The Second World War

by Winston S. Churchill

  Alexander and I started together at about nine o’clock. His aide-decamp and Tommy came in a second car. We were thus a conveniently small party. The advance had now been in progress for six hours, and was said to be making headway. But no definite impressions could yet be formed. We first climbed by motor up a high outstanding rock pinnacle, upon the top of which a church and village were perched. The inhabitants, men and women, came out to greet us from the cellars in which they had been sheltering. It was at once plain that the place had just been bombarded. Masonry and wreckage littered the single street. “When did this stop?” Alexander asked the small crowd who gathered round us, grinning rather wryly. “About a quarter of an hour ago,” they said. There was certainly a magnificent view from the ramparts of bygone centuries. The whole front of the Eighth Army offensive was visible. But apart from the smoke puffs of shells bursting seven or eight thousand yards away in a scattered fashion there was nothing to see. Presently Alexander said that we had better not stay any longer, as the enemy would naturally be firing at observation posts like this and might begin again. So we motored two or three miles to the westward, and had a picnic lunch on the broad slope of a hillside, which gave almost as good a view as the peak and was not likely to attract attention.

  News was now received that our troops had pushed on a mile or two beyond the river Metauro. Here Hasdrubal’s defeat had sealed the fate of Carthage, so I suggested that we should go across too. We got into our cars accordingly, and in half an hour were across the river, where the road ran into undulating groves of olives, brightly patched with sunshine. Having got an officer guide from one of the battalions engaged, we pushed on through these glades till the sounds of rifle and machine-gun fire showed we were getting near to the front line. Presently warning hands brought us to a standstill. It appeared there was a minefield, and it was only safe to go where other vehicles had already gone without mishap. Alexander and his aide-de-camp now went off to reconnoitre towards a grey stone building which our troops were holding, which was said to give a good close-up view. It was evident to me that only very loose fighting was in progress. In a few minutes the aide-de-camp came back and brought me to his chief, who had found a very good place in the stone building, which was in fact an old château overlooking a rather sharp declivity. Here one certainly could see all that was possible. The Germans were firing with rifles and machine-guns from thick scrub on the farther side of the valley, about five hundred yards away. Our front line was beneath us. The firing was desultory and intermittent. But this was the nearest I got to the enemy and the time I heard most bullets in the Second World War. After about half an hour we went back to our motor-cars and made our way to the river, keeping very carefully to our own wheel tracks or those of other vehicles. At the river we met the supporting columns of infantry, marching up to lend weight to our thin skirmish line, and by five o’clock we were home again at General Leese’s headquarters, where the news from the whole of the Army front was marked punctually on the maps. On the whole the Eighth Army had advanced since daybreak about seven thousand yards on a ten- or twelve-mile front, and the losses had not been at all heavy. This was an encouraging beginning.

  The next morning plenty of work arrived, both by telegram and pouch. It appeared that General Eisenhower was worried by the approach of some German divisions which had been withdrawn from Italy. I was glad that our offensive, prepared under depressing conditions, had begun. I drafted a telegram to the President explaining the position as I had learned it from the generals on the spot and from my own knowledge. I wished to convey in an uncontroversial form our sense of frustration, and at the same time to indicate my hopes and ideas for the future. If only I could revive the President’s interest in this sphere we might still keep alive our design of an ultimate advance to Vienna. After explaining Alexander’s plan, I ended as follows:

  I have never forgotten your talks to me at Teheran about Istria, and I am sure that the arrival of a powerful army in Trieste and Istria in four or five weeks would have an effect far outside purely military values. Tito’s people will be awaiting us in Istria. What the condition of Hungary will be then I cannot imagine, but we shall at any rate be in a position to take full advantage of any great new situation.

  I did not send this message off till I reached Naples, whither I flew on the 28th, nor did I receive the answer till some days after I got home. Mr. Roosevelt then replied:

  I share your confidence that the Allied divisions we have in Italy are sufficient to do the task before them and that the battle commander will press the battle unrelentingly with the objective of shattering the enemy forces.… As to the exact employment of our forces in Italy in the future, this is a matter we can [soon] discuss.… With the present chaotic conditions of the Germans in Southern France, I hope that a junction of the north and south forces may be obtained at a much earlier date than was first anticipated.

  We shall see that both these hopes proved vain. The army which we had landed on the Riviera at such painful cost to our operations in Italy arrived too late to help Eisenhower’s first main struggle in the north, while Alexander’s offensive failed, by the barest of margins, to achieve the success it deserved and we so badly needed. Italy was not to be wholly free for another eight months; the right-handed drive to Vienna was denied to us; and, except in Greece, our military power to influence the liberation of South-Eastern Europe was gone.

  The rest of the story is soon told. The Eighth Army attack prospered and augured well. It surprised the Germans, and by September 1 had penetrated the Gothic Line on a twenty-mile front. By the 18th the line had been turned at its eastern end by the Eighth Army, and pierced in the centre by the Americans.

  Though at the cost of grievous casualties, great success had been achieved and the future looked hopeful. But Kesselring received further reinforcements, until his German divisions amounted to twenty-eight in all. Scraping up two divisions from quiet sectors, he started fierce counter-attacks, which, added to our supply difficulties over the mountain passes, checked the Allied advance. The defence was stubborn, the ground very difficult, and it was raining hard. The climax came near Bologna between October 20 and 24, when General Mark Clark very nearly succeeded in cutting in behind the enemy facing the Eighth Army. Then, in Alexander’s words, “assisted by torrential rains and winds of gale force, and the Fifth Army’s exhaustion, the German line held firm.” The weather was appalling. Heavy rains had swollen the numberless rivers and irrigation channels and turned the reclaimed agricultural land into the swamp it had originally been. Off the roads movement was often impossible. It was with the greatest difficulty that the troops toiled forward. Although hopes of decisive victory had faded, it remained the first duty of the armies in Italy to keep up the pressure and deter the enemy from sending help to the hard-pressed German armies on the Rhine. And so we fought forward whenever there was a spell of reasonably fine weather. But from mid-November no major offensive was possible. Small advances were made as opportunity offered, but not until the spring were the armies rewarded with the victory they had so well earned, and so nearly won, in the autumn.

  CHAPTER XV

  THE RUSSIAN VICTORIES

  THE reader must now hark back to the Russian struggle, which in scale far exceeded the operations with which my account has hitherto been concerned, and formed of course the foundation upon which the British and American Armies had approached the climax of the war. The Russians had given their enemy little time to recover from their severe reverses of the early winter of 1943. In mid-January 1944 they attacked on a 120-mile front from Lake limen to Leningrad and pierced the defences before the city. Farther south by the end of February the Germans had been driven back to the shores of Lake Peipus. Leningrad was freed once and for all, and the Russians stood on the borders of the Baltic States. Further onslaughts to the west of Kiev forced the Germans back towards the old Polish frontier. The whole southern front was aflame and the German line deeply penetrated at many points. One great po
cket of surrounded Germans was left behind at Kersun, from which few escaped. Throughout March the Russians pressed their advantage all along the line and in the air. From Gomel to the Black Sea the invaders were in full retreat, which did not end until they had been thrust across the Dniester, back into Roumania and Poland. Then the spring thaw brought them a short respite. In the Crimea however operations were still possible, and in April the Russians set about destroying the Seventeenth German Army and regaining Sebastopol.

  The magnitude of these victories raised issues of far-reaching importance. The Red Army now loomed over Central and Eastern Europe. What was to happen to Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Bulgaria, and above all, to Greece, for whom we had tried so hard and sacrificed so much? Would Turkey come in on our side? Would Yugoslavia be engulfed in the Russian flood? Post-war Europe seemed to be taking shape and some political arrangement with the Soviets was becoming urgent.

  On May 18 the Soviet Ambassador in London had called at the Foreign Office to discuss a general suggestion which Mr. Eden had made that the U.S.S.R. should temporarily regard Roumanian affairs as mainly their concern under war conditions while leaving Greece to us. The Russians were prepared to accept this, but wished to know if we had consulted the United States. If so they would agree. On the 31st I accordingly sent a personal telegram to Mr. Roosevelt:

  … I hope you may feel able to give this proposal your blessing. We do not of course wish to carve up the Balkans into spheres of influence, and in agreeing to the arrangement we should make it clear that it applied only to war conditions and did not affect the rights and responsibilities which each of the three Great Powers will have to exercise at the peace settlement and afterwards in regard to the whole of Europe. The arrangement would of course involve no change in the present collaboration between you and us in the formulation and execution of Allied policy towards these countries. We feel however that the arrangement now proposed would be a useful device for preventing any divergence of policy between ourselves and them in the Balkans.

  The first reactions of the State Department were cool. Mr. Hull was nervous of any suggestion that “might appear to savour of the creation or acceptance of the idea of spheres of influence”, and on June n the President cabled:

  … Briefly, we acknowledge that the military responsible Government in any given territory will inevitably make decisions required by military developments, but are convinced that the natural tendency for such decisions to extend to other than military fields would be strengthened by an agreement of the type suggested. In our opinion, this would certainly result in the persistence of differences between you and the Soviets and in the division of the Balkan region into spheres of influence despite the declared intention to limit the arrangment to military matters.

  We believe efforts should preferably be made to establish consultative machinery to dispel misunderstandings and restrain the tendency toward the development of exclusive spheres.

  I was much concerned at this message and replied on the same day:

  … Action is paralysed if everybody is to consult everybody else about everything before it is taken. Events will always outstrip the changing situations in these Balkan regions. Somebody must have the power to plan and act. A Consultative Committee would be a mere obstruction, always overridden in any case of emergency by direct interchanges between you and me, or either of us and Stalin.

  See, now, what happened at Easter. We were able to cope with this mutiny of the Greek forces entirely in accordance with your own views. This was because I was able to give constant orders to the military commanders, who at the beginning advocated conciliation, and above all no use or even threat of force. Very little life was lost. The Greek situation has been immensely improved, and, if firmness is maintained, will be rescued from confusion and disaster. The Russians are ready to let us take the lead in the Greek business, which means that E.A.M.* and all its malice can be controlled by the national forces of Greece.… If in these difficulties we had had to consult other Powers and a set of triangular or quadrangular telegrams got started the only result would have been chaos or impotence.

  It seems to me, considering the Russians are about to invade Roumania in great force and are going to help Roumania recapture part of Transylvania from Hungary, provided the Roumanians play, which they may, considering all that, it would be a good thing to follow the Soviet leadership, considering that neither you nor we have any troops there at all and that they will probably do what they like anyhow.… To sum up, I propose that we agree that the arrangements I set forth in my message of May 31 may have a trial of three months, after which it must be reviewed by the three Powers.

  On June 13 the President agreed to this proposal, but added: “We must be careful to make it clear that we are not establishing any postwar spheres of influence.” I shared his view, and replied the next day:

  I am deeply grateful to you for your telegram. I have asked the Foreign Secretary to convey the information to Molotov and to make it clear that the reason for the three months’ limit is in order that we should not prejudge the question of establishing post-war spheres of influence.

  I reported the situation to the War Cabinet that afternoon, and it was agreed that, subject to the time-limit of three months, the Foreign Secretary should inform the Soviet Government that we accepted this general division of responsibility. This was done on June 19. The President however was not happy about the way we had acted, and I received a pained message saying “we were disturbed that your people took this matter up with us only after it had been put up to the Russians.” On June 23 accordingly I outlined to the President, in reply to his rebuke, the situation as I saw it from London:

  The Russians are the only Power that can do anything in Roumania.… On the other hand, the Greek burden rests almost entirely upon us, and has done so since we lost 40,000 men in a vain endeavour to help them in 1941. Similarly, you have let us play the hand in Turkey, but we have always consulted you on policy, and I think we have been agreed on the line to be followed. It would be quite easy for me, on the general principle of slithering to the Left, which is so popular in foreign policy, to let things rip, when the King of Greece would probably be forced to abdicate and E.A.M. would work a reign of terror in Greece, forcing the villagers and many other classes to form Security Battalions under German auspices to prevent utter anarchy. The, only way I can prevent this is by persuading the Russians to quit boosting E.A.M. and ramming it forward with all their force. Therefore I proposed to the Russians a temporary working arrangement for the better conduct of the war. This was only a proposal, and had to be referred to you for your agreement.

  I have also taken action to try to bring together a union of the Tito forces with those in Serbia, and with all adhering to the Royal Yugoslav Government, which we have both recognised. You have been informed at every stage of how we are bearing this heavy burden, which at present rests mainly on us. Here again nothing would be easier than to throw the King and the Royal Yugoslav Government to the wolves and let a civil war break out in Yugoslavia, to the joy of the Germans. I am struggling to bring order out of chaos in both cases and concentrate all efforts against the common foe. I am keeping you constantly informed, and I hope to have your confidence and help within the spheres of action in which initiative is assigned to us.

  Mr. Roosevelt’s reply settled this argument between friends. “It appears,” he cabled, “that both of us have inadvertently taken unilateral action in a direction that we both now agree to have been expedient for the time being. It is essential that we should always be in agreement in matters bearing on our Allied war effort.”

  “You may be sure,” I replied, “I shall always be looking to our agreement in all matters before, during, and after.”

  The difficulties however continued on a Governmental level. Stalin, as soon as he realised the Americans had doubts, insisted on consulting them direct, and in the end we were unable to reach any final agreement about dividing responsibilities in
the Balkan peninsula. Early in August the Russians dispatched from Italy by a subterfuge a mission to E.L.A.S., the military component of E.A.M., in Northern Greece. In the light of American official reluctance and of this instance of Soviet bad faith, we abandoned our efforts to reach a major understanding until I met Stalin in Moscow two months later. By then much had happened on the Eastern Front.

  In Finland, Russian troops, very different in quality and armament from those who had fought there in 1940, broke through the Mannerheim Line, reopened the railway from Leningrad to Murmansk, the terminal of our Arctic convoys, and by the end of August compelled the Finns to sue for an armistice. Their main attack on the German front began on June 23. Many towns and villages had been turned into strong positions, with all-round defence, but they were successively surrounded and disposed of, while the Red armies poured through the gaps between. At the end of July they had reached the Niemen at Kovno and Grodno. Here, after an advance of 250 miles in five weeks, they were brought to a temporary halt to replenish. The German losses had been crushing. Twenty-five divisions had ceased to exist, and an equal number were cut off in Courland.* On July 17 alone 57,000 German prisoners were marched through Moscow—who knows whither?

  OPERATIONS ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT, JUNE 1944-JAN.1945

  To the southward of these victories lay Roumania. Till August was far advanced the German line from Cernowitz to the Black Sea barred the way to the Ploesti oilfields and the Balkans. It had been weakened by withdrawal of troops to sustain the sagging line farther north, and under violent attacks, beginning on August 22, it rapidly disintegrated. Aided by landings on the coast, the Russians made short work of the enemy. Sixteen German divisions were lost. On August 23 a coup d’état in Bucharest, organised by the young King Michael and his close advisers, led to a complete reversal of the whole military position. The Roumanian armies followed their King to a man. Within three days before the arrival of the Soviet troops the German forces had been disarmed or had retired over the northern frontiers. By September 1 Bucharest had been evacuated by the Germans. The Roumanian armies disintegrated and the country was overrun. The Roumanian Government capitulated. Bulgaria after a last-minute attempt to declare war on Germany, was overwhelmed. Wheeling to the west, the Russian armies drove up the valley of the Danube and through the Transylvanian Alps to the Hungarian border, while their left flank, south of the Danube, lined up on the frontier of Yugoslavia. Here they prepared for the great westerly drive which in due time was to carry them to Vienna.