The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  In fact Harris’s determination to keep bombing the Ruhr, an area target, also succeeded in knocking out so many benzol plants there that there were none left in operation by November. The difference between the strategy of the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force was more one of presentation than effect. While the USAAF always defined its operations as precision bombing, the reality was very different. ‘Marshalling yards’ given as a target was really a euphemism for hitting the whole of the adjacent city. Largely because of the bad visibility during winter months, more than 70 per cent of Eighth Air Force bombs were delivered ‘blind’, almost exactly the same as Bomber Command. Harris simply made no bones about bombing cities, and despised anybody who was squeamish on the subject. Where he was proved totally wrong was in his repeated claims that bombing alone could end the war.

  Since the dark days of 1942, Britain had invested so much in Bomber Command, financially, industrially and in sacrificed lives, to create this bludgeon that an almost unstoppable momentum had developed. It continued even though many of its attacks towards the end of the war bore little military logic, let alone moral justification. The obsessive Harris had made it a point of honour that no German city or town of any size should be left standing by the time the war ended. On 27 November, Freiburg on the edge of the Black Forest was bombed, leaving 3,000 dead and the medieval city centre destroyed. It was a communications centre behind the front and thus a legitimate target under the original Pointblank directive, but whether it shortened the war by a day, by an hour or a single minute is far from certain.

  Like the concentrated use of artillery, bombing revealed a disconcerting paradox about democracies. Because of intense pressure at home, in the press and from public opinion, commanders were compelled to minimize their own losses. And so they resorted to the maximum application of high explosive, which inevitably killed more civilians. Many Germans cried to the heavens for vengeance. The V-1 had not brought Britain to its knees, the V-2 did not appear to be changing the course of the war either, so rumours were spread of a V-3. ‘The prayer for our Führer and the people is also a weapon,’ wrote a woman. ‘The Lord God cannot abandon our Führer.’

  On 8 November General Patton, refusing to wait any longer for the weather to improve, began the Third Army’s offensive in the Saar without air support. ‘At 05.15, the artillery preparation woke me,’ he wrote in his diary that day. ‘The discharge of over 400 guns sounded like the slamming of doors in an empty house.’ His XX Corps began a major assault on the fortress city of Metz. The sky cleared and the fighter-bombers went in, but torrential rain had swollen the River Moselle to unprecedented levels. Patton told Bradley how one of his engineer companies had taken two days of frustration and hard work to connect a pontoon bridge across the fast-flowing river. One of the first vehicles across, a tank destroyer, snagged on a cable which then snapped. The bridge broke loose and swung downstream. ‘The whole damn company sat down in the mud’, Patton related, ‘and bawled like babies.’

  The weather was equally bad further north for the First and Ninth Armies. The IX Tactical Air Command of Major General Elwood ‘Pete’ Quesada had been attacking bridges over the Rhine to prevent reinforcements getting through. On 5 November, one fighter pilot had been astonished when a whole bridge blew up and collapsed into the Rhine, after he had inadvertently hit the demolition charges laid by German pioneers in case of a breakthrough.

  The terrible weather continued, with rain thirteeen days in a row. On 14 November Bradley drove up through the Ardennes, which had just had its first light covering of snow. He headed for First Army headquarters in the Belgian resort of Spa, which had been the Germans’ GHQ in the First World War. Now Hodges’s staff sat at field desks in the casino under immense chandeliers, as V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets streaked across the sky overhead bound for London and for Antwerp.

  In the early hours of 16 November, the meteorological report promised good weather just after Hodges had decided to attack come what may. Not long after dawn, the sun appeared for the first time in weeks. Everyone stared at it almost in disbelief. Shortly after midday, Eighth Air Force Fortresses and Liberators and Bomber Command Lancasters appeared overhead to smash a way through the Westwall. Bradley, nervous after the disaster at the start of Operation Cobra, had made sure that every precaution had been taken to prevent the bombers from hitting his troops waiting to attack. But, although there were no American casualties this time, the advancing infantry and armour soon discovered that the Germans had laid their ‘devil’s gardens’ in breadth and in depth.

  First Army was to advance from Aachen through the Hürtgen Forest to the River Roer. It needed to seize the dams south of Düren, which the Germans could use to destroy any attempt at a subsequent crossing of the Roer. Putting their faith in air and artillery bombardments to blast a way through, both Bradley and Hodges underestimated the horrors ahead. They were to be far more terrible than in the Norman bocage.

  The Hürtgen Forest, south-east of Aachen, was a dark, sinister concentration of pine trees up to thirty metres tall on steep hillsides. Soldiers constantly lost their bearings in its frightening depths. They saw the area as an ‘eerie haunting region fit for a witch’s lair’. This was to be an infantry battle, yet the battalions, regiments and divisions thrown into it were not trained or prepared for what lay ahead. With ravines as well as the density of trees, it was no terrain for the tanks or tank destroyers whose support they were used to, nor did it make things easy for their artillery or fighter-bombers. For the German 275th Infantry Division, on the other hand, adept at camouflage, earth bunkers, mines and booby-traps, it was ideal ground to defend.

  The heavy level of infantry losses since D-Day meant that an increasing proportion of front-line platoons consisted largely of barely trained new arrivals. Bradley was angry not just about their quality, but about how few of them the European theatre received. He discovered that General MacArthur was securing the lion’s share for his Philippines campaign. It seemed that in Washington not even lip-service was paid any more to ‘Germany first’. The War Department had cut back Eisenhower’s allotment of 80,000 replacements a month to 67,000.

  The US Army’s replacement system had been brutally unimaginative–and the British army’s was little better. After heavy losses, any spare rear-area personnel could suddenly find themselves in a replacement depot–known as a ‘repple depple’–along with green teenagers just shipped out from the States. Great efforts had been made to improve the organization so that new arrivals were not thrown into a battle at nightfall without knowing where they were or who they were fighting with. Yet they were still woefully unprepared for what lay ahead. Only if ‘repples’ survived their first battle, and began to create some scar tissue around their fear, would they stand a chance of living through to the next.

  German tactics were cruelly simple. They intended to exact maximum casualties. German soldiers seemed to have a diabolic genius with booby-traps of all sorts, such as Teller mines linked to tripwires, and the notorious anti-personnel Schu-mine which would blow off a foot as soon as the pressure pad was released. Every firebreak or ride had been mined, and blocked by felled trees. These barricades were booby-trapped and pre-registered by mortar and artillery batteries.

  Attack after attack failed. ‘Squads and platoons got lost,’ went one account of the hapless 28th Division, ‘mortar shells landing among assault teams carrying explosive charges set off the explosives and blew up the men; an unfailing chatter of machine guns ripped through the trees when anyone moved. One man, a replacement, sobbing hysterically, tried to dig himself a hole in the ground with his fingers. In late afternoon this battalion staggered back to the line of departure.’

  To make things worse, the rain seldom stopped. Trees dripped constantly, the ground was saturated and trenches filled with water. Since no foul-weather clothing had arrived, and few remembered the lessons of trench warfare from a quarter of a century before, American soldiers suffered crippling trench-foot, or ‘i
mmersion’, casualties. Large numbers were infected with dysentery. More alarmingly, and perhaps accentuated by the malevolent atmosphere of the forest, there was a dramatic rise in panic-stricken retreats, self-inflicted wounds, nervous collapse, suicides and desertion. Private Eddie Slovik from the 28th Division in the Hürtgen became the only American soldier during the war to be executed by firing squad. The Wehrmacht could not believe how soft the Allies were. In German ranks it was not just the deserter who would automatically be shot, but now, under a decree of Himmler, his family could be too.

  One officer after another was relieved when he could not get his men to attack. In the 8th Division almost all the officers in one battalion were sacked, and their replacements suffered the same fate. In this terrible, bloody, muddy battle, one division after another had to be pulled out of the line. Men, suffering from physical and psychological exhaustion, emerged with unblinking dead eyes, known as the ‘two-thousand year stare’. Altogether in the Hürtgen Forest, the Americans suffered 33,000 casualties, more than one in four of the troops involved.

  Hodges has been severely criticized for his lack of imagination in attempting to fight such a disadvantageous battle in the first place, which was bound to accentuate American weaknesses and German strengths. Yet the forest was the only route to the village of Schmidt and the Roer dams, which had to be secured before the river could be crossed. Even in the more open country north of Aachen, German units defended each fortified village until it was destroyed around their heads. When an American intelligence officer asked a captured young Leutnant if he did not regret such destruction to his own country, the German simply shrugged. ‘It probably won’t be ours after the war,’ he replied. ‘Why not destroy it?’ And further north still, the British Second Army swinging south from Nijmegen faced conditions in the thick woods of the Reichswald similar to those of Hodges’s men in the Hürtgen. The 53rd (Welsh) Division suffered 5,000 casualties in nine days.

  Allied forces well to the south were enjoying much greater success. On 19 November, General de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army broke through the Belfort Gap and reached the upper Rhine. Three days later, on the northern sector of General Jacob L. Devers’s 6th Army Group, General Wade H. Haislip’s XV Corps penetrated the Saverne Gap and on 23 November General Leclerc’s 2ème Division Blindée entered Strasbourg, thus fulfilling a promise he had sworn in the North African desert.

  A very satisfied General de Gaulle left the next day on a long, circuitous journey to meet Stalin in Moscow. He was accompanied by his chef de cabinet Gaston Palewski, the foreign minister Georges Bidault and General Juin.

  The journey took embarrassingly long because the head of government’s obsolete two-engined aircraft broke down with depressing frequency. They finally arrived in Baku, where they left the aircraft and boarded a train provided by the Soviet government. They found themselves installed in the old-fashioned carriages of the Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsarist commander-in-chief in the First World War. The journey across the snow-bound steppe was so slow that de Gaulle observed drily that he hoped there would not be a revolution in their absence.

  De Gaulle was keen to establish good relations with Stalin, partly in the hope that he would keep the French Communist Party under control. He would not be disappointed. Stalin did not want any sort of revolutionary adventures in France for the time being. A Communist uprising might lead Roosevelt to cut off Lend–Lease material to the Soviet Union, or, in his worst nightmare, to use it as an excuse to come to some deal with Germany. Stalin knew how distrustful Roosevelt was of the French. De Gaulle’s other objective was to ensure that, with Stalin’s support, France would be represented at the peace conference and not shut out by the Americans.

  On arrival in Moscow, the French delegation had to endure one of Stalin’s sinister banquets in the Kremlin, where he forced his marshals and ministers to run round the table to clink glasses with him. He then proposed toasts, threatening them with execution in a brutal display of hangman’s humour. De Gaulle described him memorably as a ‘Communist dressed up as a marshal, a dictator ensconced in his scheming, a conqueror with an air of bonhomie’. Stalin’s objective during the talks was to obtain recognition of his puppet government, the Lublin Poles. He was clearly hoping to open a breach in the western alliance. De Gaulle politely and firmly stuck to his refusal. At one point, Stalin turned to Gaston Palewski and said with a malicious smirk: ‘One never ceases to be Polish, Monsieur Palewski.’

  Stalin was prepared to be generous, in his view, even though he despised France for its collapse in 1940 which had so upset his plans. (As a further dig at de Gaulle, he arranged for Ilya Ehrenburg to present him with a copy of his novel about the Fall of Paris.) Yet Stalin, well aware of de Gaulle’s resentment towards Roosevelt, had sensed that France might be a useful wild card to cultivate in the western alliance for the future. Stalin did not trust the British and the Americans. His greatest fear was that they might rearm Germany in the future. Stalin knew that de Gaulle really wanted not just the total defeat of Germany, but its dismemberment. In this they were in agreement, although Stalin would not support de Gaulle’s claim to the Rhineland in the post-war settlement.

  The visit went well, despite the fact that Bidault became very drunk at the banquet. A Franco-Soviet agreement was finally signed at four in the morning just before the French delegation’s departure. A compromise formula had to be reached over Stalin’s puppet government for Poland, but at least de Gaulle knew that he would not have trouble from the French Communists. Their leader, Maurice Thorez, who had reached France during his absence, had not ordered his members to the barricades or to launch more strikes. He had demanded blood, sweat, increased productivity and national unity to defeat Germany. The Communists of the resistance were dumbfounded, but next day the Party press confirmed what he had said. The Kremlin had clearly spoken. De Gaulle and his companions finally got back to France on 17 December only to face a totally unexpected crisis. German armies had broken through in the Ardennes and were thought to be heading for Paris.

  43

  The Ardennes and Athens

  NOVEMBER 1944–JANUARY 1945

  In November 1944, Major General Troy H. Middleton’s troops in VIII Corps were suffering from boredom on the Ardennes front. General Bradley heard of complaints from the forest warden that ‘GI’s in their zest for barbecued pork were hunting wild boar in low-flying Cubs with Thompson submachineguns.’ Grenades were also used in the trout streams to break the monotony of K-Rations.

  Ever since the chaotic retreat to the Westwall in September, Hitler had longed to repeat the great triumph of 1940. Once again he counted on Allied complacency, the shock effect and the speed of exploitation to achieve his goal of retaking Antwerp. This shortened version of Manstein’s Sichelschnitt plan would also cut off the First Canadian, the Second British Army, Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s Ninth and most of Hodges’s First Army. Hitler even dreamed of another Dunkirk. His generals were appalled by such a fantasy. Guderian wanted to reinforce the eastern front before the Soviet winter offensive. But Hitler’s strategy, rather like Hirohito’s hopes of the Ichig Offensive, was to achieve a sweeping victory to knock at least one country out of the war, and then perhaps negotiate from a position of strength.

  On the afternoon of 20 November, Hitler boarded his Sonderzug in the siding camouflaged under the forest canopy and left the Wolfsschanze for the very last time. He had not been well and also needed an operation on his throat, which provided an excuse for abandoning the threatened East Prussian front. He had been deeply depressed, apparently aware of the disaster facing Germany. Goebbels had been trying to persuade him to broadcast to the nation because rumours were spreading that he was gravely ill, mad or even dead. Hitler steadfastly refused.

  Only the prospect of revenge animated him, and his Ardennes offensive produced a fierce anticipation. Hitler, with the assistance of the OKW staff, had drafted the orders down to the last detail. Originally called Watch on
the Rhine as a cover name to imply a defensive operation, its real name was Autumn Mist. The attacking armies had to reach the Meuse in forty-eight hours and take Antwerp within fourteen days. He told his commanders that this would trap the First Canadian Army and knock Canada out of the war, and that in turn would persuade the United States to consider peace.

  Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt, who was perfectly prepared to launch a limited offensive to smash the Aachen salient, knew that the objective of Antwerp was utterly unrealistic. Even if the weather remained sufficiently bad to ground the Allied air forces, and even if they managed to seize Allied fuel dumps intact, the Germans simply lacked the strength to maintain the corridor. It was just like Hitler’s obsession with the Avranches counter-attack in early August, which he had forced on Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge. A dramatic and unexpected strike was no good unless you could sustain it. Rundstedt was later deeply offended when he discovered that the Allies called it ‘the Rundstedt offensive’, as if it had been his plan.

  On 3 November, when Jodl outlined the plan to the commanders involved, they were all dismayed: Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief west; Model, the commander-in-chief of Army Group B; Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the Sixth SS Panzer Army; and Generaloberst Hasso von Manteuffel, the commander of the Fifth Panzer Army. Yet when it finally came to the briefing on the eve of battle six weeks later, many of their young officers and soldiers were convinced, or managed to convince themselves, that along with the V-2s fired at England, this offensive would be the turning point for which they had waited so long.