Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  † Far more than was needed to keep order, but the Germans were convinced that the British intended to invade Norway, an impression that the British, with constant pinprick commando raids, did their best to reinforce.

  * Effective in the Battle of France as airborne artillery, the Stuka with its terrifying siren relied on its psychological effect as much as on its ability to deliver a 200lb bomb with pinpoint accuracy. By the time of the Battle of Britain, it was obsolete against RAF fighters and was withdrawn from use in the West.

  * The army group commanders were aged sixty-five, sixty-one and sixty-six respectively, rather contradicting the widely held (by the young) view that only the young are sufficiently robust to cope with modern war.

  * This was an excellent steel container holding either fuel or water, two of which could be carried by one man, allowing refuelling of a vehicle to be done by its crew rather than having bowsers come to it. The British first saw them in North Africa (and called them Jerry cans for obvious reasons) and copied them. Today the four-and-a-half-gallon jerrican is still an essential piece of British military equipment.

  * Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo, responsible for combating subversion and espionage within Germany. The nearest equivalent in the UK is the Police Special Branch, although neither might have liked the comparison.

  * The SS Totenkopfverbände were originally armed units with some military training who guarded concentration camps when those camps had not yet become extermination centres. They were embodied into the Waffen SS as the nucleus of the Totenkopf Division in 1939 and replaced by members of the General SS.

  † Born the tenth child of General of Artillery von Lewinski, he was adopted at birth by his mother’s childless sister and her husband, Lieutenant-General von Manstein, thus his full name was Fritz Erich von Lewinski gennant von Manstein, and in this author’s opinion he was the best general of the war on any side. Prior to Barbarossa, he had instructed his corps that the Commissar Order was not to be implemented.

  * Originally lightly armed border troops under the Interior Ministry, there were about 100,000 of them along the western frontier of the USSR in June 1941, including the Brest-Litovsk garrison. Later they were formed into fifteen infantry divisions and as the most politically indoctrinated units of the Red Army were used for a variety of tasks, including rear area security, apprehending deserters and partisan activity, as well as being deployed in major battles as combat divisions.

  † Koppets had done rather well, rising from captain to major-general in three years as those above him were progressively purged.

  * At three in the morning? Quite a concert party!

  * Quite apart from the legality, shooting large numbers of prisoners is not an efficient method of disposal. One shot may not kill and each victim must be examined and if necessary finished off. The whole process takes time, manpower and ammunition better used elsewhere. A more effective method, as the Russians followed by the Germans discovered, is the gas chamber.

  * Chinese names have the family name first followed by the forenames; hence the general would be addressed as ‘Chiang’ by his superiors and ‘Kai-shek’ by his friends.

  * He did at least have the grace to resign afterwards and take himself off to a Buddhist monastery. After the war he was hanged as a war criminal by the Allies nevertheless.

  * In 1915 medium machine-guns had been removed from infantry battalions on the formation of the Machine Gun Corps, which allowed the weapons to be concentrated and used to better effect than by parcelling them out to battalions. After the war, during the contraction of the army to its peacetime strength, the Machine Gun Corps went, but as the concept still held good a number of infantry battalions were turned into machine-gun battalions, which also had the advantage of protecting the tribal instincts of the infantry where the retention of a cap badge was more important than tactical development.

  * It provided around 48 per cent of Chiang’s supplies, mainly from the USA.

  * The Japanese equivalent of D-Day, J-Jour and A-Tag.

  * Sidi is a title of respect. Mr Rezegh was a prophet and his tomb was on a hill in the area, hence the name.

  * Although it was re-formed for service in the Far East.

  * High Commissioner in Palestine 1945–48, Cunningham had the thankless task of trying to contain an anti-British revolt by Jewish terrorists, when he had a run-in with Montgomery, then a field marshal and CIGS, who showed himself completely incapable of understanding the nuances of the Palestine question.

  * Deverall was a proponent of modernization, mechanization and preparation for a war in Europe. The Cabinet had little stomach and less money for a continental commitment and Leslie Hore-Belisha, the very unpleasant secretary of state for war, advised by the even more unpleasant Basil Liddell Hart, decided to remove Deverall, who arrived in his office to find a note sacking him.

  * Unlike previously removed generals, and those yet to be removed, Ritchie did not sink into obscurity. He was a protégé of Brooke and Brooke was now CIGS. All sorts of excuses were manufactured, mostly blaming Auchinleck, and Ritchie was successively given command of a division in September 1942,promotionto lieutenant-general and a corps in December 1943, which he took to Normandy in 1944, and a knighthood at the end of the war. He became General Officer Commanding Scotland and then, as a full general, Commander-in-Chief Far East Land Forces from 1947 to 1949. God bless the Old Boy Network.

  * It was also a bit of a cheek as Freyberg was, after all, a British general. As New Zealand had always been one of the more cooperative Dominions, her government would probably have backed Auchinleck.

  * This author recalls being stationed next to a famous British infantry battalion due to have its annual inspection, when accounts would be audited and stores counted. Lo, on the evening before the inspection there was a mysterious fire in the quartermaster’s stores. Very little damage was done, but all the quartermaster’s ledgers were destroyed. It is very difficult to burn ledgers.

  * It is sometimes pointed out that Napoleon got to Moscow in two months whereas it took the Germans nearly five, but the German army was six times larger than Napoleon’s, and Napoleon was making for Moscow and not Leningrad and Kiev and the Caucasus as well, and only had to fight one major battle on the way (at Borodino). That said, German infantry divisions and field artillery were, like Napoleon’s, reliant on horse power.

  † That organization in Germany responsible for making up losses in men and materiel.

  * There are a good many people in the British Army who think that we should not be allowing women in the combat area, but they would probably draw the line at shooting them.

  * This author recalls his fury when reporting to a brigade headquarters from a particularly uncomfortable field location where the infantry were lucky to have a blanket and a groundsheet each, only to find all the storemen in the Brigade Administrative Area with sleeping bags and camp beds.

  * The same offence exists in British military law, but it is a sad reflection on our social decay that the words ‘and a gentleman’ were removed some years ago.

  * Not all of India belonged to the British. There was a plethora of supposedly independent states ruled over by maharajas, rajahs, nizams, ranas and sultans, some huge like Hyderabad and some little bigger than a few hamlets, which, provided they behaved themselves and took the advice of the British Resident, were allowed to get on with things in their own way. All had their own armies and could, if they wished, opt to join the Imperial Service Scheme, which meant that their armies were trained and equipped by the British and could be deployed in support of the British or Indian armies in the event of war.

  * Largely because of Congressional meanness with money, American officers were almost never given substantive promotion above two stars (rear admiral and major-general) and if in an appointment meriting three, four or, exceptionally, five stars they held acting rank, which gave them the pay but not the pension, which remained that of their substantive rank.

  *
Sungei means river in Malay.

  * They are now, when the army teaches them to swim, and have won numerous military swimming competitions.

  * The Indian Army’s equivalent of the Royal Engineers.

  * An Indian infantry company had two British officers, the company commander and a subaltern who was learning his trade. The company second-in-command and the platoon commanders were men commissioned from the ranks and holding a commission from the viceroy, as opposed to the king.

  * 2 Royal Scots had seven killed in the fighting in the New Territories and eighty-nine killed up to the surrender.

  * Hardly, but it was well conducted all the same.

  * A fast, shallow-draft boat with a crew of about a dozen and armed with torpedoes and machine-guns – the PT boat was the American equivalent of the British MTB and MGB and the German Schnellboot.

  † The US Army’s public relations department tried to persuade MacArthur to change the wording to ‘We shall return’ but he refused.

  * So were the surrenders of Calais and Tobruk, but not on the same scale.

  * It came from the German Gott strafe England

  * Of whom, and of whose background and abilities, see Chapter 11

  * See Chapter 8

  * Admiral Ernest J. King, at this stage combining the posts of Commander-in-Chief US Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations and a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, never actually said that he disagreed with the Germany First policy, only that the Pacific was being neglected because of it. A man of great ability and considerable influence, albeit intolerant and with a weakness for other men’s wives and alcohol, he was considered unnecessarily Anglophobic

  * His difficulties were added to by his hatred of the British, who had killed his great-great-grandfather at Trafalgar in 1805.

  * He was that unusual creature, a well-bred French army officer, in reality the Viscomte de Hauteclocque who took the pseudonym Leclerc to protect his family still in France, a subterfuge which probably fooled the Germans for about five minutes. A forty-year-old captain in 1940, he had been promoted by de Gaulle, who sent him off to Africa to rally the garrisons there to the Free French

  * This author, albeit a simple infantryman, has never understood why the British did not make far more use of the 3.7-inch as an anti-tank gun, the way the Germans did with the 88mm. When questioned, numerous gunner friends have given all sorts of reasons for not having doing so, most of them unintelligible and ranging from the difficulty of moving the gun to problems with the sighting mechanism and the risk of the rivets popping out at low elevation. I suspect that the real answer was a then prevalent cult of conformity

  * Indian Army Viceroy Commissioned Officers were jemadar (usually a platoon commander), subadar (usually a company second-in-command) and subadar-major (only one in a battalion and the senior native officer). For a full explanation of how the Indian Army rank system worked, see my Sepoys in the Trenches (Spellmount, Staplehurst, 1999).

  † This actually happened in this author’s regiment. Merk lost, killing himself and his pony in the process.

  * He had risen from being a forty-six-year-old major in March 1941 to lieutenant-general in January 1943.

  * His forbears had been in trade and the second earl had bought the notorious ‘rotten’ borough of Old Sarum for £43,000 in 1802.

  † For those who do not have Debrett’s instantly to hand, the eldest son of an earl holds his father’s junior title of viscount, and succeeds to the earldom, while the other sons and daughters are ‘the honourable’, usually abbreviated to ‘hon’.

  * And as the Great Duke (of Wellington) said, if you believe that…

  * The forerunner of today’s Territorial Army.

  * Alas, when an officer returned to dig it up after the war it had gone. In the late 1960s an officer of the regiment while serving in Malaya found some of the items for sale in a bazaar in Singapore. He bought them and returned them to the regiment.

  * Described by Brooke during the discussions as ‘an unpleasant specimen’.

  † A recent concept, commandos were intended as raiding forces, in order, as Churchill put it, ‘to leave a trail of German bodies behind them’. They were manned by volunteers from the rest of the army and were quite separate from Royal Marine Commandos, who belonged to the Royal Navy and had a similar purpose.

  * He was reinstated after the Normandy landings in 1944 and commanded the Boulogne garrison, before being captured by the Canadians in September of that year.

  * He had been promoted to colonel-general only two weeks previously.

  * An army detachment was a group of units equivalent in size to an army but put together for a specific operation, rather than being a permanent formation. It was usually named after the commander, in this case General of Panzer Troops Kempf.

  * As Rommel was only on the Eastern Front for a health cure and had no command appointment there, his views were of little practical import.

  * He had been a divisional commander at Stalingrad, and was flown out of the pocket and given command of XIV Panzer Corps in Sicily. When the Germans withdrew from Sicily in August 1943, he was appointed to command First Panzer Army on the Eastern Front. After his promotion to colonel-general, he was also awarded the diamonds to his existing Knight’s Cross with oak leaves, which Hitler presented to him personally. On his way back to the Eastern Front, his aircraft crashed and he was killed.

  * As the blockers of the rail or road were often of high caste, one way to shift them instantly was to line up Gurkha or Sikh soldiers and threaten to have them urinate on the protesters.

  * Not a single Gurkha joined, despite being subjected to appalling brutality, and some were executed for non-compliance.

  * Patch Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, headquarters of the United States Forces in Europe, is named after him.

  * These included being caught in a police raid on a brothel and, upon discovering that the ‘Don’t you know who I am’ approach cut no ice, later denying that the person with Blamey’s police identity badge and claiming to be Blamey was actually him.

  * This was totally contrary to the Law of Armed Conflict and a war crime. Some years ago, this author interviewed a British sailor on an MTB or motor torpedo boat (the equivalent to a PT boat) who described shooting shipwrecked Japanese soldiers and sailors who were trying to climb on board and pleading to be rescued. His view was that, if he had allowed them aboard, such was their fanaticism that they would have attempted to take over the boat and might well have succeeded. He was probably right.

  * After all, if you can’t kill yourself, how can you possibly be expected to kill the enemy?

  * A cold chapatti.

  * Although it can be argued that madness is not necessarily a bar to military competence – General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec in the Seven Years War, was widely considered to be mad, and at one stage King George suggested that it might be a good thing if he were to bite some of his other generals.

  * He had been a regular officer of the USAAF, and regarded as somewhat of a loose cannon, until 1937, when he retired on medical grounds and became air adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, training the Chinese air force in American aircraft and organizing the airlift over the Hump. He was reinstated in the USAAF in April 1942.

  * The British dressed the body of a tramp who had died of pneumonia, a disease with similar symptoms to drowning, in the uniform of a Royal Marines officer and dumped it off the coast of Spain. When the body was washed up, the Spanish found operational instructions that indicated an attack on Greece and Sardinia, which they duly passed on to the Germans.

  * It has been suggested that this was the result of syphilis caught in his youth. The same has been said about Napoleon, who also vacillated wildly from elation to depression.

  * They may, of course, have been simply ‘windy’ and seeking an excuse not to go into the line, but cowardice, also an offence under the Army Act, is notoriously difficult to prove in court.

  * Until 1998, whe
n the death penalty was abolished in British Military Law – inadvisably in this author’s view. ‘Go forward and you may be shot, refuse and you will be’ is persuasive: ‘Refuse and you will be put in jail and there will probably be an amnesty after the war’ is less so. You don’t want to shoot your own, but you should retain the threat of doing so, at least for a conscript army.

  * In peacetime the part-time National Guard comes under State control. Its nearest equivalent is the British Territorial Army but with a lot more money spent on it.

  * According to an officer of 15 Panzer Grenadier Division, interviewed by this author in 1967, the Germans had helped the monks to remove all paintings and other religious valuables to safety in Rome before the battles, and at no time were any soldiers, equipment or weapon systems placed in the monastery, although small parties of Roman Catholic soldiers in civilian clothes did visit the monastery on sightseeing tours. General von Senger himself was a lay member of the Benedictine order.

  * It has recently been suggested that Clark was actually acting on Roosevelt’s orders.

  * The USA and the USSR because they were allies and in any case the British had broken their ciphers; the Poles because the British were unable to break their cipher and reckoned that, if they couldn’t, then neither could the Germans.

  † The members of these clandestine parties did not, of course, know where the real landings were to be, and if captured anything they said under interrogation added to the German conviction that the landings would not be in Normandy. The intelligence staffs well knew that they were throwing men’s lives away, but the sacrifice of a few would save many.

  * Ridge = Bluffs, in American accounts

  * The US National D-Day Memorial Foundation disputes these figures and puts the American dead at around 2,500 and the British and Empire at 1,915 – still well within acceptable limits.

  * Rommel remains somewhat of an enigma. Far from the most competent of German generals, he is the only second-war one to have a barracks, a regiment and a ship named after him by the present Federal Republic of Germany, largely through the post-war manufacture of the Rommel legend, which maintains that he was always anti-Nazi. That he blatantly exploited his association with Hitler to gain swift promotion was conveniently forgotten. The best that might be said is that he was politically naive.