RevelationsRevelations
“Few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall.” – Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945
Category: The Second World War
The ProjectThe Project
Twenty-seven months ago, around the time of the centenary of the the start of the First World War, I began a reading project, setting myself to read about the twentieth century’s wars, the political and economic and ideological struggles, and the people caught up in them. I knew a fair amount about the subject already, picked up in bits and pieces over the years, but I wanted to get a bigger picture – learn the contexts, draw connections, see the flow, see how one thing made the way for another thing, see if I could gain a better understanding of the world I live in – we live in – and how it got from where it was to where it is.
Today I finished: eighty-three books, innumerable articles, and various films later. I learned various things, made various connections, saw the flows, the causes and effects (in so far as those are discernable). The two major lessons I learned were, 1) The First World War (also known as the Great War) was a catastrophe for Eurpean civilization, a cataclysm from which the pre-war European world had no hope of recovery, and from which the aftershocks are still felt. If you seek to understand the world, you could do well by understanding how it was before the Great War, how quckly and how much was destroyed during that war, and all that arose from the wreckage of that collapse. And 2) if people are given the choice between believing a comforting lie and believing a discomforting truth, they will pick the lie, every time. They will hold onto their belief in that lie until they are crushed – their men slaughtered, their women raped, their children enslaved, their cities burned and razed.
Reaping the whirlwindReaping the whirlwind
“Any civilized person must react with horror to the human consequences of the catastrophe that befell the German people in the last months of the war. The battle for the Third Reich cost the lives of something like 400,000 Germans killed in ground fighting and by aerial bombardment in 1945 alone, together with anything up to two million who died in the flight from the east. Eight million became homeless refugees. Yet it is hard to conceive any less dreadful conclusion to the nightmare Hitler and his nation had precipitated. When the German people failed to depose their leader, when they made the choice, conscious or otherwise, to fight to the end, they condemned Germany to the fate which it suffered in the closing months of the Second World War.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Blood and familyBlood and family
“Lieutenant Dorothy Beavers was one of a U.S. Army medical team dispatched to Ebensee. ‘Nothing had prepared us for the camps,’ she said. To their amazement, many of the inmates spoke English. These were highly educated Hungarian Jewish girls, reduced by lice and starvation to the last waystation before death. . . . As the nurses gently bathed them and treated their hurts, Dorothy Beavers was astonished to hear them describing pre-war trips to London, visits to the British Museum. ‘We discussed Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven—and the food we’d prepare for the Jewish holidays.’ The nurse spent six weeks at Ebensee, administering plasma to men and women at the last extremities of life, carefully weaning them on to a liquid diet. ‘It was the greatest shock of my life, to see hay ladders jammed with bodies. It got to us all. After two weeks, we were just sitting around, staring into space.’ Medical teams began to arrive at the camp, to take away their own nationals. An Italian doctor turned up one day and asked: ‘Any Italians here?’ ‘Yeah, one guy,’ came back the answer, ‘but he’s dying.’ ‘If he is going to die,’ said the doctor passionately, ‘he is going to die with us.’ ” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
What happenedWhat happened
“Fourteen-year-old Erich Pusch, a fugitive who had lost his parents on the ice of the Frisches Haff, lay in a cellar in Danzig with his young brother and a dozen or so other terrified people, mostly women and children. The first Russian entered their refuge early on the morning of 31 March [1945]. The man demanded to know if there were any German soldiers present. Assured that there were none, he collected all watches and rings, then left. Young Erich put his head cautiously into the street to investigate, and saw some very young Russian soldiers standing around their tanks. Occasional shells were still exploding. fired by German naval guns. Erich returned to the cellar. They all sat in dread, awaiting the worst. The next Russians to arrive were very drunk. They took all the women into the adjoining room and raped them, amid hysterical pleas for mercy. Returning, the Russians noticed lying on the floor a young Russian PoW, who had lost a leg before his capture. One Red soldier bayoneted him and then, when the doomed man screamed, shot him. Every soldier in the Soviet armies had been thoroughly briefed that fellow countrymen who had surrendered to the fascists were traitors. The soldiers then demanded the shoes of everyone present, collected these in a bag, and departed. The women were left sobbing. Later that night, Mongolians came, and raped a fifteen-year-old girl. After that, successive waves of Russians appeared all night, bent on the same business. They ignored the old men and children, but raped the women repeatedly.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Dead men tell no talesDead men tell no tales
“The testimony of Wehrmacht soldiers who survived the war is unrepresentative of the experience of Hitler’s forces fighting the Russians in the last weeks, because so many such men perished. The fate of some units, especially those of the Waffen SS, is lost in fire and smoke, because no witnesses remained to record their destruction. Significant numbers of young soldiers, children of the Third Reich, betrayed no interest in surviving its collapse. Any temptation to applaud their courage is undone by an understanding of its futility, and the depravity of the mindset which it reflected.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Throw the little ones backThrow the little ones back
“At Rathau on the Aller, the CO of the 5th Royal Tanks advanced on foot to take a cautious look into the town before his tanks moved in. He encountered one of his own officers, a huge Welshman named John Gwilliam who later captained his country’s rugby team, ‘carrying a small German soldier by the scruff of his neck, not unlike a cat with a mouse.’ The colonel said: ‘Why not shoot him?’ Gwilliam replied in his mighty Welsh voice: ‘Oh no, sir. Much too small.’ ” – Max Hastings, Armageddon (emphasis in original)
The diminishmentThe diminishment
“Medical research suggested that children aged between ten and fourteen suffered most from hunger. The average Dutch fourteen-year-old boy weighed forty-one kilos in 1940, but only thirty-seven kilos in 1945, and had become two centimetres shorter. Girls of the same age were a frightening seven kilos lighter and six centimetres shorter.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Appearances and disappearancesAppearances and disappearances
“The courage of the Resisters was extraordinary. One day in January [1945], a Jewish mother and her two sons, desperate for food, went foraging from the house in Zeist where they had lived in precarious obscurity. They were detained by Germans who thought they appeared Jewish, and locked up in the local police station along with seven other Jews, until the SS could remove them. The father of the family sought the aid of the Resistance. Local fighters decided that a rescue attempt could be made, but that it must be carried out by men unknown by sight to the local police. A former policeman named Henry Idenburg enlisted the aid, willing or otherwise, of a Luftwaffe deserter whom the Resistance was hiding. A local garage owner agreed to turn a blind eye while a German truck he was repairing was ‘borrowed’ for an hour. On 23 January, the Luftwaffe corporal in his uniform accompanied Idenburg, in his old Dutch police uniform, to Zeist police station. They produced a forged demand for the prisoners, who were duly handed over and herded out to the truck amid appropriate shouts and abuse. When the truck halted in a forest near Driebergen, the traumatized Jewish prisoners were convinced that they were to be executed. Instead, they found themselves taken into hiding in a church until they could be removed to safe houses. They survived.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
The land of nightmares and deathThe land of nightmares and death
“Gross Rosen was not a designated mass-murder establishment. Like many Nazi concentration camps, it was simply a place where people died, usually within six months. It was not a site for sophisticated medical experiments, but prisoners were sometimes used for cruder research, such as testing army boots by marching interminably around the compounds while carrying heavy loads. Wholesale killings took place only occasionally. One day when prisoners returned from the stone quarries, from the window of his barracks [prisoner Nikolai] Maslennikov saw a chain of wagons rattling past on the narrow-gauge railway to the crematorium, laden with women and children and old people. ‘The eyes of each bore a different expression,’ he said. ‘I have seen them in my dreams forever after.’ ” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Teachable momentTeachable moment
“I was standing in the ruins of my house. My heart stood still. It was here that I lived with my wife and children in peace and comfort. Who is to blame for all this? The English? The Americans? Or the Nazis? Had a Hitler not come, there would have been no war. If the Nazis had not talked so big, or put on such a show, or done so much sabre-rattling, we would have peace with those who are our enemies today. Had we retained democracy in Germany, we would still be in accord with England and the United States. It was with those thoughts that I stood before my ruined home.” – Private Heinz Trammler, December 1, 1944 (quoted by Max Hastings in Armageddon)
Ain’t fakin’Ain’t fakin’
“A British medical report concluded that ‘the act of going sick, of giving in, is an all-or-nothing phenomenon, and is damaging to the personality.’ Most men, it concluded, were less effective soldiers after returning to duty, as did more than 50 per cent. The same report observed the paradox that a soldier who ran away from the battlefield was treated as a criminal and harshly punished, while the man who reported sick with combat fatigue was sympathetically received. . . . The report noted that the problem seemed much smaller in the German Army, ‘though precipitating trauma was obviously greater.’ This was a polite way of suggesting that the German soldier, in defeat, was experiencing a tougher war than his Allied counterpart, on the road to victory. The report failed to remark on the small but obvious point, however, that suspected Wehrmacht malingerers were shot. Although combat fatigue was recognized only with the utmost reluctance by the German Army, and not at all in Stalin’s formations, there are no grounds for supposing that German or Russian soldiers were less afflicted by the shock of battle than men of other armies.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Grim reapers reaping and reapedGrim reapers reaping and reaped
“Posterity is bemused by the banality of Hitler and the coterie of gangsters who formed the leadership of the Third Reich. It is scarcely surprising that during the 1944-45 campaign they sought refuge in military and political fantasies, and committed themselves to a struggle to the end. Most tacitly acknowledged that their own lives were forfeit, and they were therefore indifferent to the fate of others. Through the last months of the war, many Nazi officials, Gestapo agents and SS men showed themselves eager to encompass the deaths of as many enemies of the Third Reich as possible before their own time came. . . . In the spring of 1945 there was a rush to kill surviving critics of National Socialism within the Nazis’ reach before they could be delivered by the Allies.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
EradicatedEradicated
“Many [German] civilians, even in areas such as East Prussia and Silesia, which now [October 1944] lay close to the Red Army, found it difficult to comprehend the notion that their entire world was on the verge of extinction, that the streets in which they shopped, the farms on which they milked cows, the communities in which they had lived their lives, would forever be destroyed within a matter of months.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
First things firstFirst things first
“When front-line soldiers escaped from imminent peril for a few hours, their desires were usually pathetically simple. Soldiers talk much about women, but on the battlefield their private cravings are seldom sexual. A British officer described his men’s priorities as ‘char, wad, flick and kip’—tea, food, a movie and sleep.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Potemkin empirePotemkin empire
“It is remarkable that the Soviet command system functioned as well as it did, given the ideological resistance to truth which was fundamental to the Stalinist system. In war, telling the truth is essential not for moral reasons, but because no commander can direct a battle effectively unless his subordinates tell him what is happening: where they are, what resources they possess, whether they have attained or are likely to attain their objectives. Yet since 1917 the Soviet Union had created an edifice of self-deceit unrivalled in human history. The mythology of heroic tractor drivers, coal miners who fulfilled monthly production norms in days, collective farms which produced record harvests, was deemed essential to the self-belief of the state. On the battlefield, in some measure this perversion persisted. Propaganda wove tales of heroes who had performed fantastic and wholly fictitious feats against the fascists.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Dead men walkingDead men walking
“As the Americans and British advanced across western Europe, although some disorder persisted behind their front, there was no armed resistance to their administration. They were presiding over a genuine process of liberation. Across millions of square miles of Soviet-occupied territory, however, desperate fighting persisted for months. Far behind the front, whole Soviet divisions were deployed to clear up the armed flotsam of many nations, men who knew that they possessed no hope of survival if they fell into Russian hands. In addition to German stragglers, there were Ukrainians and representatives of Soviet minorities of every hue who had been rash enough to throw in their lot with the Nazis.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
No fries with thatNo fries with that
“It was necessary for somebody, somewhere, to pay a heavy price to break down the mass of the Wehrmacht. Who can imagine the democracies, in any circumstances, bearing a loss akin to that of the 900,000 citizens of Leningrad who starved to death to sustain its defence? Even if Britain had been invaded, the inhabitants of its cities would have chosen surrender rather than eat each other.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Liquor and the gunLiquor and the gun
“The Red Army often displayed courage and determination far beyond anything that ever could have been asked of American or British troops. Yet its achievements on the battlefield seem all the more remarkable given its manic indiscipline. Even the relentless efforts of firing squads proved unable to deter excesses that often became suicidal. Huge injections of alcohol alone rendered service in the eastern war endurable to many of those who took part. Yet institutionalized alcoholism could be deadly to men in possession of weapons. Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov’s orderly started a drunken fight following an argument about—of all things—which tank possessed the thickest armour. A pilot shot him dead.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Mistah Supa-BadMistah Supa-Bad
“Stalin dominated Russia’s war more absolutely than Hitler controlled Germany’s. The Nazi empire was fatally weakened by the rivalry, self-indulgence, strategic folly and administrative incompetence of its leaders. In the Soviet Union, there was only one fount of power, from whom there was no escape or appeal. [General] Ismay, Churchill’s personal Chief of Staff, recoiled from the cringing subservience of Russia’s generals when he first visited the Kremlin in 1941. ‘It was nauseating,’ he wrote, ‘to see brave men reduced to such abject servility.’ The Soviet Union’s defeats in 1941-42 were chiefly attributable to Stalin’s own blunders. In the years that followed, however, in striking contrast to Hitler, the master of Russia learned lessons. Without surrendering any fraction of his power over the state, he delegated the conduct of battles to able commanders, and reaped the rewards. He displayed an intellect and mastery of detail which impressed even foreign visitors who were repelled by his insane cruelty. He showed himself the most successful warlord of the Second World War, contriving means and pursuing ends with a single-mindedness unimaginable in the democracies. Terror was a more fundamental instrument of Russia’s warmaking than of Germany’s. Even Stalin’s most celebrated marshals were never free from its spectre.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Brothers in armsBrothers in arms
“A critical divide persisted between the Eastern and Western Fronts in the Second World War: most American and British soldiers did not share the bitter hatred for their enemy which prevailed among the Russians. GIs or Tommies were subject to flashes of passion and rage when they were frightened, or when their unit was suffering heavy losses. But, once the adrenalin rush of battle slowed even a little, it was striking how little ill-will Allied soldiers, and especially Americans, sustained towards the Germans. ‘Hate them?’ said nineteen-year-old Private Tony Carullo. “No, no, we respected them. Even if you captured them, they’d look you in the face and ask, ‘What are you people doing here?’ It was the French we didn’t care for.’ ” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Salting the earthSalting the earth
“Because battles are fought by men who wear uniforms and carry weapons, it is easy to forget that, in the Second World War, the vast majority of those who served in every army did not think of themselves as soldiers. They were civilians, who strove even upon the battlefield to secrete a part of themselves from their military superiors and soldierly functions, from all the horrors around them. Even as they saluted, fired weapons or sheltered from bombardment, in their innermost selves most cherished the conviction that these horrors did not represent reality, that real life remained the small town or great city from which they had come; their loved ones; the civilian jobs they prayed desperately to survive to return to.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
The fog of warThe fog of war
“For soldiers who took part, the north-west Europe campaign seldom looked like a clash of mighty armies, after the fashion of Waterloo or Gettysburg. Rather, it was an interminable series of local collisions involving a few hundred men and a score or two of armoured vehicles, amid some village or hillside or patch of woodland between Switzerland and the North Sea. Only the generals grasped the big picture—or not, as the case might be.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
Keeping their heads downKeeping their heads down
“It is the nature of every soldier in every war to focus overwhelmingly upon his own prospects of life and death, rather than to think much about distant battlefields. The men of the Red Army cared little for the doings of their allies, save that they were thankful for American trucks and canned meat. Among many other commodities, the United States supplied to the Soviet Union 500,000 vehicles, 35,000 radio sets, 380,000 field telephones and a million miles of signal wire. Few Russians were ever allowed to know that they marched to Berlin in boots manufactured by the U.S. under Lend-Lease, or that much of the Soviet Union’s aircraft production was made possible by American aluminum supplies.” – Max Hastings, Armageddon
LiberationLiberation
“Our column continued forward, and my company shifted to the lead position on tanks. I rode behind the lead tank in the artillery jeep. The little country towns changed into small industrial towns, and we began to notice a scattering of red, white and blue Czechoslovakian flags in the towns in place of the usual white flags of surrender. Civilians waved at us guardedly from behind closed windows. The scattering of Czech flags should have warned us, but we were totally unprepared for the mad celebration which greeted us in the next town. We had suddenly crossed from the Sudetenland into Czechoslovakia proper. The houses were a riot of color with red, white and blue Czechoslovakian flags. Civilians lined the streets ten deep, cheering and waving their flags as if their lives depended upon it. Our column was forced to slow down, and the happy civilians pushed into the street and showered us with flowers and cakes and cookies. One old woman thrust a baked chicken into our jeep. Another old woman stood beside the road waving both hands in the sir, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks. Little children were wild with joy . . . some of them had never known anything but six years of Nazi occupation. The young men wore red, white and blue arm bands and carried German weapons, a part of the underground movement that was even now struggling against superior German forces in the capital city of Prague. Everyone was screaming the Czech words, “Nazdar! Nazdar!” and we wondered what they meant. I looked up and down the column at the soldiers in the company. Brilliant smiles wreathed their faces, and they waved cheerfully at the shouting crowds as if they had just won an election campaign and this was a personal triumph. Hardened, stubble-faced veterans had unashamed tears in their eyes. The unleashed joy of these oppressed people knew no bounds, and it was too much for us. Suddenly, I began to realize what no one had thus far been able in the war to put into words—what we were fighting for. And I found a lump in my throat which I could not swallow.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
Alles ist kaput!Alles ist kaput!
“I entered the town with my CP group, Already at least fifty German soldiers were assembled before the second house, their hands raised high above their heads and dazed, startled expressions of incredulity on their faces. Others poured from every building as eager GIs sought them out with curses and shouts of derision. Some hurried alone down the street toward the assemblage, terror written on their faces. We moved on. I looked back and saw my support platoon move into the town and join in the mop-up operations. The fifth house was a mass of flame. Two cows stood nearby, chewing their cuds and staring without expression at the scene of destruction. A grey-haired German farmer stood with his arm around his aged wife and stared at the burning house, tears streaming down both their faces. ‘Alles ist kaput! Alles ist kaput!’ they sobbed hysterically as we passed. I was not impressed; instead, I was suddenly angry at them and surprised at my own anger. What right had they to stand there sobbing and blaming us for this terror? What right did they and their kind have to any emotions at all? ‘Thank Adolf!’ I shouted. ‘Thank Hitler!’ I pointed to the burning house and said, ‘Der Führer!’ and laughed.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
The weight of commandThe weight of command
“Someone awakened me at three-thirty the next morning. It was cold in the room, and I shivered as I climbed from my sleeping bag. My mind was dulled with sleep, and I wanted to climb back into the warm sleeping bag and sleep on and on. I wanted to scream to hell with the war and go back to sleep. The sudden jolt of awakening was like emerging from a wonderful, peaceful world into a world of forbidding reality. There would be men hurt today, perhaps killed—men from my own company. It could be me. That seemed remote and impossible, but it did not remove my fear for the others. There were many responsibilities. Had I given the platoon leaders all the information they would need? How was my attack plan? Was there some important detail I had forgotten? Would Heimbach be defended? Would our attack be discovered as we crossed the flat, open field toward the town? Oh, God, if we could but rush from the house into the attack without thinking again. It was the waiting and the thinking and the wondering that got you.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
The cost of all costsThe cost of all costs
“Message after message came over the platoon phone. Lieutenant Wilson was badly wounded. He could not walk and must have a litter. Ammunition was running lower and lower. The M Company machine-gunners with the 1st Platoon were out of ammunition except enough to keep one gun firing a few minutes longer. The 60mm mortars found their ammunition supply so low that they fired only when the enemy was actually assaulting. Germans were being killed as close as ten yards to forward foxholes. Hand grenades were practically all gone. There was no solace from battalion. Each call for litter-bearers or additional ammunition was met with the maddening words: ‘We’re doing all we can.’ I told them we could not hold out much longer unless we got additional ammunition. Captain Montgomery said we must hold. ‘Our orders are to hold at all costs,’ he said. I wondered if he could possibly realize the meaning of those words. We must hold until every last man was killed or captured. Company I’s last stand! And what is to be gained? Nothing but time. Time born of the bodies of dead men. Time.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander (emphasis in original)
You have to be there to knowYou have to be there to know
“OK,” [Private First Class Henry] Croteau interrupted. “I’ve got something to say. Tell them it’s too damned serious over here to be talking about hot dogs and baked beans and things we’re missing. Tell them it’s hell, and tell them there’s men getting killed and wounded every minute, and they’re miserable and they’re suffering. Tell them it’s a matter more serious than they’ll ever be able to understand.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
It looked like a bad day to dieIt looked like a bad day to die
“I awoke the next morning at ten o’clock and stepped outside the pillbox. The sun was shining down with a light so intense that I blinked involuntarily and rubbed my eyes. The effect, after the days of rain and overcast skies, was exhilarating. All seemed right with the world and I wondered why we must be huddling in pillboxes and foxholes shooting at other men a few hundred yards away.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander