Letters from the Front: From the First World War to the Present Day

by Roberts, Andrew

  As time goes on I hope censorship regulations will be relaxed and that we shall be allowed to name places. It is too early to imagine how things are going to settle down, and when and at what moment: one wants a few days to collect and re-arrange one’s thoughts and ideas.

  I have seen armistice terms since writing the commencement of this. They are simply wonderful. What more complete victory could have been desired?!

  xxxxxxxxxx

  Stanley

  Major Westmacott who less than a year earlier had been part of the Allied retreat during the German Spring Offensives, was with the victorious Allied armies as they crossed into Germany. He later recalled his thoughts on marching into the homeland of his former enemy in a letter to his wife on 13 December 1918.

  I have seen a sight today which I shall never forget. There are three bridges over the Rhine at Cologne, known as the Mulhelm bridge, the Hohen-Zollern bridge, and the suspension bridge. Our infantry began to cross the Rhine at 9.15am, the 9th Div. by the Mulhelm bridge, the 29th Div. by the Hohen-Zollern bridge and the Canadians by the suspension bridge. Until 1.15pm they poured across in three dense columns. So as to do things really well, the German police were told to see that no wheeled German traffic was allowed on the streets, and they obeyed their orders to the letter. There were big crowds of Germans looking on in spite of the rain, but they seemed more curious than anything else. I saw one women in tears, poor soul, but bar that it might have been almost an English crowd. General Jacob, my Corps Commander, stood under the Union Jack by a big statue of the Kaiser, at the west end of the Hohen-Zollern bridge, and took the salute of the 29th Division, one of the finest fighting divisions in the British Army, being the division which earned undying glory in Gallipoli.

  The men marched with fixed bayonets, wearing their steel helmets, and carrying their packs. I wish you could have seem them – each man making the most of himself, and full of pride and élan. Then came the guns, turned out as our gunners always turn themselves out. Mind you, the Division was fighting hard all through the last battle, and they have been marching steadily through Belgium and Germany for the last 30 days, but the horses were all fit and hard as nails, and the buckles of the harness were all burnished like silver. The mules were as fit as the horses, and went by wagging their old ears as if they crossed the Rhine every day of the week. A German looking on said that the Division must have just come fresh from England. It is difficult to remember what we were like last March and April, during the retreat of the 5th Army, and to find ourselves here as conquerors in one of the proudest cities of Germany.

  * The Zimmermann telegram was a message from the German Foreign Minister Alfred Zimmermann to his ambassador in Mexico suggesting that if war should break out with the United States, Mexico should be encouraged to recapture the territory she had lost in 1848.

  * This refers to the green envelope given to some soldiers as a privilege. The letters in these envelopes were sealed and exempt from the censors and the soldiers certified that the contents did not contain any military information.

  * His sister Marjorie had spent some time in hospital due to illness.

  * See the image insert for the sketch of the tanks in action at Cambrai, drawn by Reverend Lomax.

  * Uff was the name of Patrick’s cat back at home.

  * This is the ancient name for the Gallipoli peninsular.

  * Owen was Charles’ horse.

  * Moloch, the name of an ancient Semetic god, is often used to describe an entity, either a person or thing, demanding a very costly sacrifice.

  * The naval battle referred to here is likely to be the battle of Heligoland Bight (28 August 1914), the first naval battle of the war.

  * Tommy slang for Ypres.

  THE SECOND WORLD WAR

  The Second World War began shortly after dawn on Friday 1 September 1939 when two German Army Groups thrust deep into Poland. Supported by Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers (‘Stukas’), and employing the tactic of Blitzkrieg or ‘Lightning war’, the Wehrmacht raced forward, enveloping and capturing entire Polish armies which were soon overwhelmed, especially when on 17 September the Red Army of Soviet Russia also attacked Poland from the east.

  Two days after Hitler’s assault on Poland, the British and French governments – which had guaranteed Poland’s sovereignty that March – declared war on Germany. That same day, Sunday 3 September, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain brought Winston Churchill into his cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, the minister responsible for the Royal Navy.

  To the public eye, the next thing that happened was … very little. The ‘Phoney War’ lasted seven months while the Nazis ingested Poland and moved their forces westwards, but there was no fighting on the Western Front. Both the war in Finland and the war at sea were fought aggressively, however, with many sinkings on both sides, including the British aircraft carrier Courageous and the German battleship Graf Spee.

  The months of uneasy waiting suddenly ended on 9 April 1940, when Hitler covered his northern flank by successfully invading Denmark and Norway, and forcing the Royal Navy to evacuate British and French forces from the latter country. This humiliation brought down Chamberlain’s government after a tumultuous debate over Norway in the House of Commons, and on 10 May 1940 Winston Churchill became prime minister. In his first appearance in the Commons in this role, on 13 May, he told the British people that they could expect nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’, in the first of many sublime morale-boosting speeches of his wartime premiership.

  On the very day that Churchill became prime minister, Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg on the Low Countries. Neutral Holland and Belgium were invaded, as well as France, and by 20 May General Heinz Guderian’s leading Panzer tank formations had reached the English lines at Abbeville, cutting the Allied line in half. Hopes of an effective counter-attack soon faded, and on the evening of 25 May, the British commander Lord Gort took the decision to retreat to the Channel port of Dunkirk and re-embark as much as he could of his hard-pressed British Expeditionary Force. There started a desperate race to the sea. Through a brilliant naval operation, supported by brave RAF sorties against the Luftwaffe, no fewer than 338,226 soldiers, including 120,000 French troops, were saved by 3 June, from what had at one point looked like inevitable capture. As the writer of one of these letters observes: ‘Imagine carrying 56 pounds of potatoes on your back for five hours and you can imagine how I felt.’

  Yet as Churchill told the House of Commons, ‘Wars are not won by evacuations,’ and by 11 June the Germans had crossed the River Marne. The French premier Paul Reynaud resigned soon afterwards, and the Great War hero of Verdun, Marshal Philippe Pétain, filled the gap, becoming leader of the French state. He immediately appealed to Hitler for an armistice, and a peace treaty was signed on 22 June.

  Contrary to the cliché, Britain did not ‘stand alone’ against Nazism after the fall of France: the British Empire remained utterly loyal to the motherland, with declarations of war against Germany and the sending of troops from Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and the West Indies. India provided the largest all-volunteer army in the history of mankind, and in East Africa the native populations enthusiastically joined up and took part in the attacks on the Italian empire there.

  Now the undisputed master of the continent, Hitler began to draw up plans to invade and subjugate Great Britain, codenamed Operation Sealion. In order for them to be put into effect he needed command of the skies, so he allowed Hermann Goering to undertake the great aerial struggle that became known as ‘the Battle of Britain’. In July, throughout August and for the first half of September 1940, the Luftwaffe – with 875 bombers, 316 bombers and 929 fighters – contested the air against the RAF, which had around 650 fighters (having already lost nearly 500 in the battle of France).

  Through the careful husbanding of resources by Air Chief Marshal Dowding, increased fighter construction under the new Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, invaluable early warning in
formation from recently installed radar and observation posts, the slight performance edge of the Hurricane and Spitfire over the Messerschmitt, but above all the superb aggressive spirit of the young pilots of Fighter Command, the RAF won the Battle of Britain, in which Germany lost 1,733 planes by the end of October 1940, to Britain’s 915. On 7 September 1940, after taking heavy losses, Goering decided to switch the main target from the aerodromes and radar stations to the metropolis of London itself, a tacit acknowledgement that Britain had won. The ‘Nazi doctrines’ which one of the authors of these letters, a RAF pilot, refers to, were not about to pollute Britain after all.

  The bombing of London and many other British cities – including Coventry, Glasgow, Portsmouth, Bristol and Southampton – in what was called ‘the Blitz’, was to cost the lives of nearly 43,000 British civilians. It brought the war home to ordinary Britons in a way that the Zeppelins had not really achieved during the Great War. In order to protect urban children, millions were evacuated to safety, often to rural parts of the country. If a little more brutal honesty about the horrors of war can be detected in the Second World War letters than the first set in this volume, it might be because the soldiers at the front knew that the Blitz had brought the ghastly realities of death and destruction home to civilians in 1940 in a way that hadn’t really happened before.

  Although the RAF’s Bomber Command responded by attacking German cities, and the Royal Navy blockaded Germany and attempted to sink raider battleships and U-boats, for a while after the Battle of Britain there was nowhere for the Allies and the Wehrmacht to clash on land, since the Axis powers controlled the European continent and an attempted invasion there was judged suicidal. In Libya, Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia and along the North African coast, however, the British Army under General Wavell was able to score several significant victories over Marshal Graziani’s Italian troops, despite being heavily outnumbered.

  This was not to last, however, as in February 1941 Churchill ordered forces to be diverted to protect Greece, just as the brilliant German commander General Erwin Rommel arrived in Tripoli to take command of the German Afrika Korps. On 6 April, Germany, having suborned Romania and Hungary onto its side, invaded Yugoslavia, which fell after only 11 days’ fighting. Soon afterwards, British forces had to be evacuated from Greece to Crete, where they were followed by a daring German airborne landing of over 17,500 troops under General Kurt Student. After eight days’ fighting the British were forced to evacuate Crete.

  The war was going badly for the British Commonwealth, but in 1941 Adolf Hitler made two disastrous blunders which truly globalized the war and allowed the British their first genuine glimpses of possible future victory. The first mistake was Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, which inaugurated a life-or-death four-year struggle between him and the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

  The other mistake came after the surprise attack that Imperial Japan launched against the American Pacific Fleet as it lay at anchor at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Sunday 7 December 1941, which succeeded in sinking four battleships, damaging a further five, destroying 164 aircraft and killing 2,403 US servicemen and civilians. What President Franklin D. Roosevelt called ‘a day that would live in infamy’ brought the world’s greatest industrial power into the conflict. Hitler’s near-lunatic decision to declare war against America four days later effectively spelt his doom.

  Between 22 and 28 December 1941, Churchill visited Washington and Ottawa with his service chiefs and hammered out with the Americans and Canadians the key stages by which victory was to be achieved. To their great credit, Roosevelt and the US Army chief of staff, General George Marshall, eschewed the obvious response to Pearl Harbor – a massive retaliation against the immediate aggressor, Japan – to concentrate instead on a ‘Germany First’ policy that would destroy the most powerful of the Axis dictatorships first, before then moving on to crush Japan.

  ‘Germany First’, while making good political and strategic sense, did, however, mean that the Japanese were permitted to make enormous advances throughout the Far East in the early stages of the campaign, advances that were characterised by dreadful cruelty to the peoples they conquered and to the prisoners-of-war they captured. Catastrophe for the Allies followed, along with humiliation at Japanese hands. On 10 December 1941 Japanese aircraft sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, on Christmas Day Hong Kong surrendered and in January 1942 the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies and Burma and captured Kuala Lumpur. On 15 February Britain suffered her greatest defeat since the American War of Independence when the great naval base of Singapore surrendered to a much smaller Japanese force. The Americans were also forced out of the Philippines.

  Meanwhile, the struggle in North Africa surged back and forth between Tripoli and Tobruk. Wavell was replaced by General Claude Auchinleck, who was himself replaced by Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery. It was Montgomery who convincingly defeated Rommel in a well-planned battle at El Alamein, Egypt, between 28 October and 4 November 1942. On 8 November, Allied forces under the American commander Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in French North Africa, and it was not long before the Germans were in full retreat. Tobruk, which had been taken by Rommel in June, was recaptured by the British Army on 13 November 1942.

  Between January 1943 and June 1944 the Axis powers were forced to pull back in Russia and the Mediterranean, which they did in a hard-fought rearguard action, contesting every important nodal point, defensive line and communications centre. On occasion, such as at the monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy, their dogged resistance held up the Allied advance for weeks.

  At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that once the Germans were expelled from Africa, the Allies would invade Sicily. After that was undertaken successfully on 10 July, Mussolini fell from power, and the new Italian government began secret negotiations to switch sides. In early September Montgomery crossed the Straits of Messina onto mainland Italy, and the American Lieutenant General Mark Clark landed an amphibious Anglo-American army at Salerno. The fighting up the Italian peninsula, which was relatively easy for the Germans to defend, proved long, hard and costly, yet too early a cross-Channel attack would most likely have been disastrous. Rome did not fall until 4 June 1944.

  The very next day the eyes of the world turned to the beaches of Normandy, where – after two night-time airborne landings inland – 4,000 10-ton landing craft took six infantry divisions to five beachheads, codenamed (from west to east) Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. In all, Operation Overlord on 6 June involved 6,800 vessels, 11,500 aircraft and 176,000 men. ‘I hope to God I know what I’m doing,’ Eisenhower said on the eve of the attack. With total air superiority, German confusion, ingenious inventions such as the PLUTO oil pipeline* and artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours, and the courage of the English-speaking peoples, victory was assured. ‘To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom which will live in history,’ Montgomery told his troops, ‘and in the better days that lie ahead men will speak with pride of our doings. We have a great and righteous cause.’ The casualty figures from D-Day are estimated to be around 10,000 servicemen killed and wounded, including men from the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

  Yet the town of Caen held out for a month, the battle of the Falaise Gap was not won until 21 August and Paris was not liberated until 26 August. The ever-present capacity for Nazi punishment of Allied tactical over-extension was proven on 17 September, when a huge Anglo-American airborne operation of glider landings and parachute drops codenamed Operation Market Garden attempted to secure the bridges over the key Dutch rivers and canals ahead of their armies. The Allies took Eindhoven, Grave and Nijmegen, thereby securing access over the Meuse and the Waal rivers, but the British First Airborne Division was dropped to the west of the town of Arnhem, capturing the bridge over the lower Rhine. It proved to be a bridge too far, since by 25 September it was impossible to relieve them and they were o
rdered to withdraw, with just over 2,000, onefifth of the total, managing to escape death, wounding or capture.

  On 16 December the Germans then launched a major counterattack, coming once again through the wooded mountains of the Ardennes. Twenty divisions – seven of them armoured – assaulted the American First Army, while to the north SS-Oberstgruppenfuhrer Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army struck for the Meuse and General Hasso von Manteuffel Fifth Panzer Army tried to make for Brussels. Seeing the American front effectively being sliced in half, Eisenhower gave Montgomery command of the whole northern sector on 20 December. Montgomery managed to fight ‘the Battle of the Bulge’ successfully until the Germans ran out of petrol by Boxing Day 1944.

  In January 1945, Eisenhower and Montgomery adopted a two-pronged strategy for the invasion of Germany, with the British and Canadians pushing through the Reichswald into the Rhineland from the north, while the Americans came up through the south. The land battle was supported by the heroic bombing missions of the RAF and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), over such cities as Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin, as well as other cities and industrial and military targets. The diaries and memoirs of senior Nazis such as propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and armaments minister Albert Speer suggest that these were highly effective in breaking German morale and dislocating industry. They came at a terribly high cost though: no fewer than 58,000 men died in Bomber Command during the war.