The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  As the conspirators had feared, most Germans were shocked by the attempt on Hitler’s life at such a critical moment of the war. Soldiers in Normandy seem to have been either loyal or more cautious in their letters home, but some of those on the eastern front, especially in Army Group Centre, were much more outspoken about the need for change. ‘The generals who carried out the assassination attempt on the Führer’, wrote a Gefreiter on 26 July, ‘know very well that a change of regime is necessary because the war for us Germans offers no hope. So it would be a release for the whole of Europe if the three gentlemen Hitler, Göring and Goebbels were to go. With that the conflict would be ended because mankind needs peace. Anything else is a lie… Our lives are not worth living as long as this firm stays in place.’ Others also made remarks so critical of the regime that they would have been arrested if their letters had been checked by the censors.

  On 23 July, the Nazis forced the army to adopt the ‘German greeting’, or Hitler salute, instead of the traditional military salute. This provoked scorn among most of those who were not committed Nazi supporters. ‘With the German greeting we will win the war!’ a military doctor wrote sarcastically. Opinions inevitably polarized between the true believers and those who had understood the writing on the wall. On 28 July, the OKW bulletin finally announced the evacuation of four major towns in the east, including Lublin and Brest-Litovsk. ‘Certainly it looks bad,’ an Unteroffizier attached to the 12th Panzer Division wrote to his wife, ‘but that is no reason to lose courage. The day before yesterday, Dr Goebbels in a major speech indicated new developments (new weapons, Himmler’s measures with the Replacement Army, total war commitment), which even for the strained situation in the east will have positive effects. Of that we are all convinced.’

  News of Himmler’s appointment to head the Replacement Army and of fresh call-ups did not impress all soldiers at the front. ‘And soon they’ll be calling up babies,’ a gunner wrote home on 26 July. ‘Here at the front you see almost nothing but snotty kids and old men.’

  Some, on the other hand, did not dare face the reality of defeat. They believed only that the desperate situation should encourage them to make even greater efforts to protect their families at home. ‘Dearest,’ an Obergefreiter wrote home, parroting Nazi propaganda, ‘do not be afraid, we will not let the Russians enter our Fatherland. Better that we should fight to the last man, because we do not tolerate this horde coming to Germany. What would they start doing to our women and children–No, that must not be. That would be a great disgrace for us, from which comes the watchword: intensified struggle until a victorious outcome!’

  While the Reich was gripped by Nazi frenzy over the failed plot, the collapse on the eastern front was soon matched in the west. On 25 July General Bradley launched Operation Cobra from north of the Saint-Lô–Périers road. The first attempt the day before had been cancelled, after American bombers dropped their loads on their own forward troops. This setback turned bizarrely in the Allies’ favour. Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge believed that it must be a feint to distract him from another offensive by Montgomery down the Falaise road. Then, on the second try, a strong southerly wind blew the dust back over the American troops waiting to attack, and the bombers aimed for the dust cloud, causing yet more own casualties. Bradley still pushed on.

  The offensive seemed to get off to a slow start, so Major General Collins sent in his armoured troops early. German defences collapsed. Combat commands from armoured divisions forged ahead with Shermans and infantry in half-tracks, as well as engineers with bulldozers. At last it was the Germans suffering from the vicious circle of defeat. Communications collapsed in the rapid withdrawal, commanders had no idea what was happening, vehicles ran out of fuel and soldiers received no supplies or ammunition. Their retreat was harried by strafing fighters while P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers flew ‘shotgun’ over the armoured columns, ready to attack any attempt at ambush. When Kluge finally realized that this was the main breakthrough, he transferred the 2nd and the 116th Panzer Divisions to the west, but their arrival and counter-attacks were too late.

  In London, the War Cabinet became uneasy over the effects of the V-1 attacks. On 24 July, it heard that casualties were ‘thirty thousand-odd of whom four thousand odd killed’. Over the next few days ministers also discussed the threat from the V-2 rocket, which they knew would soon be ready.

  On 30 July, Montgomery launched the rapidly prepared Operation Blue-coat to protect Bradley’s left flank. By the next day, American armoured columns had reached Avranches and crossed the River Sélune beyond. They were out of Normandy and unopposed. The following day, 1 August, General George Patton’s Third Army came into being. His orders were to seize the ports on the Brittany coast, but Patton was well aware that in the other direction the way lay open to the Seine.

  While the German command on the western front begged for reinforcements, the transfer of II SS Panzer Corps to Normandy had convinced commanders on the eastern front that they were being unfairly treated. ‘The effect of the major conflicts in the west and the east was reciprocal,’ Jodl acknowledged under interrogation at the end of the war. ‘The two-front war came into sight in all its rigour.’ For many soldiers in the east, the strain was becoming too great to bear.

  Nervous breakdown became a much more open subject in letters home. ‘Psychologically’, wrote a gunner in a heavy artillery battery, ‘I am finding it increasingly hard to manage when you’ve just been having a good chat with a comrade and half an hour later you see him as little more than scraps of flesh as if he had never existed, or comrades who are lying badly wounded in front of you in a large pool of their own blood and beg you with pleading eyes to help them because in most cases they cannot speak any more, or pain takes away their power of speech. That is terrible… This war is a crushing war of nerves.’

  In the last days of July, the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 13th Army managed to get forces across the Vistula south of Sandomierz and seize bridgeheads which would be joined together in spite of desperate German counter-attacks. The OKH was all too aware of the significance of Red Army footholds west of the Vistula. Another lunge would take the enemy all the way to the River Oder, some eighty kilometres from Berlin.

  ‘We’ve just received our annual summer beating,’ a Leutnant commanding a light anti-aircraft detachment observed cynically. ‘With a surprise punch, the Russians came from Lublin towards Deblin. Apart from flak batteries and a few disintegrated units there was nothing in their way. After the bridge was blown we took up a new dug-in position on the other [western] bank of the Vistula.’ He too was incredulous that the German army could have been surprised and defeated in such a way. ‘We are outraged by those swine who are responsible for this crisis on the eastern front.’

  Some flak batteries, on the other hand, were proud of what they had achieved in the fighting. ‘Round us no fewer than 46 tanks were knocked out!’ boasted an Obergefreiter from the 11th Infantry Division. ‘On our own we shot down ten armoured ground attack aircraft [Shturmoviks] in five days.’ The Red Army had indeed suffered grievous losses during Operation Bagration: a total of 770,888 casualties of which 180,000 were ‘irrecoverable’. Army Group Centre losses may not have been so high at 399,102 killed, missing and wounded, but they were irreplaceable, and so were the guns and tanks abandoned in the retreat of over 500 kilometres. Overall, those three months alone accounted for a total of 589,425 Wehrmacht dead on the eastern front.

  Further north on 28 July, the 2nd Tank Army attacked the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the 73rd Infantry Division just forty kilometres from Warsaw. Bitter fighting followed for the approaches to the Polish capital. Red Army soldiers, kept ignorant of recent events and Stalin’s treatment of Poland, were unsure what to make of the country. ‘The Poles are strange,’ one wrote home. ‘How do they receive us? It’s very hard to answer this. In the first place, they fear us very much (no less than they fear the Germans). Their ways are completely different from Russian ways. It
is obvious that they didn’t want the Germans, but they aren’t receiving us with pies either… Of course they are often taken aback by Russian rudeness and lack of honesty.’

  Although greatly reduced, Warsaw’s civilian population still stood at nearly one million people. On 27 July the German governor ordered 100,000 males to turn up next day for fortification work. The call was defied. Two days later, Jan Nowak-Jezioraski, a representative of the government-in-exile in London, arrived. He spoke to the deputy prime minister in Warsaw, Jan Stanisaw Jankowski, and heard that an uprising was imminent. He warned him that the western powers would not be able to help, and asked whether the revolt could be delayed. Jankowski replied that they had little choice. The young, who had been trained and armed, were too eager to fight. They wanted to be free, and to owe that freedom to nobody.

  At the same time, Jankowski felt that, if they did not issue a call for battle, the Communist People’s Army would. The Communists in Warsaw were just 400 strong, but if they seized the town hall and raised the red flag as the Red Army entered the city, then they would claim to be the leaders of Poland. And if the Home Army did nothing, the Soviets could accuse them of collaboration with the Germans and of holding on to their weapons to resist the Red Army. The Home Army was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t.

  That day Radio Moscow announced that ‘the hour of action has already arrived’ and called on the citizens of Warsaw to rise up ‘and join the struggle against the Germans’. Yet neither the Soviets nor the Home Army made any attempt to contact one another. As at Monte Cassino, the Poles were determined to demonstrate to the world their right to live as a free nation, even if they were doomed by their geographical position between Germany and the Soviet Union.

  They knew by then that they could not count on their British and American allies against the Soviets. The brutal realpolitik of the Second World War had made American and British collaboration with Stalin essential, since the Red Army had broken the back of the Wehrmacht at an appalling cost. This had been clearly shown by their silence over the Soviet attempt to blame the Katy massacre on the Germans. Stalin dismissed the 400,000 members of the Polish Home Army, the Armia Krajova, as ‘bandits’ and tried to link them to the Ukrainian guerrilla force, the UPA, which had ambushed and killed General Vatutin. He soon tried to pretend to the Allies that they had killed 200 men of the Red Army. The truth was that any independent Polish organization was by definition anti-Soviet in his eyes. And the ‘government friendly to the USSR’ which he demanded could only be one that was totally subservient to the Kremlin.

  General Tadeusz ‘Bór’ Komorowski, the commander of the Home Army, gave the order for the rising to begin, with ‘W-Hour’ at 17.00 hours on 1 August. He seemed to believe that the Red Army would be in the city almost immediately. But it would be facile to blame him in the atmosphere of intense expectancy. Almost all 25,000 members of the Home Army in Warsaw, a number which doubled with volunteers and others from outside the city, were impatient to start. They had already heard of the NKVD persecution of their comrades in areas occupied by the Red Army, and knew how little they could trust the Soviet leader. They knew that ‘if Stalin would use his own massacre [of the Polish officers in 1940] as a reason to end relations with the Polish government, how could he be expected to negotiate in good faith about anything?’

  The first priority for the Home Army was to attack German barracks to seize weapons. This was not easy, especially in daylight, as the Germans were expecting some form of revolt. The Old Town and the city centre rapidly fell to the Polish insurgents, but the eastern parts on the Vistula, where most German troops were concentrated to defend Warsaw against the Red Army, remained beyond their grasp. Members of the Home Army later managed to seize the massive PAST building with its colossal neo-Norman tower, after pumping in petrol and setting it on fire. The garrison surrendered, so they took 115 German prisoners with their arms.

  Members of the Home Army wore white and red armbands to identify themselves as combatants. Many soon wore captured German helmets, but with a white and red band painted round it. Polish Communists and Jews who had been in hiding since the Ghetto Uprising also joined the fight. On 5 August, the Home Army attacked the concentration camp on the site of the flattened ghetto, killed the SS guards and released the remaining 348 Jewish prisoners.

  Voluntary mass mobilization was based on a planned infrastructure, with doctors and nurses running dressing stations and field hospitals. Local priests served as military chaplains. Metal-workers became armourers. They manufactured flamethrowers and their own Byskawica sub-machine guns based on the Sten. Other cellar workshops made grenades improvised with cans and home-made explosive or, more often, the contents from unexploded German shells and bombs. Supply services were organized with former restaurants acting as field kitchens. Propaganda departments printed leaflets and the news sheets Biuletyn Informacyjny and Rzeczpospolita Polska. They also produced posters displayed around the city, urging ‘One bullet–One German!’ And the rising had its own radio station which continued broadcasting, despite all German efforts to destroy it, until the very end on 2 October.

  Young women served as stretcher-bearers. Boys too young to fight volunteered as runners. A nine-year-old was seen to climb on to a German panzer and throw grenades inside. Both Germans and Poles froze in disbelief at the sight. ‘When he jumped down,’ an eyewitness recorded, ‘he raced off to the gate [of a tenement building] and there burst out crying.’ The courage and self-sacrifice of the young was breathtaking.

  On 4 August, Stalin reluctantly agreed to meet a delegation of the Polish government-in-exile. The prime minister Stanisaw Mikoajczyk did not handle the meeting well, but this almost certainly made little difference to the outcome. Stalin simply insisted that they should talk to the Soviet puppet ‘Polish Committee of National Liberation’. He had already given instructions that his tame government in waiting should be moved on to Polish territory in the baggage train of the Red Army. Its members were installed in Lublin and became known in the west as the ‘Lublin Poles’, as opposed to the ‘London Poles’.

  The Lublin committee naturally accepted Stalin’s border along the Molotov–Ribbentrop Line, which had roughly followed the Curzon Line, named after the British foreign secretary who had suggested it in 1919. The Lublin Poles were closely controlled by Nikolai Bulganin and Commissar of State Security Ivan Serov, the NKVD chief in 1939 who had overseen the mass deportation and killing of Poles. Bulganin and Serov were also both keeping an eye on that half-Pole Marshal Rokossovsky, commanding the 1st Belorussian Front on Polish territory. Stalin’s attitude toward the Poles appears to have been that ‘my enemy’s enemy is still my enemy’.

  Having almost washed his hands of the London Poles, Churchill was deeply stirred by the bravery of the Home Army and did his utmost to help them. On 4 August he signalled Moscow to tell Stalin that the RAF would drop weapons and supplies to the insurgents. The mainly Polish and South African bomber crews based in Italy began their dangerous missions that very day.

  On 9 August, Stalin, presumably to keep up appearances, promised Mikoajczyk that the Soviet Union would help the insurgents, even though their rising had been premature. He claimed that a German counter-attack had pushed his forces back from the city. This was partly true, but, more to the point after the great advances of Operation Bagration, the Red Army lead formations were exhausted and short of fuel, and their vehicles were in desperate need of repair. In any case, Stalin soon showed that he had little intention of providing real help, nor of aiding the airlift. No Allied aircraft were to be allowed to land on Soviet-occupied territory, although one flight of American bombers was given permission to refuel. Soviet aircraft did drop some weapons to the insurgents, but without parachutes, which rendered them useless. Stalin simply wanted a couple of examples of assistance to ward off any criticism later.

  The Germans brought in their most savage anti-partisan formations, in which sadism and cruelty were glorified. They include
d the notorious Kaminski Brigade, part of the 15th SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, and the SS Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, commanded by SS Brigadeführer Oskar Dirlewanger who walked around with a pet monkey on his shoulder as he directed the slaughter. This Korpsgruppe was commanded by SS Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, one of Himmler’s main supervisors for the massacre of Jews in Belorussia and the man who had told the Reichsführer-SS of the strain his killers were suffering. In Warsaw, his men appeared to enjoy their work. The wounded in Polish field hospitals were burned alive with flamethrowers. Children were massacred for fun. Home Army nurses were whipped, raped and then murdered. Himmler encouraged the idea of annihilating Warsaw and its population both physically and ideologically. He now seemed to consider the Poles to be as dangerous as the Jews. Some 30,000 non-combatants were slaughtered in the Old Town alone.

  In France during the first week of August, the Canadians, the British and the 1st Polish Armoured Division fought with difficulty down the road to Falaise. Patton’s Third Army had taken Rennes and charged into Brittany. On 6 August Hitler forced Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge to send his panzer divisions in a doomed counter-attack at Mortain, in the hope of advancing to Avranches on the coast to cut off Patton. Thanks to American determination and guts in the defence of Mortain, the plan proved militarily insane, and greatly accelerated the disintegration of the German army in Normandy. Hitler urged Kluge on to even greater disaster, ordering him to relaunch the attack, but by then Patton’s armoured spearheads had turned east towards the Seine and were well into the German rear, threatening Kluge’s supply base. The Seventh Army and the Fifth Panzer Army now risked complete encirclement in the Falaise Gap.

  On 15 August, while the Falaise pocket began to shrink, Operation Anvil (now renamed Dragoon) landed 151,000 Allied troops on the Côte d’Azur between Marseilles and Nice. Most of the forces had been transferred from the Italian front. Field Marshal Alexander, unhappy to have lost seven divisions for this invasion, described Dragoon as ‘strategically useless’. Like Churchill, he had his eye on the Balkans and Vienna. But the British were wrong to have opposed Dragoon. The landings in the south of France prompted a rapid German withdrawal and thus reduced the damage and suffering done to France.