The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Although Eisenhower had taken over field command, there was lamentably little direction, or even effective communication, during these crucial days. He had damaged his knee and was trapped back at SHAEF headquarters, which was still at Granville on the Atlantic coast of Normandy. Montgomery became exasperated at the failure to answer his signals promptly. So when Eisenhower flew to Brussels, Montgomery was in a less than tactful mood when he joined the disabled supreme commander on his aircraft beside the runway. He flourished the copies of the signals exchanged and went into a tirade about what he thought of the strategy proposed. Eisenhower waited for him to draw breath, then leaned forward, put his hand on his knee and said quietly: ‘Steady, Monty! You can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.’ Montgomery, thoroughly put in his place, mumbled, ‘I’m sorry, Ike.’

  Montgomery was determined to be first across the Rhine, so as to open up the way for the major thrust into Germany, which he should command. This led to one of the most famous Allied disasters of the war. Bradley was amazed by Montgomery’s audacious plan to leapfrog forward, with a series of airborne drops, to cross the lower Rhine at Arnhem. It struck him and others as completely out of character. ‘Had the pious teetotaling Montgomery wobbled into SHAEF with a hangover,’ he later wrote, ‘I could not have been more astonished than I was by the daring adventure he proposed.’ But Montgomery did have one justification, which Bradley did not acknowledge. V-2 rockets had just started to fall on London, fired from northern Holland, and the War Cabinet wanted to know if anything could be done.

  On 17 September Operation Market Garden began. It consisted of an airborne assault by British, American and Polish paratroop formations to capture a series of bridges over two canals, the River Maas, the Waal and then the Rhine. Warnings that SS panzer divisions had been identified in the area of Arnhem were ignored. Dogged by bad luck and bad weather, the airborne operation failed mainly because the drop zones were too far from their objectives, radio communications failed disastrously and the Germans reacted far more rapidly than expected. This was due to prompt action by the energetic Model, as well as to the fact that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions had been close to Arnhem.

  Montgomery’s plan had depended on the rapid advance of Horrocks’s XXX Corps up a single road to relieve the paratroop forces, but German resistance at key points made it impossible to maintain the momentum. Despite truly heroic bravery by all the airbone formations, above all the American 82nd Airborne crossing the River Waal under fire in daylight, XXX Corps never managed to link up with the 1st Airborne Division. On 27 September, the paratroopers holding the Arnhem bridgehead, short of water, rations and above all ammunition, were forced to surrender. The battered remnants of the 1st Airborne Division had to be evacuated across the lower Rhine by night. The Germans took nearly 6,000 prisoners, half of whom were wounded. Total Allied losses came to nearly 15,000 men.

  On the eastern front, the Red Army had extended their massive gains from Operation Bagration with another offensive further south, which had begun on 20 August. General Guderian, the new army chief of staff, appointed by Hitler in the wake of the July plot, had taken five German panzer and six infantry divisions from Army Group South Ukraine in an attempt to shore up Army Group Centre. Generaloberst Ferdinand Schörner was left with just one panzer and one panzergrenadier division to stiffen his German infantry and Romanian formations. They were stretched out from the Black Sea along the River Dnestr and east of the Carpathian Mountains.

  The Stavka briefed Marshals Malinovsky and Tolbukhin. Their 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were to drive Romania out of the war and seize the Ploesti oilfields. Romanian formations began to disintegrate and desert from the first day. The German Sixth Army, Hitler’s attempt to resurrect the one lost at Stalingrad, was also surrounded and destroyed. Army Group South Ukraine lost more than 350,000 men killed or captured. Romania abandoned Germany to make terms with the Soviet Union, and Bulgaria followed suit two weeks later. The collapse came far more rapidly than either the Germans or the Soviets had expected.

  For Germany, the most damaging blow was the loss of the Ploesti oilfields. In addition all their occupation forces in the Balkans, especially those in Yugoslavia and Greece, were at risk of being cut off. And with Soviet armies spilling across the Carpathian Mountains and Slovakia, Hitler’s last oil supplies near Lake Balaton in Hungary lay open to the Red Army.

  On 2 September, the same day as Soviet forces secured both Bucharest and the Ploesti oilfields, Finland also agreed terms with the Soviet Union as Stalin had expected. The Soviet leader was still trying to cut off Army Group North on the Baltic coast, now commanded by the conspicuously brutal Schörner, a devoted Nazi who exulted in hanging deserters and defeatists. A German counter-attack ordered by Guderian had broken the Soviet corridor to the Gulf of Riga at tremendous cost. Schörner conducted a fighting retreat through Riga with the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies. But a Soviet strike due west towards Memel left Army Group North completely isolated on the Kurland Peninsula.

  ‘We are mentally and morally at the end of our strength,’ wrote a soldier with a flak battery guarding the headquarters of the Sixteenth Army. ‘I can only mourn the many, many comrades who have fallen without knowing what they were fighting for.’ Some of Army Group North’s troops were evacuated by sea, but a quarter of a million men would remain besieged there, unable to defend the Reich because Hitler refused to give up what was by now useless territory.

  At this time of momentous events, Churchill, accompanied by Field Marshal Brooke, Admiral Cunningham, now chief of the naval staff, and Air Chief Marshal Portal, crossed the Atlantic in the Queen Mary. Another Allied conference in Quebec began on 13 September. Brooke despaired of Churchill. He considered him a sick man, since he had still not fully recovered from his pneumonia. The prime minister could not let go of distracting ideas which would only irritate the Americans. He still wanted landings in Sumatra to seize back the oilfields from the Japanese, and to capture Singapore. He had lost all interest in the Burma campaign.

  Churchill also wanted landings at the head of the Adriatic on the Istrian coast to seize Trieste, and to further his pet project of getting to Vienna before the Red Army. In accordance with this dream, Churchill, like Alexander and General Mark Clark, advocated that the Italian campaign should continue way beyond the Gothic Line between Pisa and Rimini. When his chiefs of staff argued that the Italian theatre was now of secondary importance, the prime minister believed that they were secretly ganging up against him. He could not accept the idea that, even if Alexander’s forces broke into the Po Valley, an advance north-east through the Ljubljana Gap in the Alps towards Vienna would be virtually impossible against a determined German defence in the mountains.

  In the end, the Octagon conference in Quebec did not go nearly as badly as Brooke had feared. Surprisingly, Brooke himself swung round to support Churchill’s Vienna strategy, although he was later embarrassed by this lapse of judgement. Perhaps even more surprisingly, General Marshall offered landing craft for the Istrian plan, although the Americans refused to have anything to do with a campaign in south central Europe.

  Tensions arose, however, when Admiral King revealed that he did not want the Royal Navy, now under-employed in western waters, to take on a major role in the Pacific. He suspected, with justification, that Churchill was keen for it to play a conspicuous part in the Far East so that Britain could re-establish its colonial possessions. Yet King behaved so aggressively in a meeting of the combined chiefs of staff–he even called the Royal Navy a ‘liability’–that he forfeited the support of General Marshall and Admiral Leahy.

  On 15 September, Roosevelt and Churchill, in one of the most ill-considered decisions of the war, agreed the plan of Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the Treasury, to split Germany up and turn it ‘into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’. Churchill had in fact expressed his revulsion at the plan when he first heard of it, but when the question of a $6.5 billion Lend
–Lease agreement came up, he pledged his support.

  Anthony Eden was firmly opposed to the Morgenthau Plan. Brooke also was horrified. He foresaw that a democratic west would need Germany as a rampart against a Soviet threat in the future. Fortunately, Roosevelt came to his senses later, although only after a savaging from the American press. But the damage was done. Goebbels had been presented with a propaganda gift to help him persuade the German people that they could expect no mercy from the western Allies, any more than from the Soviet Union. When the Allied occupation authorities later pasted up proclam ations from General Eisenhower declaring, ‘We come as conquerors, but not oppressors,’ German civilians read them ‘open-mouthed’ in astonishment.

  Very little was said in Quebec about relations with the Soviet Union, where Churchill was soon bound for the second Moscow conference, and astonishingly little about Poland and the Warsaw uprising, which still continued. Roosevelt and Churchill were far apart in their views on Stalin and his regime. Roosevelt was unconcerned about any post-war threat. He was sure that he could charm Stalin, and he said that in any case the Soviet Union was made up of so many different nationalities that it would fall apart once the common enemy of Germany had been defeated. Churchill, on the other hand, although wildly inconsistent in many ways, still saw the Red Army’s occupation of central and southern Europe as the major threat to peace in the post-war era. Now that he realised that there was little chance of pre-empting it through an advance north-eastwards out of Italy, he attempted one of the most scandalous and inept moves in the history of realpolitik diplomacy.

  On the evening of 9 October in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, the prime minister and the Soviet leader met with only interpreters present. Churchill opened the discussion by suggesting that they begin with ‘the most tiresome question–Poland’. The prime minister’s attempt to cosy up to the tyrant was neither subtle not attractive. It seems that Stalin began to enjoy himself immediately, sensing what was to come. Churchill then said that the post-war eastern frontier of Poland was ‘settled’, even though the Polish government-in-exile had still not been consulted over the decision made behind its back at Teheran. This was because Roosevelt had not wanted his Polish voters to be upset before the presidential elections. When Prime Minister Mikoajczyk discovered this during another meeting insisted on by Churchill, he was shaken to the core by the deception. He rejected all Churchill’s arguments and even threats to force him to accept the Curzon Line border in the east. He resigned not long afterwards. Stalin ignored the protests of the government-in-exile. As far as he was concerned, his puppet government of ‘Lublin Poles’ was now the true government. It was backed by General Zygmunt Berling’s 1st Polish Army, although many of its Red Army officers felt it a farce to pretend that they were Polish. The point was that, unlike the army corps of General Anders, they were on Polish territory. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, as Stalin knew only too well. So did Churchill, but he proceeded to play a weak hand very badly indeed.

  As the discussion moved on to the Balkans, Churchill produced what he called his ‘naughty’ document which later became known as the ‘percentage agreement’. It was a list of countries with a suggested division between Soviet and western Allied influence.

  Romania: Russia 90%; the others 10%.

  Greece: Britain (in accord with USA) 90%; Russia 10%.

  Yugoslavia: 50% 50%

  Hungary: 50% 50%

  Bulgaria: Russia 75%; the others 25%.

  Stalin gazed at the paper for some time, then increased the Soviet proportion for Bulgaria to ‘90%’, and with his famous blue pencil put a tick in the top left corner. He pushed it back across the table to Churchill. Churchill rather coyly suggested that it might be ‘thought rather cynical if it seemed that we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?’ Should they not burn the paper?

  ‘No, you keep it,’ Stalin replied casually. Churchill folded it and put it in his pocket.

  The prime minister invited Stalin to dinner at the British embassy, and, to the genuine surprise of Kremlin officials, he accepted. It was the first time that the Vozhd had ever visited a foreign embassy. Central Europe and the Balkans were not far from anybody’s thoughts at the dinner. During one of the courses, the guests could hear the thundering artillery salute to celebrate the capture of Szeged in Hungary. In his speech after dinner, Churchill returned to the subject of Poland: ‘Britain went to war to preserve Poland’s freedom and independence,’ he said. ‘The British people have a sense of moral responsibility with regard to the Polish people and their spiritual values. It is also important that Poland is a Catholic country. We cannot allow internal developments there to complicate our relations with the Vatican.’

  ‘And how many divisions does the Pope have?’ Stalin broke in. This single, now famous, interjection demonstrated that what Stalin had, he held. The Red Army’s occupation would lead automatically to the imposition of a government ‘friendly to the Soviet Union’. Astonishingly Churchill, in spite of all his visceral anti-Bolshevism, still thought that the trip had been a great success and that Stalin respected and perhaps even liked him. His self-delusion could at times match that of Roosevelt.

  Churchill, however, at least had obtained Stalin’s agreement to intervene in Greece to save it from ‘the flood of Bolshevism’, as he later claimed. Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie’s III Corps was put on standby to forestall any attempt by the Communist-dominated EAM-ELAS to seize power as soon as the Germans withdrew. Churchill, who was excessively well disposed towards the Greek royal family, intended to have a government in Athens which was friendly to Great Britain.

  Although Field Marshal Brooke had discussed the military situation with General Aleksei Antonov of the Stavka and others, the subject of defeating the Wehrmacht had hardly come up between leaders either in Quebec or in Moscow. The Reich was under attack from both sides. To complement the Westwall, an Ostwall was ordered. In East Prussia most of the adult population, male and female, were dragooned by the Gauleiter Erich Koch and his Nazi Party officials into digging defences. The army was not consulted, and most of these earthworks were entirely useless.

  On 5 October, the Red Army attacked towards Memel. It took two days before evacuation orders were issued to the civilian population, but then they were countermanded. Koch did not like the idea of evacuating civilians and Hitler supported him, because it conveyed a defeatist message to the rest of the Reich. Panic ensued and many women and children were cut off in Memel as a result. A number drowned in the River Niemen, trying to escape the burning and looted town.

  On 16 October the Stavka sent General Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorus-sian Front on an attack into East Prussia, between Ebenrode and Goldap. Guderian sent panzer reinforcements to the threatened front to push the Red Army back. In the wake of the Soviet retreat, an atrocity was discovered. A number of the women and girls in the village of Nemmersdorf had been raped and murdered and the bodies of some victims were supposedly found crucified on barn doors. Goebbels rushed in photographers. Brimming with righteous indignation, he was not going to miss the opportunity of showing the German people why they had to fight to the end. In the short term, it appears that his efforts were counter-productive. But when the real invasion of East Prussia began three months later, the terrible images published in the Nazi press resurfaced in people’s minds.

  Even before the events at Nemmersdorf, many women were afraid of what was to come. Despite the ignorance professed in post-war years, a large part of the civilian population had a good idea of the horrors committed on the eastern front by their own side. And as the Red Army advanced on the Reich, they imagined that its revenge would be terrible. ‘You know the Russians really are coming in our direction,’ wrote a young mother in September, ‘so I am not going to wait, instead I will choose to kill myself and the children.’

  The announcement by Himmler on 18 October of a mass militia levy to be called the Volkssturm inspired som
e with a determination to resist, but it was a depressing idea for most. Their armament would be pathetic–a variety of old rifles captured from different armies early in the war, and the Panzerfaust shoulder-launched anti-tank grenades. And since all available men of military age had already been called up, the Volkssturm’s ranks would be filled with old men and young boys. It was soon known as the ‘Eintopf’ or casserole, because it consisted of ‘old meat and green vegetables’. Since the government offered no uniform apart from an armband, many doubted that they would be treated as lawful combatants, especially after the Wehrmacht’s attitude to partisans on the eastern front. Goebbels later organized a huge parade for the newsreel cameras in Berlin at which those called up had to make their oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Veterans of the eastern front did not know whether to laugh or to cry at the spectacle.

  Hitler, convinced that Patton’s Third Army posed the greatest threat, ordered that the bulk of his panzer divisions should be deployed in the Saar. Commanded by Generaloberst Hasso von Manteuffel, they made up a new Fifth Panzer Army, which cannot have been an encouraging title since the two previous ones had been destroyed. Rundstedt, guessing that the Americans would concentrate first on Aachen, sent as many infantry divisions there as he could muster.

  The US First Army commanded by Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges had advanced on Aachen, with a strong sense of the fact that it was at last on German territory. Just a few hundred metres across the border it seized a nineteenth-century Gothic castle in the ‘Bismarckian style’, with heavy iron accoutrements and massive furniture. This belonged to the nephew of Hitler’s former commander-in-chief, Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch. The Australian correspondent Godfrey Blunden described this first battle on German soil in the west. ‘It was fought in brilliant sunshine beneath a cloudless blue sky where the Piper Cub spotting planes hovered like kites. It was fought over very beautiful landscape, across green fields with neat hedgerows, gently wooded hills and small villages with needle-spired churches.’