Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  When XXXIII Corps advanced from the Chindwin, the Japanese, in accordance with Kimura’s plan, fell back towards the Irrawaddy, behind which they had concentrated eight divisions and the Indian National Army. This latter had now been exposed for the militarily unreliable organization that it was, but could still be used for labouring and carrying duties provided its members were given no opportunity to desert back to the British. XXXIII Corps established two bridgeheads across the Irrawaddy; they were furiously attacked by Japanese infantry but held their ground, using every possible stratagem to convince the Japanese that they were defending against two corps, not one, and steadily pushing the Japanese back until Slim could move Fourteenth Army headquarters to Monywa, on the lower Chindwin, while 200 miles to the south Messervy’s corps crossed that river on 13 February. Now they were out of the mountains and the jungle and into the plains of central Burma where armour could be used in wide outflanking sweeps to which the Japanese had no answer. The attack towards Meiktila by Messervy’s spearhead, Major-General ‘Punch’ Cowan’s 17 Indian Division, on 21 February came as a severe shock to Kimura in his Burma Area Headquarters in Rangoon, but the 12,000-strong garrison fought grimly, and it was not until 3 March that the town fell, Cowan going on to take the main airfield complex ten miles to the east and the surrounding villages over the following two days.

  Kimura was very well aware of the implications of losing Meiktila and now began to move troops south to retake it. For three weeks, IV Corps and 17 Division in particular were subject to constant counter-attacks as the Japanese tried desperately to reopen their supply and withdrawal route, and Twenty-Eighth Army, so far uninvolved and still west of the Irrawaddy, attempted to relieve its battered comrades, but without success. Cowan adopted a policy of aggressive defence, using groups of mobile infantry, self-propelled artillery and tanks supported by fighter-bombers to range up to twenty miles from the Meiktila perimeter to seek out the approaching Japanese columns and destroy them, but it was a close-run thing and on 17 March Slim flew the 5 Indian Division into Meiktila to bolster the defence. In the north, XXXIII Corps broke out of its bridgeheads forty miles north of Mandalay and on 20 March, after bitter fighting, Mandalay fell to the 29 Indian Division. The Japanese were now in serious disarray. With their retreat to the south cut off and with no possibility of reinforcement or resupply, Kimura could only order the remnants of Fifth and Thirty-Third Armies to fall back eastwards into the Shan Hills and retreat south.

  Now the race was on to get to Rangoon before the monsoon broke; IV Corps headed south from Meiktila down the Sittang valley while XXXIII Corps followed the Irrawaddy. Kimura had left small delaying parties along the Irrawaddy, which were a nuisance and caused delay, but were no match for Grant tanks, but IV Corps met much more serious resistance as Kimura decided that theirs would be the main Allied axis towards the capital. Thirty miles south of Meiktila there was a stiff battle at Pyawbwe, and a farther 100 miles south of that the Japanese fought tenaciously to hold the airfield at Toungoo, from where a handful of their fighters attacked the approaching IV Corps column, destroying a number of soft-skinned vehicles but failing to stop the advance. Slim now adopted a policy of what he called ‘Hammering on the back door while I burst in through the front’, and on 1 MayaGurkha parachute battalion was dropped on Elephant Point, commanding the entrance to Rangoon harbour. In a desperate little battle, with no quarter given by either side, the Gurkhas killed all the defenders and at 0700 hours the next morning landing craft with the 29 Indian Division were able to enter the harbour and land on the docks, while the advance elements of IV Corps arrived overland the next day. In fact, the Japanese, realizing that holding on to Rangoon was utterly pointless, had abandoned the city. Within two weeks the port’s facilities, destroyed by the Japanese before they left, had been put in working order again and the Allies were using them for much-needed resupply. All that was left now was to mop up the scattered Japanese, many of whom were already being ambushed and subjected to the most bestial atrocities by the delightful Burmans, and to prepare for the next great leap forward – the liberation of Malaya.

  Now occurred a most extraordinary faux pas in the reorganization of the British higher command as Slim was sacked and then un-sacked. The details are still argued over and Slim was too much of a gentleman to make his true feelings known at the time, but Lieutenant-General Leese, Commander Land Forces under Mountbatten, told Slim that he was to be relieved as Commander Fourteenth Army and replaced by Leese’s old chum from Staff College days, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Christison, currently Commander XV Corps. Fourteenth Army was to reconquer Malaya, while a newly formed Twelfth Army (actually little more than a corps), which Slim would command, was to mop up in Burma. Slim was deeply disappointed – ‘I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong’ – and his staff were horrified; the Indian Army, who had never had much time for Leese, was outraged; and back in London, the CIGS, Brooke, was affronted. The upshot of it all was that Leese himself was sacked and Slim stayed at Fourteenth Army.

  What appears to have happened is that Leese carried the can for Mountbatten,* who was hyper-sensitive to any criticism or any negative publicity that might rebound on him, and was quite happy to hang Leese out to dry once he saw that nobody, from the most junior rifleman in Fourteenth Army to the CIGS, wanted rid of Slim.93 Slim went on leave to the UK, met Churchill for the first time and informed him bluntly that the British soldiers of Fourteenth Army would not vote for him in the coming general election, and then returned to the Far East in a new appointment as Commander Land Forces – the post that Leese once held. It was while he was making his way to his new headquarters at Kandy in Ceylon that he heard that the Japanese war was over.

  19

  CHECKMATE

  JANUARY 1945–DECEMBER 1946

  In North-West Europe, the mighty Rhine was the last great obstacle facing the Western Allies and preventing them from driving deep into Germany, and Eisenhower intended to clear the approaches to it and then cross on a broad front. Montgomery dissented: he still clung to the view that the full power of logistic and air support should be given to him to drive an armoured spearhead across the river which would stab through the German vitals to Berlin and end the war. In hindsight there are many who believe Montgomery was right, but Eisenhower was not convinced that the Germans were beaten yet – they had shown with their Ardennes offensive that they could still snarl if not roar – and that an advance on a narrow front would only risk being cut off and annihilated. Montgomery was instructed to clear to the Rhine between Antwerp and Düsseldorf starting on 8 February, but, owing to flooding and stiff resistance from German parachute troops, the Canadian First and US Ninth Armies, the latter still under Montgomery’s command, could not close up to the river until 10 March. Farther south, Bradley closed up between Düsseldorf and Koblenz with Hodges’s US First Army and Patton’s Third, while the US 6th Army Group would advance north-east to the Rhine from south of Saarbrücken and trap elements of the German Seventh Army between Patch’s US Seventh Army and Patton.

  Once again, Hitler had placed impossible strictures on his generals by ordering them to fight west of the Rhine, instead of making full use of it and fighting behind it, with the result that, by the time the Allies had closed up all along the river, they had taken over 200,000 prisoners. First to get across were men of the US First Army’s Twenty-Seventh Armoured Infantry Battalion who found a road and railway bridge at Remagen, between Cologne and Koblenz. The Germans had attempted to demolish it but the charges were incorrectly placed and while the bridge was damaged it still stood, and the Americans charged across and established a bridgehead on the far side. The wretched members of the demolition party were blamed with dereliction of duty and at least one, the officer commanding, was shot (and duly pardoned by the Federal Republic of West Germany years later). Next over was Patton, south of Mainz on 22 March, and then Montgomery, on a thirty-five-mile front between Rees and Emmerich on 23 and 24 March. Typically, Montgomery had
orchestrated a set-piece battle: as Churchill, Brooke and Eisenhower looked on, 3,500 guns carried out a preliminary bombardment before two divisions, one British and one Canadian, crossed. By 26 March, 21st Army Group had twelve bridges in place and the troops were swarming over. The day before, Patton’s armour broke out of the bridgehead south of the Ruhr and was heading north-east for Kassel. In the space of three weeks, the Allies were across the Rhine on a front of almost 200 miles and poised for the last leap into the heart of Germany.

  In Berlin, Guderian, Chief of the General Staff of the army, was increasingly pessimistic about the course of the war and began to argue for the opening of negotiations with the Anglo-Americans for an armistice in the West, which would allow the full weight of what was left of the Wehrmacht to be directed against the Red Army in the East. Such a possibility would have been out of the question (although Stalin suspected otherwise) as the Western Allies had agreed upon a policy of no separate peace, but Guderian was sacked anyway and replaced by General of Infantry Hans Krebs,who had spent most of his career on the staff and had recently been brought in as Guderian’s deputy, having previously been Chief of Staff at Army Group B on the Western Front. Rundstedt, too, was sacked yet again, and for the last time; blamed for the fiasco at Remagen and regarded as defeatist, he was replaced by Kesselring, who was recalled from Italy. At the same time Hitler ordered a scorched-earth policy to be implemented in Germany. As they were pushed back, army units were to leave nothing to the invaders. Crops, buildings, factories, roads, bridges, airports, docks and railways – all were to be comprehensively destroyed. In the event, ministers such as Albert Speer, who was responsible for armaments, local party officials and army commanders ensured that these orders were evaded: if Germany was to lose this war, then something had to be left for regeneration after it.

  Once across the Rhine, 21st Army Group began to clear the Germans out of Holland. The priorities were to bring in food for a population which was on the brink of starvation and to deal with the remaining V2 launch sites, since these rockets were still being used not only against London but also against European cities in Allied hands. By now the German army was on the brink of dissolution: the Volksturm of old men, boys and even women fought bravely but they were no match for tanks and artillery, and it did not escape Stalin’s notice that army units were surrendering much more readily in the West than to the Red Army in the East. An exception was in the Ruhr pocket, cut off when the US First and Third Armies met at Lippstadt on 2/3 April, when remnants of Field Marshal Model’s surrounded Army Group B held out against repeated American attacks. Meanwhile, Montgomery was downcast to find that the US Ninth Army was now to be removed from his command (he was still insisting that with it he could take Berlin) and returned to Bradley, whose army group was to drive for Leipzig and Dresden, while 21st Army Group was to push north-east to Hamburg on the River Elbe, that being the agreed meeting line of the Anglo-American and Soviet armies.

  Despite Patton’s protests that he could take Prague, Eisenhower insisted that the Western Allies adhere to the agreement with the Soviets that they would advance no farther east than the Elbe. Churchill, egged on by Brooke and Montgomery, had now become alarmed at the prospect of the Russians getting to Berlin first and appealed to Roosevelt. Eisenhower, supported by Marshall, insisted that Berlin was but a geographical location and what mattered was the destruction of the German armies, not mere occupation of territory, and Roosevelt backed him. But for all Eisenhower’s insistence on the military necessity taking priority over the political, he none the less impressed on Montgomery the importance of his reaching the Baltic before the Red Army: if Denmark and Norway had to be liberated, it had better be by the British or Americans, rather than by the Russians. On 11 April the US Ninth Army got to the Elbe at Magdeburg, and the next day Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. Hitler was overjoyed, but of course it made no difference to the course of the war, except that Vice-President, now President, Harry S. Truman cancelled plans to bombard German industrial sites with pilotless bombers packed with explosives, for fear of retaliation in kind against London. German industry was still operating, albeit most of it far underground: the first jet fighters were taking to the skies and the latest in long-range submarines to the seas, but it was all far too late. Resistance in the West was now sporadic, albeit at times spirited. The situation in the East was very different.

  * * *

  For the Soviets, after they had thwarted the last German attempt to recapture Budapest and the Hungarian oil fields, the next objective was Vienna. They smashed the Hungarian Third Army, and forced back the furiously resisting Germans, whose Hungarian allies were now deserting them in droves. By 28 March the Red Army was on the Austrian border and heading for Vienna. In the north of the front, the priority for the German army now was to hold off the Russians and maintain the road and rail network until the civilian population could be evacuated overland or by the German navy. In the Baltic, Russian submarines were active, sinking anything they could find, even clearly marked hospital ships. When the 5,000-ton freighter Goya was sunk on the night of 16/17 April, 6,000 civilian refugees went down with her. The strategically irrelevant Army Group North, now renamed Army Group Kurland, withstood all comers in the Courland Pocket, and in Königsberg General of Infantry Otto Lasch, unable to be evacuated by sea because of constant air attacks, held out with his three badly under-strength divisions against thirty-six Russian ones, disputing every yard and counter-attacking with all the old skill and courage, until the Red Army finally penetrated to the centre of the city and Lasch surrendered on 9 April. A quarter of his soldiers lay dead in the ruins, along with about a quarter of the civilian population, but Hitler insisted that he was a traitor for surrendering at all and had him and his family condemned to death.*

  On 13 April the Soviets took Vienna after suffering fearful casualties: the Germans had absolutely refused to give up the bridges over the Danube while the remotest possibility of holding on to the city remained. But now that the Russians were into Greater Germany proper, they reverted to barbarism. For years, German propaganda had warned what would happen if the Slavic hordes got into Europe, and it had not exaggerated. Red Army soldiers had behaved abominably in Budapest and Königsberg and now it became endemic. Russians butchered, tortured, shot and raped with impunity: military or civilian, adult or child, old or young, it mattered not, and often they were egged on by their commanders. Partly, of course, this was revenge for the German atrocities in Russia, but rape had not been a German sport, partly because military discipline had generally held, and partly because Russians and Jews were deemed inferior beings and so it would not have been fitting to have sex with them. Nobody knows how many German women and girls were raped by Russian soldiers – and, for many who were, suicide was seen as the only way out – but it was so widespread that after the war the Catholic Church’s bishops absolved German doctors from the sin of performing abortions. For years, Soviet commanders had kept their men going with appeals to patriotism reinforced by savage discipline while holding out promises of the pleasures of revenge once they had reached Germany, and now that time had come. Three days after the Russians took Vienna, their final offensive to take Berlin began, although Stalin had told the Western Allies that he could not attack Berlin until May, and that this offensive was aimed at Dresden. Naturally suspicious, and judging the Americans and the British by his own duplicitous standards, Stalin seems to have believed that the Germans were going to open the Western Front and do a deal with the Anglo-Americans to the detriment of the Soviet Union. In fact, although there were many who urged him to do so, Kesselring set his face firmly against any armistice that was not sanctioned by the political leadership, and Hitler himself was firmly set against any such agreement.

  The Berlin offensive would be carried out by two Fronts: Marshal Zhukov’s First Byelorussian with nine armies including two tank armies, which was directly east of Berlin along the River Oder, and Marshal Konev
’s First Ukrainian Front of eight armies, two of them tank armies, which was situated farther south, along the River Neisse. The Neisse is in fact the upper reaches of the Oder, so Konev had rather more ground to cover than Zhukov and would have to cross the River Spree before turning north for Berlin, although this would be compensated for by the fact that Zhukov would have to negotiate the formidable lines of obstacles the Germans had established before Berlin. Altogether, the Russians had assembled 2 million men, 6,000 tanks and self-propelled guns and 40,000 artillery pieces, mortars and Katyusha rocket-launchers. Facing them was Army Group Vistula, previously Oberhein, which had been commanded by Himmler until Guderian managed to persuade him to stand down ‘for reasons of health’ and was now in the hands of Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici, who had previously commanded Fourth Army on the Eastern Front. Heinrici had General of Panzer Troops Hasso von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army, Colonel-General Walter Weiss’s Second Army, Colonel-General Theodor Busse’s Ninth Army and General of Infantry Kurt von Tippelskirch’s Twenty-First Army. All of these armies had taken a considerable battering, most were amalgamations of parts of previously shattered units and formations, all were seriously under-strength and Weiss’s Second Army was cut off in Danzig, where it continued to resist stoutly but was unavailable to Heinrici for the defence of Berlin. Altogether, Heinrici could field around 300,000 men with 900 tanks and around 1,500 artillery pieces, and he was already losing faith in the competence of Berlin after being ordered to launch a counter-attack on the concentrating Russian troops at Küstrin (now Kostrzyn), one which had failed with heavy losses on 1 April.