World War II: The Autobiography

by Jon E. Lewis

  The girls in their thin, bright dresses heightened the impression that the city had been taken over by an enormous family picnic. The number of extraordinarily pretty young girls, who presumably are hidden on working days inside the factories and government offices, was astonishing. They streamed out into the parks and streets like flocks of twittering, gaily plumaged cockney birds. In their freshly curled hair were cornflowers and poppies, and they wore red-white-and-blue ribbons around their narrow waists. Some of them even tied ribbons around their bare ankles. Strolling with their uniformed boys, arms candidly about each other, they provided a constant, gay, simple marginal decoration to the big, solemn moments of the day. The crowds milled back and forth between the Palace, Westminster, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus, and when they got tired they simply sat down wherever they happened to be – on the grass, on doorsteps, or on the kerb – and watched the other people or spread handkerchiefs over their faces and took a nap. Everybody appeared determined to see the King and Queen and Mr Churchill at least once, and few could have been disappointed. One small boy, holding on to his father’s hand, wanted to see the trench shelters in Green Park too. “You don’t want to see shelters today,” his father said. “You’ll never have to use them again, son.” “Never?” the child asked doubtfully. “Never!” the man cried, almost angrily. “Never! Understand?” In the open space before the Palace, one of the places where the Prime Minister’s speech was to be relayed by loudspeaker at three o’clock, the crowds seemed a little intimidated by the nearness of that symbolic block of grey stone. The people who chose to open their lunch baskets and munch sandwiches there among the flower beds of tulips were rather subdued. Piccadilly Circus attracted the more demonstrative spirits.

  By lunchtime, in the Circus, the buses had to slow to a crawl in order to get through the tightly packed, laughing people. A lad in the black beret of the Tank Corps was the first to climb the little pyramidal Angkor Vat of scaffolding and sandbags which was erected early in the war to protect the pedestal of the Eros statue after the figure had been removed to safekeeping. The boy shinnied up to the top and took a tiptoe Eros pose, aiming an imaginary bow, while the crowd roared. He was followed by a paratrooper in a maroon beret, who, after getting up to the top, reached down and hauled up a blonde young woman in a very tight pair of green slacks. When she got to the top, the Tank Corps soldier promptly grabbed her in his arms and, encouraged by ecstatic cheers from the whole Circus, seemed about to enact the classic role of Eros right on the top of the monument. Nothing came of it, because a moment later a couple of GIs joined them and before long the pyramid was covered with boys and girls. They sat jammed together in an affectionate mass, swinging their legs over the sides, wearing each other’s uniform caps, and calling down wisecracks to the crowd. “My God,” someone said, “think of a flying bomb coming down on this!” When a firecracker went off, a hawker with a tray of tin brooches of Monty’s head happily yelled that comforting, sometimes fallacious phrase of the blitz nights, “All right, mates, it’s one of ours!”

  All day long, the deadly past was for most people only just under the surface of the beautiful, safe present, so much so that the Government decided against sounding the sirens in a triumphant “all clear” for fear that the noise would revive too many painful memories. For the same reason, there were no salutes of guns – only the pealing of the bells, and the whistles of tugs on the Thames sounding the doot, doot, doot, dooooot of the “V”, and the roar of the planes, which swooped back and forth over the city, dropping red and green signals toward the blur of smiling, upturned faces.

  It was without any doubt Churchill’s day. Thousands of King George’s subjects wedged themselves in front of the Palace throughout the day, chanting ceaselessly “We want the King” and cheering themselves hoarse when he and the Queen and their daughters appeared, but when the crowd saw Churchill there was a deep, full-throated, almost reverent roar. He was at the head of a procession of Members of Parliament, walking back to the House of Commons from the traditional St Margaret’s Thanksgiving Service. Instantly, he was surrounded by people – people running, standing on tiptoe, holding up babies so that they could be told later they had seen him, and shouting affectionately the absurd little nurserymaid name, “Winnie, Winnie!” One of two happily sozzled, very old, and incredibly dirty cockneys who had been engaged in a slow, shuffling dance, like a couple of Shakespearean clowns, bellowed, “That’s ’im, that’s ’is little old lovely bald ’ead!” The crowds saw Churchill again later, when he emerged from the Commons and was driven off in the back of a small open car, rosy, smiling, and looking immensely happy. Ernest Bevin, following in another car, got a cheer too. One of the throng, an excited East Ender, in a dress with a bodice concocted of a Union Jack, shouted, “Gawd, fancy me cheering Bevin, the chap who makes us work!” Herbert Morrison, sitting unobtrusively in a corner of a third car, was hardly recognized, and the other Cabinet Ministers did no better. The crowd had ears, eyes, and throats for no one but Churchill, and for him everyone in it seemed to have the hearing, sight, and lungs of fifty men. His slightly formal official broadcast, which was followed by buglers sounding the “cease firing” call, did not strike the emotional note that had been expected, but he hit it perfectly in his subsequent informal speech (“My dear friends, this is your victory . . .”) from a Whitehall balcony.

  All day long, little extra celebrations started up. In the Mall, a model of a Gallic cock waltzed on a pole over the heads of the singing people. “It’s the Free French,” said someone. The Belgians in the crowd tagged along after a Belgian flag that marched by, its bearer invisible. A procession of students raced through Green Park, among exploding squibs, clashing dustbin lids like cymbals and waving an immense Jeyes Disinfectant poster as a banner. American sailors and laughing girls formed a conga line down the middle of Piccadilly and cockneys linked arms in the Lambeth Walk. It was a day and night of no fixed plan and no organized merriment. Each group danced its own dance, sang its own song, and went its own way as the spirit moved it. The most tolerant, self-effacing people in London on VE Day were the police, who simply stood by, smiling benignly, while soldiers swung by one arm from lamp standards and laughing groups tore down hoardings to build the evening’s bonfires. Actually, the police were not unduly strained. The extraordinary thing about the crowds was that they were almost all sober. The number of drunks one saw in that whole day and night could have been counted on two hands – possibly because the pubs were sold out so early. The young service men and women who swung arm in arm down the middle of every street, singing and swarming over the few cars rash enough to come out, were simply happy with an immense holiday happiness. They were the liberated people who, like their counterparts in every celebrating capital that night, were young enough to outlive the past and to look forward to an unspoilt future. Their gaiety was very moving.

  Just before the King’s speech, at nine Tuesday night, the big lamps outside the Palace came on and there were cheers and ohs from children who had never seen anything of that kind in their short, blacked-out lives. As the evening wore on, most of the public buildings were floodlighted. The night was as warm as midsummer, and London, its shabbiness now hidden and its domes and remaining Wren spires warmed by lights and bonfires, was suddenly magnificent. The handsomest building of all was the National Gallery, standing out honey-coloured near a ghostly, blue-shadowed St Martin’s and the Charles I bit of Whitehall. The illuminated and floodlighted face of Big Ben loomed like a kind moon. Red and blue lights strung in the bushes around the lake in St James’s Park glimmered on the sleepy, bewildered pelicans that live there.

  By midnight the crowds had thinned out some, but those who remained were as merry as ever. They went on calling for the King outside the Palace and watching the searchlights, which for once could be observed with pleasure . . .

  “A Correspondent”, The Hereford Times, England

  Passing through the village of Stoke Lacy early on Tuesday af
ternoon one was startled to see an effigy of Hitler in the car park at the Plough. That evening a crowd began to gather, and word went round that Hitler was to be consumed in flames at 11 p.m. At that hour excitement was intense, when Mr W.R. Symonds called upon Mr S. J. Parker, the Commander of No. 12 Platoon of the Home Guard, to set the effigy alight. In a few minutes the body of Hitler disintegrated as his 1,000-year empire had done. First his arm, poised in the Hitler salute, dropped as smartly as it was ever raised in real life . . . then a leg fell off, and the flames burnt fiercely to the strains of “Rule Britannia”, “There’ll Always be an England”, and “Roll Out the Barrel”. The crowd spontaneously linked hands and in a circle 300-strong sang the National Anthem.

  Part Seven

  The Road to Berlin

  The Eastern Front, February 1943–May 1945

  INTRODUCTION

  Stalingrad was not the only German disaster on the Russian front in 1943. Taking advantage of German disorder, a generalized Russian offensive created a salient around Kursk. This proved a temptation beyond resistance for the Germans, who sought to cut the salient’s “neck” and thus encircle and destroy the Russian armies within. Kursk was to be a “beacon” to the world, Hitler informed his generals, proof that Germany was still invincible and, less prosaically, victory at Kursk would prevent any major Russian offensives in the summer of 1943. At 4.30 a.m. on 5 July, the German attack at Kursk opened, and over the next week there followed the greatest tank battle in history, with 7,000 tanks thrown into the inferno. The Germans lost, partly because their attack was anticipated, partly because the new generation of Russian tanks was superior to their own. The margin of victory was small but it was enough. Thereafter, even Hitler seemed to have lost faith in his – and the German army’s – ability to win on the Eastern Front, where the few scant reserves were soon to be bled by transfers to the new Allied front in Sicily. By autumn 1943, the Germans had been pushed back to the Dnieper. On 3 November the Red Army captured Kiev. Everywhere, the Red Army was unstoppable. For good reason: the Russians now outnumbered the Germans on the Eastern Front 2–1 (5,512,000 to 2,468,000), and possessed 8,400 tanks compared to the German’s 2,300. No amount of Hitlerite rhetoric, fanatical fighting by elite SS units and clever military tactics by the supremely able Manstein and Heinrici could halt the Russians because they were too numerous and were producing too much military hardware (as well as enjoying substantial aid from their allies Britain and America). And thus it was that the Nazis’ ultimate nightmare came to pass. Not only did they lose their possessions in Russia and Poland, but in January 1945 the “untermensch” hordes of Russia broke into Germany itself. Five months later they took Berlin. With the Red Army at the door, Hitler committed suicide.

  The Reich which was to last “A Thousand Years” lasted just twelve.

  “CONCENTRATED SLAUGHTER”: A RUSSIAN CAVALRY AND TANK ATTACK, KORSUN, UKRAINE, 17 FEBRUARY 1943

  Major Kampov, Red Army Officer

  All that evening the Germans had been in a kind of hysterical condition. The few remaining cows in the village were slaughtered and eaten with a sort of cannibal frenzy. When a barrel of pickled cabbage was discovered in one hut, it led to wild scrambles. Altogether they had been very short of food ever since the encirclement; with the German army in constant retreat, they didn’t have large stores anywhere near the front line. So these troops at Korsun had been living mostly by looting the local population; they had done so even before the encirclement.

  They had also had a lot to drink that night, but the fires started by the U-2s and then the bombing and the shelling sobered them up. Driven out of their warm huts they had to abandon Shanderovka. They flocked into the ravines near the village, and then took the desperate decision to break through early in the morning. They had almost no tanks left – they had all been lost and abandoned during the previous days’ fighting, and what few tanks they still had now had no petrol. In the last few days the area where they were concentrated was so small that transport planes could no longer bring them anything. Even before, few of the transport planes reached them, and sometimes the cargoes of food and petrol and munitions were dropped on our lines.

  So that morning they formed themselves into two marching columns of about 14,000 each, and they marched in this way to Lysianka where the two ravines met. Lysianka was beyond our front line, inside the “corridor”. The German divisions on the other side were trying to batter their way eastward, but now the “corridor” was so wide that they hadn’t much chance.

  They were a strange sight, these two German columns that tried to break out of the encirclement. Each of them was like an enormous mob. The spearhead and the flanks were formed by the SS men of the Wallonia Brigade and the Viking Division in their pearl-grey uniforms. They were in a relatively good state of physique. Then, inside the triangle, marched the rabble of the ordinary German infantry, very much more down at heel. Right in the middle of this, a small select nucleus was formed by the officers. These also looked relatively well fed. So they moved westward along two parallel ravines. They had started out soon after 4 a.m., while it was still completely dark. We knew the direction from which they were coming. We had prepared five lines – two lines of infantry, then a line of artillery, and then two more lines where the tanks and cavalry lay in wait . . . We let them pass through the first three lines without firing a shot. The Germans, believing that they had dodged us and had now broken through all our defences, burst into frantic jubilant screaming, firing their pistols and tommy-guns into the air as they marched on. They had now emerged from the ravines and reached open country.

  Then it happened. It was about six o’clock in the morning. Our tanks and our cavalry suddenly appeared and rushed straight into the thick of the two columns. What happened then is hard to describe. The Germans ran in all directions. And for the next four hours our tanks raced up and down the plain crushing them by the hundred. Our cavalry, competing with the tanks, chased them through the ravines where it was hard for tanks to pursue them. Most of the time the tanks were not using their guns lest they hit their own cavalry. Hundreds and hundreds of cavalry were hacking at them with their sabres, and massacred the Fritzes as no one had ever been massacred by cavalry before. There was no time to take prisoners. It was a kind of carnage that nothing could stop till it was all over. In a small area over 20,000 Germans were killed. I had been in Stalingrad; but never had I seen such concentrated slaughter as in the fields and ravines of that small bit of country. By 9 a.m. it was all over. Eight thousand prisoners surrendered that day. Nearly all of them had run a long distance away from the main scene of the slaughter; they had been hiding in woods and ravines.

  CITADEL: THE GERMAN SUPREME COMMAND DEBATES THE ATTACK ON KURSK, APRIL–MAY 1943

  General von Mallenthin, Wehrmacht

  In the circumstances the German Supreme Command was faced with a grave dilemma. Should we stand purely on the defensive in the East, or should we launch a limited attack in an endeavour to cripple Russia’s offensive power?

  . . . It is true that in view of the losses suffered in preceding years there could be no question of seeking a decision. Zeitzler’s object was a limited one; he wished to bite out the great Russian bulge which enclosed Kursk and projected for seventy-five miles into our front. A successful attack in this area would destroy a number of Soviet divisions and weaken the offensive power of the Red Army to a very considerable degree.

  . . . Such was my introduction to the fateful Battle of Kursk – the last great German offensive in the East.

  Zeitzler outlined the plan for Operation ‘Citadel’, as the new attack was to be called. All our available armour was to be concentrated in two great pincers – Colonel-General Model with his 9 Army was to attack from the north, and Colonel-General Hoth with 4 Panzer Army from the south. In the initial assault Hoth was to have eight Panzer divisions and Model five; several infantry divisions were to join in the attack, and to obtain them the neighbouring fronts were to be thinned out be
yond the limits of prudence. From the strategic aspect ‘Citadel’ was to be a veritable ‘death-ride’, for virtually the whole of the operational reserve was to be flung into this supreme offensive.

  Because so much was at stake, hesitations and doubts were bound to arise. When the attack was originally proposed, Field-Marshal von Manstein was strongly in favour, and believed that if we struck soon a notable victory could be won. But Hitler kept postponing D-Day, partly in order to assemble stronger forces and partly because he had the gravest doubts about our prospects of success. Early in May he held a conference in Munich and sought the views of the senior commanders. Field-Marshal von Kluge, the commander of Army Group Centre, was strongly in favour; Manstein was now dubious, and Model produced air photographs which showed that the Russians were constructing very strong positions at the shoulders of the salient and had withdrawn their mobile forces from the area west of Kursk. This showed that they were aware of the impending attack and were making adequate preparations to deal with it.

  Colonel-General Guderian spoke out and declared that an offensive at Kursk was ‘pointless’; heavy tank casualties were bound to be incurred and would ruin his plans for reorganizing the armour. He warned that the Panthers, on which ‘the Chief of the Army General Staff was relying so heavily, were still suffering from many teething troubles inherent in all new equipment’. But General Zeitzler was still confident of victory, and perplexed by the conflict among the experts, Hitler put off the decision until a later date.