The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  The escape route from the Falaise Gap was not sealed effectively for a number of reasons, but mainly because Bradley, now commanding 12th Army Group, and Montgomery, commanding 21st Army Group, failed to liaise properly or establish priorities. Montgomery, having agreed to a ‘short encirclement’ at Falaise, and thinking that the First Canadian Army would get through quickly, had not concentrated sufficient forces for the purpose. He had his eye on the Seine, and diverted most of his available forces towards it. He felt that he could always achieve a ‘long envelopment’, trapping the Germans in front of the river. The result was that the neck of the Falaise Gap remained half open. The 1st Polish Armoured Division was left scandalously unsupported, to face the remnants of the SS panzer divisions and other formations fighting their way out of the pocket.

  The other division trying to seal the exit was the 2ème Division Blindée, the French 2nd Armoured Division, commanded by General Philippe Leclerc. Leclerc had protested bitterly to his American commanders when his division was transferred from Patton’s Third Army. Both Leclerc and General de Gaulle wanted their American-equipped division to enter Paris first, as Eisenhower had promised. General Gerow, the corps commander, was distinctly unsympathetic to French political concerns. He did not know, however, that the French troops had secretly been stealing gasoline at every opportunity to create a reserve to allow them to strike towards Paris without authority.

  The liberation of Paris was low on Eisenhower’s list of priorities. It would constitute a huge diversion of effort and supplies, at the very moment when he wanted to keep the Germans on the run all the way back to the borders of the Reich. Patton’s divisions had sliced through the German rear in the sort of armoured cavalry campaign for which he had been born. When he visited the 7th Armored Division outside Chartres, he asked its commander when he was going to take the city. He replied that there were still Germans fighting in it so it might take some time. Patton cut him short. ‘There are no Germans. It is now three o’clock. I want Chartres at five or there will be a new commander.’

  On 19 August, the eve of the fighting breakout from the Falaise pocket, General de Gaulle arrived from Algiers at Eisenhower’s headquarters. ‘We must march on Paris,’ he told the supreme commander. ‘There must be an organized force there for internal order.’ Not surprisingly, de Gaulle was afraid that the Communists of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans would provoke a rising and try to establish a revolutionary government. He, meanwhile, had been infiltrating his own officials into occupied Paris to create a skeleton administration and take over ministries.

  The following day in Rennes, de Gaulle heard that an insurrection had started in the capital. He immediately sent General Juin with a letter to Eisenhower insisting that Leclerc’s division should be sent straight there. The Paris police had gone on strike five days earlier, in protest at a German order to disarm them. General Koenig in London sent Jacques Chaban-Delmas to persuade the resistance not to rise in revolt yet. But the Communists, led by Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, the regional leader of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), wanted to liberate Paris themselves. On 19 August, the Parisian police, armed with their pistols but dressed in civilian clothes, took over the Préfecture de la Police and hoisted the tricolore.

  Generalleutnant Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander of Paris, felt obliged to send in troops, and a very inconclusive engagement took place. Choltitz had been told by Hitler to defend the city to the last and destroy it, but other officers had persuaded him that this would serve no military purpose. On 20 August, a Gaullist group seized the Hôtel de Ville as the start of their strategy to take over key government buildings. The Communists, believing their own propaganda which decreed that power lay in the streets, failed to see that they would be outmanoeuvred.

  Patriotic enthusiasm, with improvised tricolores at windows and spontaneous renditions of the ‘Marseillaise’, contributed to a fever of excitement. Streets were barricaded to deny freedom of movement to the Germans, Wehrmacht trucks were ambushed and isolated soldiers disarmed or killed. The Swedish consul-general negotiated a truce. Choltitz agreed to recognize the FFI as regular troops and allow them to hold on to their present buildings. In return the resistance would have to desist from attacking German barracks and headquarters. The Communists, claiming that they had not been properly represented, denounced the deal. Chaban-Delmas managed only to persuade them to wait a day before they attacked again.

  As the remnants of the German forces from Normandy began to escape across the Seine, the First Canadian and the Second British Armies were joined by the 1st Belgian Infantry Brigade, a Czech armoured brigade and the Royal Netherlands Brigade (Princess Irene’s). Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, with the forces of at least seven countries, was beginning to resemble Roosevelt’s dream of the United Nations.

  On 22 August, while the FFI responded to Rol-Tanguy’s order of ‘Tous aux barricades!’, Eisenhower and Bradley became persuaded that they would have to go into Paris after all. Eisenhower knew that he would have to sell the decision to General Marshall and Roosevelt as a purely military one. The President would be angry if he thought that US forces were putting de Gaulle in power. De Gaulle, on the other hand, tried to ignore the fact that the United States had anything to do with the Liberation of Paris.

  Bradley flew back in a Piper Cub to give Leclerc the good news that he could advance on Paris. The reaction among his soldiers was one of fierce joy. Orders from General Gerow that they were to leave the next morning were ignored, and the 2ème Division Blindée set off that night. After some hard fighting in the outer suburbs on 24 August, Leclerc sent a small column ahead into the city through backstreets. Soon after they reached the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville that night, cyclists spread the word across the city and the great bell of Notre Dame began to peal. General von Choltitz and his officers knew immediately what it signified.

  Next morning, the 2ème Division Blindée and the US 4th Infantry Division entered the city to a riotous welcome, interspersed with some fighting. In reality, this was little more than a few sharp skirmishes round German-held buildings–enough for Choltitz to have pretended to resist before he signed the surrender. When he saw the document de Gaulle was deeply irritated to find that Rol-Tanguy had somehow signed above Leclerc, but the Gaullist strategy had won. With their picked men installed in the ministries, the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française was more or less in control. Both the Communists and Roosevelt had been presented with a fait accompli.

  While Paris was saved, Warsaw was destroyed. The cheering, the tricolore flags, the proffered bottles and generous kisses for the liberators were a whole world away. Barbarous and gratuitous murder by the SS auxiliaries continued, as the Home Army struggled on against increasingly desperate odds. ‘In fighting Warsaw’, wrote a Polish poet, ‘no one cries.’ Poles carried on the struggle from cellars and sewers as German artillery and Stukas smashed the city around their heads. Their forces, attacking section by section, retook the Old Town. One familiar landmark after another was destroyed, especially the churches. There was no water with which to fight the fires, and the field hospitals had little to treat those with severe burns. Patients simply died in agony.

  Discipline remained remarkably good among the insurgents, with little drunkenness. The Home Army had given orders that alcohol was to be destroyed. Some insurgents used what was left to wash their feet as there was little water. Life and defence depended on the parachute containers, all too many of which fell behind German lines as the area held by the Home Army shrank. Allied bombers did not come every day with their precious loads, only when the BBC’s Polish service had announced their arrival by playing the old favourite ‘Let’s dance a mazurka again’.

  The insurgents lacked armour-piercing weapons, apart from a few airdropped PIAT launchers, yet they still destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles with petrol bombs and home-made grenades. Barricades and their human defenders were crushed under tank tracks. Dust from pulveriz
ed buildings mixed indistinguishably with smoke from burning rafters. Yet others not far away suffered even more.

  When the Home Army uprising began in Warsaw, the ghetto at Łód still held 67,000 Jews. After the astonishing Soviet advance in Operation Bagration, they thought that their moment of release had finally arrived. But with the Red Army still halted on the other side of the Vistula, Himmler decided that no time should be wasted. The vast majority were sent to their death in Auschwitz.

  The first request for RAF Bomber Command to attack Auschwitz had come in January 1941 from Count Stefan Zamoyski of the Polish general staff. Portal refused, on the grounds that British bombing techniques were simply not accurate enough to destroy the railways lines. At the end of June 1944, after confirmation emerged of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, more pleas reached London and Washington to bomb the railways leading to the camps.

  Auschwitz-Birkenau was by now the last major death camp operating.* At that time the production-line massacre of Hungarian Jews was coming to a crescendo, with 430,000 of them killed in a few months. In August the last Jews from the Łód ghetto were killed there, to be followed by Jews from Slovakia and then those supposedly privileged Jews from Theresienstadt. It was Himmler’s last attempt at a Final Solution before the camps were evacuated and destroyed.

  Harris still held to his obsession that the best course for everyone, including prisoners, was to shorten the war with his bombing strategy against Germany. He was also able to argue that in any case this was a day target and therefore a mission for the USAAF. The Americans also refused, but bizarrely, from 20 August, Allied aircraft from the Foggia air bases began to bomb the Monowitz plant of Auschwitz III because it produced methanol, and thus came under Spaatz’s oil plan. The raids ended any further hope of IG Farben manufacturing buna and synthetic fuel at Auschwitz. And after Operation Bagration, the Red Army was now too close for comfort. Company employees were evacuated towards the west.

  Opposite Warsaw, the Red Army hardly moved. Stalin clearly wanted the rising to fail. The more potential Polish leaders the Germans killed, the better it was for him. Finally on 2 October, after sixty-three days, General Komorowski surrendered. Bach-Zelewski, without Himmler’s knowledge, offered the survivors the privilege of being treated as legal combatants. He hoped to recruit them in the fight against the Red Army, but none joined. Although Bach promised that there would be no more destruction in Warsaw, Himmler soon ordered the total demolition of the city with fire and explosive. Only the concentration camp on the site of the ghetto was preserved to hold the Home Army prisoners. The Poles had no illusions in either direction, trapped as they were between the two pitiless totalitarian systems which fed off each other. Another Home Army poet wrote: ‘We await you red plague / to deliver us from the black death.’

  41

  The Ichig Offensive and Leyte

  JULY–OCTOBER 1944

  On 26 July 1944, as the Americans broke out of Normandy, as the Red Army reached the Vistula and as US Marines completed the conquest of the Mariana Islands, the cruiser USS Baltimore entered Pearl Harbor flying the presidential flag. A bevy of admirals in crisp white uniforms waited on the quayside.

  Admiral Nimitz went on board to tell President Roosevelt that General Douglas MacArthur’s plane from Brisbane had just landed. Half an hour later MacArthur, who had delayed his arrival to make a grand entrance, drove up in a large open staff car with outriders. Waving to the crowd, he too came aboard like the star of a show at a premiere.

  MacArthur may have been an egomaniac obsessed with his own inflated legend. He had not concealed his disdain for the President, whom he regarded as virtually a Communist. He saw no reason why he should acknowledge the authority of General George C. Marshall, and he strongly resented the fact that Admiral Nimitz did not come under his command. Yet MacArthur now knew exactly what was necessary to defend his own power and prestige, even if it meant swallowing his pride and being agreeable to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  MacArthur regarded this conference as politically motivated, with Roosevelt playing the part of commander-in-chief before the November elections. Fortunately, MacArthur’s conquest of Papua New Guinea had gone far better than he could have hoped, and his forces were now ensconced at Hollandia on the western end. The moment had come to force through his personal mission, the reconquest of the Philippines, to which he had promised to return. ‘They are waiting for me there,’ was his grandiose declaration for the press. The fact that he alone among the supreme commanders and chiefs of staff advocated a complete liberation of the Philippines did not discourage him in the least. Others suspected that he had an uneasy conscience after abandoning Corregidor and Bataan, albeit on a presidential order. But the Philippines represented an important part of his life, to say nothing of his wealth after a $500,000 gift from his friend Manuel Quezon, the Filipino President.

  Several of his colleagues accepted the idea of liberating Luzon, the main Philippine island, as a stepping stone to Formosa. That was linked to the idea of using China as the main bombing base against Japan. Others, most especially Admiral King, argued that Luzon should be bypassed and they should go straight for Formosa.

  MacArthur, using both charm and bulldozing tactics, managed to persuade Roosevelt that they had to liberate the Philippines, if only as a matter of honour. Roosevelt, knowing that to refuse could play badly with the press and the American public in the lead-up to the presidential election in November, allowed himself to be persuaded. Some suggest that there was a private deal: the Philippines in return for MacArthur not attacking Roosevelt at home. Marshall and the air force chief ‘Hap’ Arnold, on the other hand, knew that MacArthur’s pet project would not hasten the end of the war in the Pacific in any way. With the Marianas secured, they now had their air bases for attacking the Japanese home islands. Details recently released of the Bataan death march had provoked a wave of calls for the bombing of Japan.

  In the end, after Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey had carried out a series of raids on the Philippines with his Third Fleet and Mitscher’s fast carriers, the joint chiefs of staff agreed at the Octagon conference in Quebec that MacArthur could go ahead. He should start with the island of Leyte in the north-west Philippines in October. All preliminary operations were cancelled, with one exception, the capture of Peleliu in the Palau Islands some 800 kilometres to the east of Leyte. An invasion of Formosa was dropped for a number of reasons, one of which was the disastrous situation on the mainland of China with the continuing Japanese Ichig Offensive.

  The dramatic events in Paris and Warsaw were hard to visualize for those fighting an essentially maritime war on the other side of the world, just as the palm trees, mangrove swamps and cobalt-blue Pacific were unimaginable to those locked in a death struggle on the continent of Europe.

  Island fighting against Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender made American commanders consider gas warfare for clearing their bunkers and tunnels, but Roosevelt vetoed the idea. The US Navy had, on the whole, become more adept at deciding which archipelagos and atolls to bypass in its Pacific advance. Well aware of the desperate plight of Japanese troops on isolated islands, it simply left them to starve.

  The blockade by American submarines was devastating. Japan had only just begun to establish a convoy system, and lacked transport ships. This was mainly because the Imperial Japanese Navy had preferred to concentrate resources on capital warships. Japanese troops abandoned by Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo were not allowed to surrender. They were simply told to adopt ‘self-sufficiency’, which meant that they could expect no supplies and no relief. It has been estimated that six in every ten of the 1.74 million Japanese soldiers who died in the war succumbed to disease and starvation. Whatever the scale of their war crimes against foreign nationals, the Japanese chiefs of staff should have been condemned by their own people for crimes against their own soldiers, but this was unthinkable in such a conformist society.

  Japanese soldiers took the food of the local popula
tion wherever they could, but in the country people often managed to hide theirs cleverly enough to survive. In towns and cities, however, the suffering was worse, as of course it was among their forced labourers and Allied prisoners of war. Japanese officers and soldiers resorted to cannibalism and not just of enemy corpses. Human flesh was regarded as a necessary food source, and ‘hunting parties’ went forth to obtain it. In New Guinea they killed, butchered and ate local people and slave labourers, as well as a number of Australian and American prisoners of war, whom they referred to as ‘white pigs’, as opposed to Asian ‘black pigs’. They cooked and ate the fleshy parts, the brains and the livers of their victims. Although told by their commanders that they were not allowed to eat their own dead, this did not stop them. On occasions they selected a comrade, especially one who refused to join in eating human meat, or they seized a soldier from another unit. Japanese soldiers later cut off in the Philippines acknowledged that ‘it was not guerrillas but our own soldiers of whom we were frightened’.

  Japanese requisitions and intervention in farming had already led to famine in parts of south-east Asia, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. Their depredations disrupted agriculture and left little seed grain for the next season. Burma, which had been a great rice bowl for the region, was reduced to subsistence farming by the end of the war. In Indochina the Vichy French authorities, with the approval of their Japanese supervisors, fixed prices and established quotas. But then the Japanese Imperial Army would move from village to village and seize everything before the French officials arrived.