The Second World War

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The Second World War Page 116

by Antony Beevor


  ‘It’s all over, my child’: Moorhouse, Berlin at War, p. 360

  here For suicides in Germany at the end of the war, see Christian Goeschel, Suicide in Nazi Germany, Oxford, 2009

  ‘You will see, the Russians’: quoted Gilbert, The Second World War, p. 670

  ‘mental sickness consisted’: conversation with Generalinspekteur a.D. Ulrich de Maizière, 9.10.99

  ‘Because the fascist clique’: TsAMO 233/2374/93, p. 414

  ‘tragi-comedy’: BA-MA MSg1/976, p. 22

  ‘Do you really believe’: Fritz Hockenjos, BA-MA MSg 2 4038, p. 24

  ‘are very amiable–so far’: Rabe, The Good German of Nanking, pp. 218–20

  ‘Frau ist Frau’: conversation with Magda Wieland, 11.7.00

  Rape estimates and deaths from rape and suicide: Dr Gerhard Reichling, in Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, Befreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder, Munich, 1992, pp. 54, 59

  ‘The Führer in Berlin’: NA II RG 338 R-79, pp. 37–8

  ‘Now he’s had it’: Zhukov, Vospominania i Razmyshlenia, vol. iv, pp. 269–70

  ‘at the head of his troops’: Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p. 188

  49: Cities of the Dead

  ‘I am unable’: Efraim Genkin in Altman (ed.), Sokhrani moi pisma, p. 282

  ‘Victors are not judged’: Ehrenburg, Men, Years–Life, vol. v, p. 37

  ‘People were living with their fate’: conversation with Lothar Loewe, 9.10.2001

  ‘The people were not to blame’: Fritz Hockenjos, BA-MA MSg 2 4038, p. 25

  ‘traitor of the Motherland General Vlasov’: GLAVPURKKA, RGASPI 17/125/310

  ‘A merciless fight’: TsAMO 372/6570/78, pp. 30–2

  ‘systematic anti-Soviet talk’: RGVA 38686/1/26, p. 36

  ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’: GARF 9401/1a/165, pp. 181–3

  ‘On the roads of Germany today’: GBP, 19/4/45

  ‘An old woman traveller’: RGALI 1710/3/51

  ‘Some American prisoners’: GBP, 19/4/45

  ‘Those identified as murderers’: Kenneally, The Honour and the Shame, pp. 205–6 Operation Unthinkable: TNA CAB 120/691; see also Hastings, Finest Years, pp. 571–7

  ‘The idea is of course’: Alanbrooke, War Diaries, 24.5.45, pp. 693–4

  ‘again discussed the’: ibid., p. 695

  ‘a new Yalta’: Plokhy, Yalta, p. 383

  ‘In a few days’: Alanbrooke, War Diaries, 2.7.45, 3.7.45, p. 701

  Stalin’s security for Potsdam: Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 439–40

  ‘completely shattered’: Alanbrooke, War Diaries, p. 709

  ‘It must be very pleasant for you’: Berezhkov, History in the Making, p. 168

  ‘a landing in Norway’: Beria, Beria, my Father, pp. 112–13

  ‘Churchill was standing by the door’: ibid., p. 118

  ‘Well, prime minister, I know’: quoted Hastings, Finest Years, p. 578

  ‘Socialist, sir’: the late A. H. Brodhurst to the author

  here On Titoist massacres in Slovenia, I am grateful to Keith Miles and Jože Dežman for documents on the subject; also papers from the symposium at Teinach, Austria, 30.6.95

  Czech expulsions: Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 320

  ‘Murder became ordinary’: Czesaw Miosz, The Captive Mind, London, 2001, pp. 26–9

  ‘If we are American’: Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books, 11.11.10

  50: The Atomic Bombs and the Subjugation of Japan

  ‘A honky-tonk’: White and Jacoby, Thunder out of China, p. 267

  Opium trade in Communist areas and inflation: see Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp. 337–41

  ‘I just tried to choose’: Enomoto Masayo in Rees, Their Darkest Hour, p. 74; on cannibalism by Japanese forces, see Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, pp. 111–34

  For Unit 731 and Japanese biological warfare, see Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, pp. 135–65

  Experiments on bomber crews: NA II RG 153/Entry 143/Boxes 1062–73 and 1362–3; Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, p. 160

  ‘incapacitated soldiers’: Allied Translator and Interpreter Section Southwest Pacific Area, quoted Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, p. 160

  ‘Do not survive in shame’: quoted Hastings, Nemesis, p. 57

  ‘the army had dug’: quoted Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, East Lansing, Mich., 1995, p. 43

  ‘they may expect’: Spector, Eagle against the Sun, p. 555

  ‘Japan lost the war’: 37th Division soldiers, quoted Kawano, ‘Japanese Combat Morale’, in Peattie, Drea and van de Ven, The Battle for China, p. 328

  1,336 cases of rape: Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, p. 103

  For Japanese colonists in Manchuria, see Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 62

  ‘From then on’: quoted Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, p. 102

  Red Army column in Chahar: Yang Kuisong, ‘Nationalist and Communist Guerrilla Warfare in North China’, in Peattie, Drea and van de Ven, The Battle for China, p. 32

  ‘deeply, irrevocably convinced’: Smedley, China Fights Back, p. 116

  For the race to take Hong Kong, see Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, pp. 231–62

  ‘What’s a Jeep?’: Wasserstein, Secret War in Shanghai, p. 266

  ‘widespread practice of cannibalism’: Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, p. 126

  ‘to combine the duties’: Beria to Stalin, 22.6.45, GARF 9401/2/97, pp. 8–10

  ‘died as a result of the interaction’: Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 381

  * Sachsenhausen, like all other German concentration camps at this stage, was not an extermination camp. These camps had been set up very soon after Hitler’s arrival in power in 1933 to hold political opponents, then those the Nazis defined as ‘anti-social’. Nazi policy then was to force Jews through persecution to emigrate. As will become clear, the ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’ developed only after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, first by shooting, and then from 1942 by gas.

  * Chemno (or Kulmhof) was the first to be closed in March 1943, although it was briefly reactivated in the summer of 1944 and finally burned down during the retreat of January 1945. Treblinka, Sobibór and Beec were closed in the early autumn of 1943. Majdanek (or Lublin) was abandoned in a panic in July 1944 during the Red Army’s rapid advance. In almost all cases the work commandos of mainly Jewish, Soviet and Polish prisoners were massacred as soon as they had finished the task.

  Japanese bayonet Chinese prisoners in Nanking

  Japanese horse artillery in southern China

  Goebbels and Göring

  Warsaw, August 1939

  Narvik, April 1940

  The crew of a French B1 tank surrender

  Dunkirk, rescue of survivors from the destroyer Bourrasque

  German aircrew taken prisoner, September 1940

  Hans Frank of the Generalgouvernement and Polish clergy

  German paratroopers, Crete

  The crew of a British Bren gun carrier in Syria, June 1941

  A Ukrainian village ablaze in July 1941

  Soviet troops counter-attack near Moscow, December 1941

  Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941

  Hitler declares war on the United States, 11 December 1941

  The Soviet counter-offensive near Moscow

  German supply services December 1941

  A Soviet medical orderly

  The effects of starvation: three identity photos of Nina Petrova in Leningrad, May 1941, May 1942, October 1942

  Evacuees from Leningrad on the ‘Ice Road’ across Lake Ladoga

  Rommel in North Africa

  The Japanese advance in Burma, with soldiers acting as bridge supports

  Japanese victory on Corregidor, 6 May 1942

  German officers relax in Paris

  German infantry in Stalingrad

  US Marines storm Tarawa atoll, 19 November 1943

  Camp prisoner about to be executed

  HMS Belfast on an Arctic convoy, November 1943

  Soviet war industry mobilization
<
br />   Japanese cavalry detachment in China

  Hamburg after the firestorm raids of July 1943

  Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek with General Stilwell

  MacArthur, Roosevelt and Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, 26 July 1944

  US troops land on Bougainville, 6 April 1944

  A Hellcat crash-landed on a carrier

  German prisoner in Paris, 26 August 1944

  Stretcher-bearers in the Warsaw Uprising

  Medical services during the bombing of Berlin

  Churchill in Athens with Archbishop Damaskinos, December 1944

  British troops occupy Athens

  Red Beach on Iwo Jima, February 1945

  Filipina women rescued during the battle for Manila, February 1945

  Soviet troops in a burning German town

  Civilians wait to enter a flak tower bunker in Berlin

  Soviet traffic controller on the road to Berlin

  Civilians clearing rubble in Dresden, February 1945

  C-46 transport plane landing at Kunming

  Japanese kamikaze pilots pose for a memorial picture

  Marble Gallery in the battered Reichschancellery

  German wounded in Berlin, 2 May 1945

  The Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, 2 September 1945

  Homeless civilians on Okinawa

  CONTENTS

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. The Outbreak of War

  2. ‘The Wholesale Destruction of Poland’

  3. From Phoney War to Blitzkrieg

  4. The Dragon and the Rising Sun

  5. Norway and Denmark

  6. Onslaught in the West

  7. The Fall of France

  8. Operation Sealion and the Battle of Britain

  9. Reverberations

  10. Hitler’s Balkan War

  11. Africa and the Atlantic

  12. Barbarossa

  13. Rassenkrieg

  14. The ‘Grand Alliance’

  15. The Battle for Moscow

  16. Pearl Harbor

  17. China and the Philippines

  18. War across the World

  19. Wannsee and the SS Archipelago

  20. Japanese Occupation and the Battle of Midway

  21. Defeat in the Desert

  22. Operation Blau–Barbarossa Relaunched

  23. Fighting Back in the Pacific

  24. Stalingrad

  25. Alamein and Torch

  26. Southern Russia and Tunisia

  27. Casablanca, Kharkov and Tunis

  28. Europe behind Barbed Wire

  29. The Battle of the Atlantic and Strategic Bombing

  30. The Pacific, China and Burma

  31. The Battle of Kursk

  32. From Sicily to Italy

  33. Ukraine and the Teheran Conference

  34. The Shoah by Gas

  35. Italy–The Hard Underbelly

  36. The Soviet Spring Offensive

  37. The Pacific, China and Burma

  38. The Spring of Expectations

  39. Bagration and Normandy

  40. Berlin, Warsaw and Paris

  41. The Ichig Offensive and Leyte

  42. Unrealized Hopes

  43. The Ardennes and Athens

  44. From the Vistula to the Oder

  45. Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Tokyo Raids

  46. Yalta, Dresden, Königsberg

  47. Americans on the Elbe

  48. The Berlin Operation

  49. Cities of the Dead

  50. The Atomic Bombs and the Subjugation of Japan

  Acknowledgements

  By the same author

  Illustrations and Maps

  Notes

  Photo Insert

  Copyright

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2012 by Antony Beevor

  Cover design by Steve Marking; image: www.humanrecord.com

  Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First e-book edition: June 2012

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  ISBN 978-0-316-08407-9

 

 

 


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