by Phil Mason
On the evening of 22 August, with the Allies still two days away from Paris, Hitler sent a telegram to the commander in the city instructing that ‘Paris must only fall into the hands of the enemy as a field of rubble.’ Explosives experts had been feverishly working for days to put in place explosive charges to destroy all 45 of the city’s bridges, the Eiffel Tower, the Elysee Palace and several industrial targets. As well as destroying the buildings, the explosions were designed to create a firestorm that would destroy the historic heart of Paris.
The signals officer on duty that night at the German headquarters who received the telegram happened to be 26-year-old Ernst von Bressendorf, whose artistic passions made him recoil at the vandalism of the order. Aware of how close the Allies were, and that the war was effectively lost, but also that direct disobedience would lead to his execution, he delayed passing the telegram up to his commanding officer (who, as a strict Prussian, was known for unquestioningly obeying orders).
By the time he did so, his commanding officer, General Dietrich von Choltitz, had also become convinced of the futility of the act. Paris was saved. On 25 August, when the Allies arrived, they found it intact.
After the war, von Bressendorf worked on the reconciliation of French and German families. He became revered in France as the man who saved Paris. His dearest wish was to live until the 50th anniversary of the liberation in 1994, and had been invited to the celebrations. He died on 19 August, six days short of the anniversary.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa came within two hours of being blown up by advancing American troops in July 1944, according to a veteran of the Fifth Army speaking for the first time in 1999.
Sergeant Leon Weckstein had been ordered by his commander to deploy a detachment to scout the tower which was thought to be occupied by German observers at the top to direct artillery fire on to the American forces.
His commander, Colonel James Woods, had told him, ‘If you see any Germans up the tower, we’ll have to demolish it. We are losing too many men.’ Weckstein spent as long as he could on the mission to avoid reporting back. ‘I thought I saw German rifles and helmets through the pillars around the top of the tower, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure. So I hesitated.’
He later reported back that there were no Germans visible, and after two tense hours during which the tower was one radio message away from being obliterated, Weckstein was recalled. ‘The attack on the Leaning Tower was called off.’
The impetus towards the world’s first atomic attack, on Hiroshima in August 1945, may have been unduly spurred on by a translator’s interpretation of a single word in a Japanese press statement.
At the end of the Big Three conference at Potsdam at the end of July, Allied leaders issued a declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan. Japan, which had begun to put out feelers for a negotiated peace, and hoping to continue the nascent diplomatic contacts, replied with a holding statement to the world’s press that intended to offer ‘no comment’ on the unconditional surrender demand.
The Japanese word used – mokusatsu – has several shades of meaning: to ignore, to refrain from comment or even, in some contexts, to seek more information. The American interpreter who provided the translation for Secretary of War Stimson, who was advising President Truman on plans to use the atomic bomb, used ‘ignore’. The Americans stiffened their attitude towards Japan’s apparent intransigence, and quickened the preparations for the drop on Hiroshima. Had a different slant been used, the moral pressure not to inflict the terrifying weapon on civilians might have been too strong to resist.
The Nazi attempt to build an atomic bomb was the nightmare dread of Allied governments during the Second World War. Evidence after the war showed that German scientists’ early research had put them ahead of the Americans by the end of 1941. They had two Nobel Prize winners working on the programme – the co-discover of nuclear fission, Otto Hahn, and Werner Heisenberg who, by as early as 1942, understood what was needed to build an atomic device.
But it was the German assessment of how long the war would last – an assumed maximum of 18 months – that drove them to relegate the atom bomb low down their list of priorities, behind the V1 and V2 rocket programmes, and the development of the jet engine. They did not put effort into the bomb simply because they judged it would take longer to develop than the war would last.
By the time it dawned on Germany military leaders that the war would drag on, shortage of materials and damage from Allied air raids made it impossible to restart the programme. The chance was lost.
Ironically, it was the threat of a German bomb that gave impetus to the American Manhattan Project. Einstein, who had left Nazi Germany for America only because of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, wrote two letters to President Roosevelt in 1939 and 1940 detailing the advances Germany was making and urging him to commit vast resources of manpower and money. Roosevelt obliged.
When the German scientists heard of the American effort, they estimated that from where they had left off, had they applied the same effort, they might have secured a working bomb in late 1944 or early 1945 – six months before the Americans.
If only, at the right time, there had been a German advocate to write a letter to Hitler…
Nagasaki, destroyed in 1945 by the second nuclear bomb to be dropped on Japan, only became the target after the first choice city was found on the morning of the attack to be covered by cloud.
The 210,000 citizens of Kokura, about 100 miles southwest of Hiroshima which had been devastated three days before, should have been vaporised on 9 August. It was selected for having the largest ammunition factory in western Japan. The complex, where 12,000 people worked, was the aiming point for the bomb.
The B-29 bomber was overhead by 10am and circled the city three times with its bomb door open, but cloud as well as smoke from an air raid the day before obscured the ground. So it gave up and flew on to Nagasaki, an hour further south. At 11.02am it dropped the device there. Some 74,000 people died immediately, and as many again would die later from the longer-term effects.
On the 60th anniversary in 2005, Kokura mounted an exhibition to commemorate its narrow escape. It ran under the tile, ‘That day: if it had been clear…’
Japan’s plans for its own terror weapon – balloons carrying plague and other deadly diseases across the Pacific to the United States – never came to fruition because of fears by Japanese commanders that they might blow back on to home territory.
The story only emerged in 1987. In late 1944, as the war closed in on Japan, scientists at the notorious biological warfare unit, Unit 731, developed a paper balloon capable of carrying a very small bomb. The plans were for the devices to spread plague, anthrax, typhus and other diseases across the United States.
A trial attempt between November 1944 and January 1945 sent over 9,000 of the balloons towards the American continent carrying incendiary devices. Only 10 per cent of them reached their destination. Few did any damage. Five children and an adult were killed by one in Oregon (the only casualties from hostile action on American soil), and several forest fires were started in the west coast states. They were recorded as landing over a wide area of Alaska and Canada, and some are believed to have travelled as far as Chicago.
Although unsatisfactory as a bombing mission, the numbers which did make it to America would have been more than enough to cause a catastrophe had they carried biological agents. Ironically, it was that risk that also scuppered the project. Japanese regional commanders feared that unhelpful winds could send some of the lethal weapons off track and back into Japan. No plague bombs were ever despatched. But the winter of 1944 to 1945 had shown how close the American heartland had come to devastation.
One of the war’s most wanted individuals, Josef Mengele, the doctor responsible for performing medical experiments on concentration camp inmates at Auschwitz, miraculously evaded detection by Allied authorities – because of his lifelong vanity.
In June 1945, a month after t
he end of the war, Mengele had been detained by American forces along with thousands of other Germans and interred in a holding camp in Bavaria. He even registered under his real name. He escaped notice, however, because he could not be readily identified as a member of the SS. When he had joined the elite force in 1938, he had refused to have his blood group tattooed on his chest or arm as was normally required for an entrant. He persuaded his seniors that, as a doctor, he could look after himself. The real reason, according to his wife, was that he was so self-obsessed about his looks and particularly the smoothness of his skin – he used to stand in front of a full-length mirror admiring its perfection – that he did not want it blemished in any way.
The absence of the telltale insignia that all American troops had been told to look out for literally saved his skin. The Americans unknowingly released Mengele in September.
Mengele had no idea how lucky he had been. Two months before his capture, he had been formally declared a war criminal. The information failed to percolate down to the confused transit camps in time to catch him.
He managed to fade into civilian life in post-war Germany for four years and then he quietly slipped away to Argentina in 1949. He was able to live out another 30 years in various South American hideaways until he died while swimming in Brazil in February 1979, a fact that did not become public until 1992.
A bridge across a river in southern Hungary was discovered in October 1999 to still be rigged with dynamite dating back to the end of the Second World War. The village of Holloshaza was the scene of heavy fighting as the invading Soviet Army fought its way to Budapest. The retreating Germans had planned to blow up the bridge but fled, leaving the explosives in place. The bridge then enjoyed 55 years of traffic usage before someone spotted the wires.
The Korean War of 1950 – 53 was the first military conflict of the Cold War. It remains technically unresolved to this day. Bizarrely, it might have been the United States that unwittingly prompted the North Koreans to invade the South in June 1950.
Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, delivered a speech in January that year defining American security interests in the East Asian sphere. He appeared to be precise: ‘Our defensive perimeter runs from the Aleutians [off Alaska] to Japan, the Ryukyus [Okinawa] and down to the Philippines…So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee theses areas against military attack.’
His description excluded the Korean peninsula, and all American forces had just been withdrawn the previous year. Historians dispute whether the speech was more forceful in encouraging the North to go ahead with its assault, or in motivating the South’s leaders, now feeling exposed to the Communist threat, to force the issue so as to inveigle the US back into providing defence support.
Either way, five months after Acheson’s remarks, the Koreas were at war, with the US and Chinese troops soon to follow.
There were echoes of this carelessness in the lead up to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. As Iraqi pressure on Kuwait grew in July that year, the American ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, was summoned at short notice to an audience with Saddam. Not having time to consult Washington for specific guidance, she followed a general conciliatory line trying to defuse the growing fears in Baghdad of the US taking sides.
She told Saddam that the US had ‘no opinion on inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait.’ While also reiterating that the US could never excuse settlement of disputes by any but peaceful means, she could not back up this view with a threat to intervene by the US in the event of hostilities as she had no authority from Washington to do so.
It seems that Saddam probably interpreted this message as a signal that the US would not intervene. Eight days later, he invaded Kuwait.
The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 at the height of the Cold War is acknowledged by historians to have been the closest the world has come to nuclear war. As the tense stand-off developed – on 22 October, Day 8 of the crisis, the United States had moved its forces up to the third highest level of readiness, and had nuclear-armed B-52s in the skies ready to launch attacks on the Soviet Union – any misjudgement was potentially catastrophic.
It was revealed only 30 years later that on that day over the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia, a B-52 strayed into Soviet airspace. Two MIG-17 fighters were sent up with orders to destroy it. General Boris Surikov, a Defence Ministry official, recalled how the encounter was tracked on screens in Moscow. ‘I could see two green dots – the MIGs – and one red dot – the B-52 – steadily converging. No one… doubted that if the red dot disappeared off the screen, then it would be the beginning of an atomic war. When the dots were only about 50km [30 miles] apart, the two green ones suddenly reversed course.’
It turned out that they did not have sufficient fuel left. On the likely assumption that they were flying close to their maximum speed of 715mph, they had been just two and a half minutes from their target.
In 2002, an even closer episode was revealed, when the actions of a single Soviet officer appear to have prevented accidental nuclear war breaking out. On 27 October 1962, the day before the Soviet leadership finally agreed the deal to withdraw its missiles from Cuba, tensions were rising to their highest crescendo. Satellite reconnaissance of Cuba showed the nuclear missiles installed there had become fully operational and hours earlier an American U2 spy plane had been shot down over Siberia.
Off Cuba, a US navy ship, the USS Beale, had encountered a Soviet submarine and launched an attack with depth charges. It was unaware that the submarine was armed with a nuclear torpedo. On board, the Soviet crew believed war had broken out and started the procedure for firing its own nuclear device. It was authorised to do so without orders from Moscow on the approval of its three officers.
According to the account, disclosed for the first time by a sailor who had witnessed the chaos in the submarine, the captain Valentin Savitsky and another officer decided in favour of launching. The third, Vasily Arkhipov, refused. His single-handed action calmed Savitsky, persuaded him to surface and defused the crisis.
At the very moment this was happening at sea, Kennedy and Khrushchev were striking the deal which ended the stand-off. The settlement was announced the very next morning.
In the American homeland, there were also several near misses that could have triggered catastrophe in the heightened atmosphere of panic. On 26 October 1962, a routine test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile went ahead at Vandenberg military air base in California despite the crisis being close to its gravest point. No one had thought to stand down the test in the circumstances. Although unarmed, the base was on the second highest state of alert, and all other standby missiles had been nuclear-armed in readiness. Had the Soviet Union detected the launch, it might well have concluded that America had decided to commence a first strike.
At an air force base in Montana, the new Minuteman missile was about to be commissioned into service when the crisis broke. They were rushed into operation, with several safety checks bypassed. Crews were also deployed before they had completed their training and certified as being competent to manage the launch process.
The strangest incident occurred on the night of 25 October when a sentry on duty at a base near Duluth, Minnesota, spotted and fired at an intruder trying to climb the perimeter fence. The alarm was raised throughout the base and, under a synchronisation arrangement, across all the bases in the surrounding region. However, at Volk Field, Wisconsin, the wrong signal sounded – the alarm indicating the nuclear war had actually started. Pilots had been told that there would be no drills during the present crisis, so they responded as they were trained to do. They were taxiing their fully-primed nuclear-armed planes down the runway before the base commander, who had the presence of mind to ring Duluth, cancelled the alert. He had to send his staff car into the middle of the runway and flash its lights to abort the take-offs.
The day of the Beale i
ncident recounted above – the darkest day of the crisis – had already seen a bizarre close shave that morning caused by a routine drill conducted at an advance warning radar station at Moorestown, New Jersey. A test tape was run which simulated a missile attack from the Caribbean. In a potentially fatal coincidence, at the same moment what was later identified as a friendly US spy satellite was detected on its normal flight path over Cuba. It appeared in exactly the same place and at exactly the same time as the test simulation of an enemy missile. When the test finished, the object was still there. According to the station log of the incident, operators ‘became confused’ about what was real and what was part of the drill. They notified central command that America was under attack from Cuba and that the apparent missile was targeted on Tampa, Florida, with impact in two minutes.
The Situation Room dealing with the Missile Crisis was notified that war had started. When nothing happened two minutes later, the station began to realise its mistake. Other tracking stations began to confirm the true identity of the mystery object. Ironically, and fortunately, on this occasion there simply had not been enough time for the military high command to make a decision to respond.
In 1985, during evidence to an Australian Commission of Inquiry on nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, it was revealed that British Ministry of Defence scientists considered using Duncansby Head near Wick in northeast Scotland as the site for Britain’s nuclear bomb tests. It was eventually ruled out – only on the grounds that weather records showed it rained too much for the monitoring equipment. The tests were transferred to the remote Australian outback.