergarten. The idea was to subvert Operation Valkyrie, an emergency plan which originally dated back to the eastern front in the winter of 1941. In July 1943, Generalmajor Friedrich Olbricht had begun to incorporate subtle changes to Valkyrie, so that the military resistance might use it when ready to act. This contingency plan had been created to thwart an uprising by foreign forced labourers, billeted in and around Berlin. That autumn, Henning von Tresckow and Stauffenberg added secret orders to be announced once Hitler was dead. A key element was to circumvent any involvement by the SS and retain all responsibility for internal order in the hands of the Replacement Army.

  The conspirators faced many obstacles. Sympathetic officers were posted away, and it was quickly obvious that Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm, who became commander-in-chief of the Replacement Army, could not be relied on. Above all, the plotters had few illusions. They knew that they represented a tiny minority with negligible popular support. The country at large would see them as traitors and the vengeance of the Nazis against them and their families would be savage. Their ethics, often shaped by strong religious beliefs, were combined with conservative political views: several had been supporters of Hitler before Operation Barbarossa. The sort of government they wished to establish had more in common with Wilhelmine Germany than modern democracy. And the basis on which they intended to propose peace with the Allies was totally unrealistic, since they wished to maintain the eastern front against the Soviet Union and retain some occupied territories. Yet even with the odds against them, they felt a strong obligation to take a moral stand against the criminality of the regime.

  A practical problem was that Stauffenberg, who had become the effective leader of the plot, was also the only one in a position to plant the bomb. He had lost an eye and a hand in Tunisia, which would be a disadvantage when arming the bomb, but as Fromm’s chief of staff he was the sole member of the inner group who had access to Führer headquarters.

  Several fellow officers had been recruited often on the basis that they were relations, friends or former officers from the 17th Cavalry, or the 9th Infantry Regiment at Potsdam, the successor unit of the Prussian Guards. Some had refused to join on the grounds that ‘changing horses in midstream’ was too dangerous for Germany at that stage of the war. Others referred to their oath of obedience. They were not moved by the argument that Hitler, through his criminal actions, had displaced any obligation to obey him.

  On 9 July Stauffenberg’s cousin Oberstleutnant Cäsar von Hofacker had visited Rommel at La Roche-Guyon. He asked Rommel how long the German armies in Normandy could hold out, and Rommel estimated a couple of weeks. This was a vital piece of information for the conspirators, who suspected that time was running out for negotiations with the Americans and British. But further details of their conversation are disputed. It is not clear whether Hofacker asked Rommel to join the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, let alone whether Rommel agreed. But it appears that Rommel did ask Hofacker to draft a letter to General Montgomery inviting him to discuss terms.

  As Stauffenberg had guessed, the most senior officers were the most unreliable. Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein and even Kluge, who had earlier allowed a resistance group under Henning von Tresckow to flourish at the headquarters of Army Group Centre, were opposed to action. But Kluge, they felt certain, would join them once Hitler was dead. In France Rommel’s chief of staff, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, was the key conspirator, and although Rommel opposed the idea of killing Hitler, they were sure that he would join after the event. But on 17 July a Spitfire strafed Rommel’s staff car on his return to La Roche-Guyon from the front and effectively removed him from any participation in the plot.

  Stauffenberg’s plan relied far too much on the traditional chain of command, a risky dependence after the Nazis’ politicization of the Wehrmacht. It was particularly dangerous in the case of the commanding officer of the Grossdeutschland guard battalion in Berlin, Major Otto Ernst Remer. Stauffenberg was warned that Remer was a loyal Nazi. But Generalleutnant Paul von Hase, another conspirator, who was Remer’s superior, felt confident that he would follow orders. To back their coup, the conspirators counted on the panzer training unit at Krampnitz and other detachments outside Berlin. But they did not go far enough in securing the key radio stations and transmitters in and around Berlin.

  Bad luck had frustrated several attempts, and an excessive perfectionism thwarted an attempt at the Wolfsschanze on 15 July. Himmler and Göring had not been present, so the conspirators in Berlin told Stauffenberg to wait for another chance. But as time was running out in Normandy, this would be their very last opportunity. Everything was set for 20 July.

  Having flown from Berlin to the Wolfsschanze, Stauffenberg joined Hitler’s situation conference which was held in a pinewood building. At a convenient moment, Stauffenberg slipped away to the lavatory with his briefcase to prime the two bombs. This took a long time because of his injuries, and before he had finished he was called back to the conference. After replying to the questions put to him about the Replacement Army, he pushed the briefcase with just the one bomb prepared under the heavy table where Hitler was standing. As everyone round the table bent over the maps, Stauffenberg left discreetly. He was driving away when the bomb exploded.

  Stauffenberg, convinced that Hitler was dead, flew back to Berlin. Uncertainty, confusion and unexpected complications in Berlin contributed to the coup’s failure. The conspirators had certainly made a number of mistakes in their planning and in its execution, but without the death of Hitler himself, who survived the blast, they had not the slightest hope of success.

  Mussolini arrived at the Wolfsschanze on that afternoon of 20 July, for a visit which had been arranged long before. He was met by Hitler who, in a manically exultant mood, insisted on showing the Duce the scene of his miraculous escape. The Führer talked incessantly of his conviction that divine intervention had saved him to continue the war. Mussolini, on the other hand, was ‘not altogether displeased by the bomb attack on Hitler, as it was proof that treachery was not confined to Italy’.

  In his address to the nation that night Hitler compared the attempt to the stab-in-the-back of 1918. He now felt that the only reason why Germany had not defeated the Soviet Union had been because of deliberate sabotage, all along, by army officers. Parallel conspiracy theories developed over setbacks in Normandy, and these are perpetuated to this day in some German books and on neo-Nazi websites. They claim that Speidel, who was in charge of Army Group B on 6 June when Rommel was absent in Germany, deliberately interfered with the deployment of panzer divisions. Speidel is described as the centre of ‘the cancer of treason in the German armed forces in the West’.

  Everything which had gone wrong on 6 June is attributed to Speidel. He is accused of sending the 21st Panzer Division on a wild-goose chase down the west side of the River Orne that morning, when in fact it was the local commander who ordered it to attack the British airborne landings on that flank. He is also accused of thwarting the movement of the 12th SS Panzer Divisio
n Hitler Jugend, the 2nd Panzer Division and the 116th Panzer Division towards the invasion area. This is said to have been part of his plot to keep the 2nd and 116th Panzer Divisions back to help the 20 July plotters to seize Paris a month and a half later.

  Speidel was indeed a key member of the conspiracy, but to pretend that he had sabotaged the whole of the defence of Normandy on 6 June is completely ridiculous. After 20 July he escaped the Gestapo killing machine by a miracle, which perhaps partly explains the subsequent Nazi vituperation against him. In the 1950s he became a senior officer of the West German Bundeswehr and later a NATO commander in Europe. The Nazis and neo-Nazis see this as his pay-off for having treacherously helped the Allies in Normandy. In this all-embracing stab-in-the-back legend of the Second World War, the traitors this time were not Jews and Communists as in 1918, but aristocrats and officers of the general staff.

  The Gestapo and SS, in a frenzy of righteous vengeance against the army and above all its general staff, began to round up all those involved and their relatives. With the German army in retreat on all fronts, and Hitler blaming general staff ‘traitors’ for his own mistakes on the eastern front, even the influence of field marshals diminished dramatically. For the Nazis, this represented a victory in itself on the home front. Their chief priority was ‘not to optimize the war effort but to change the power structure within the Reich, to the detriment of the traditional elites’. Altogether, more than 5,000 suspected opponents of the regime and their relations were arrested.