Armageddon (6 page)
“This period was made up of fruit,” wrote Brigadier John Stone, chief engineer of the British Second Army. “Belgians stood by the roads with baskets of grapes, pears, apples, plums and peaches. If you stopped for a moment, presents were pressed on you, and a refusal hurt the offerer very much.” “As we went across France with no resistance of any moment in front of us, we were racing towards Germany,” recorded General Omar Bradley’s aide Colonel Chester Hansen. “I thought they might quit.” In the first week of September, 67 per cent of Americans questioned for a Gallup poll said that they expected the war to be over by Christmas. The British embassy in Washington reported to London on the national mood: “Early victory in the European campaign continues to be taken for granted.” The Allied Control Commission for Germany was “called upon to make itself ready to operate in Berlin by 1st November.” “Until mid-September,” observed Sergeant Forrest Pogue, “the intelligence estimates all along the lines were marked by almost hysterical optimism.”
On 4 September, for planning purposes the British Cabinet accepted 31 December as the likely date for the end of the war. The U.S. War Production Board in Washington cancelled some military contracts, on the assumption that the material would not be needed. On 8 September the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, told the prime minister that, while the Chiefs of Staff did not ignore the possibility of continued German resistance, it seemed unlikely that the Nazis could survive the winter. Churchill, almost alone, dissented. He wrote to the Joint Intelligence Committee: “It is at least as likely that Hitler will be fighting on 1 January as it is that he will collapse before then. If he does collapse before then, the reasons will be political rather than military.” More than any other man at the summit of Anglo-American power, the prime minister respected the fighting power of the German Army and had grown painfully familiar with the limitations of the armies of the democracies.
Yet what could the enemy fight with? Ultra, the wonderful fount of intelligence which poured forth to Allied commanders from Bletchley Park the daily riches of decoded German signals traffic, detailed the enemy’s weakness. An intelligence estimate on 12 September suggested that the Germans could deploy only nineteen divisions for the defence of the West Wall—the frontier fortification of Germany also known as the Siegfried Line—reinforced with a further five or six by the end of the month: “The West Wall cannot be held with this amount, even when supplemented by enemy oddments and large amounts of flak.” A jubilant intelligence summary by British Second Army on 5 September suggested that partisan activity against the Allies would henceforward pose a more serious threat to the Allied advance than the wreckage of the German Army:
[It] is tolerably certain that the enemy has not kept at home a reserve which is well enough trained or equipped to hold an invading force at bay for long, particularly if the latter includes armour . . . But invasion of Germany is different to invasion of France. The population will not be friendly . . . pockets left may be more than a nuisance, and sniping, minor attacks on single vehicles, staff cars etc. may be prevalent. Even if a breakthrough proves relatively easy, the enemy left behind will have to be cleaned up. The population, which may be provided with small arms, will need to be disarmed.
American commanders shared this mood. Bradley’s aide recorded on 5 September: “Brad believes the Germans may either fold up with our crossing of the Rhine, or . . . as long as the SS has its hold, we may be forced into a guerrilla clean-up of the entire country, a costly and troublesome process.” Nor did the enemy seem to dissent. Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt told Hitler on 7 September that it would be six weeks before the West Wall could be manned and made defensible. Meanwhile, Army Group B—the principal German force in the west—possessed just a hundred tanks with which to confront the Allies’ 2,000. Ludwig Seyffert, a general commanding the German 348th Division, told interrogators after his capture on 6 September: “The Allies should be in the heart of Germany in less than two months.” On 4 September, Corporal Joseph Kolb wrote home from the beleaguered German garrison at Calais: “I am still alive, but perhaps this will be my last letter of all to you. How we shall end up I don’t know—either dead or in captivity.” Likewise Private Fritz Gerber: “Our only hope is to be taken prisoner. Now, my dear ones, I send you my last greetings from the West, and should we not see each other again in this world, we must hope to be reunited in another one above.” Sergeant Helmut Günther, serving with the ruins of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers on the Moselle, said: “We were amazed that it took the Allies so long to engage us. We were utterly exhausted. Yet we were given the chance to catch our breath and regroup at Metz. It seemed extraordinary.”
Inside the Third Reich, among informed people with no connection to Hitler’s regime, there was a desperate impatience for the end. Only peace could bring a halt to relentless death. Allied victory would mean a chance of life for millions of captives, not least those who had dared to oppose Nazi tyranny. “For the thousands locked up by the Gestapo and for those who were still waiting to be picked up,” wrote Paul von Stemann, a Danish journalist who spent the war in Berlin, “it seemed to be a race with their lives at stake. ‘If they can only hold on till October,’ somebody said, ‘the Allies will be here and they will be safe.’ Somebody else said: ‘The war cannot last till Christmas—it is only a matter of perseverance.’ ” Von Stemann was startled to hear Germany’s official military spokesman, Major Sommerfeldt, observe casually one day in September that he expected the Allies to break through the Siegfried Line at any time, “and then the war will be over in 14 days.” Off the record or not, Sommerfeldt’s words seemed to the journalist a revelation of despair within the Wehrmacht.
Throughout Germany, by an order of 24 August Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels closed theatres, cabarets and drama schools, and disbanded all orchestras except those essential for radio broadcasting. Only scientific and technical literature, school books and “certain standard political works” continued to be published. The working week was extended to sixty hours, and a “temporary” ban on holidays was imposed. Frau Keuchel of Betzdorf wrote to her husband: “It is dreadful to read the communiqués and realize that Tommy is progressing further, or rather coming nearer, every hour. Here, people are full of fears . . . No doubt you will have heard of the complete ban on holidays and now, to cap it all, the 60-hour working week. If I was to fulfil this, I would have to leave Betzdorf at four in the morning to get to the office!”
From Weichselstadt in Poland, Frau Kaiser wrote to her husband, a sergeant-major on the Western Front: “My nerves are bad . . . Your little girl is very sick—food poisoning and high fever. Even the doctor doesn’t know what has caused it. I think it is the war. The food is bad and the bread is terrible. What will become of us? You are so far away and I am so alone. Day and night we hear the rumble in the distance. Everyone has to dig trenches, Poles and Germans alike. Couldn’t you manage to get yourself captured in one of the encirclements?” Frau Strauch, a sergeant’s wife, wrote in similar vein: “Today is Sunday, overcast and cold, and my state of mind matches the weather. I could cry. Yet I still cannot believe that God will permit that we Germans should be ruled by murderers like the Russians.”
On 3 September, Field-Marshal Walter Model, “the Führer’s fireman” who had succeeded as C-in-C of Army Group B after the suicide of the defeated Günther von Kluge, issued an order of the day to his men: “We have lost a battle, but I tell you—we shall still win this war. I cannot say more now, although I know that there are many questions burning on the lips of every soldier. Despite everything that has happened, do not allow your confident faith in Germany’s future to be shaken . . . This hour will separate the real men from the weaklings.” Model’s enigmatic words reflected only his hopes for Hitler’s new rockets and jet fighters, none of which offered a realistic prospect of averting defeat. The Americans later computed that 24,000 conventional combat aircraft could have been built with the German resources squandered on “wonder weapons.” Yet the short, stocky, frankly uncouth commander of Army Group B remained unswervingly loyal to Hitler. For all Model’s competence as a commander, his behaviour, like that of many of his colleagues, reflected a refusal to confront reality. Rational military analysis led inexorably to despair.
Yet an astonishing number of German soldiers remained convinced that the war might be won. A straw poll was conducted among eighty-two prisoners of the Luftwaffe’s 6th Parachute Division. Asked whether they still believed Germany would prevail, even in captivity thirty-two men replied “certainly”; fifteen “possibly”; nine “doubtful”; sixteen “impossible”; and ten refused to express an opinion. Captain Hans-Otto Polluhmer, former signals officer of 10th SS Panzer, nursed feelings of guilt, “a belief that I had let the side down,” even as he languished at Camp Polk, Oklahoma, after being captured at the Falaise Gap. Many of Polluhmer’s fellow prisoners still believed victory attainable, and some of them physically assaulted “weaklings” who revealed doubt. Eugen Ernst, a Wehrmacht reserve colonel captured in Holland, wrote to his family from prison camp in England, asserting boldly that he expected Germany’s new wonder weapons would soon arrive and turn the tide of the war. An American survey of German PoWs showed that more than two-thirds still expressed belief in their Führer as late as November 1944. The Nazis’ assiduous cultivation of the warrior ethos had created some young fanatics of the Waffen SS who simply liked fighting for its own sake, even now that they were losing the war. A captain of 1st SS Panzer said: “We reached a point where we were not concerned for ourselves or even for Germany, but lived entirely for the next clash, the next engagement with the enemy. There was a tremendous sense of ‘being,’ an exhilarating feeling that every nerve in the body was alive to the fight.”
Private Bruno Bochum harboured no such sentiments. Like many of his comrades, the nineteen-year-old flak gun captain simply considered himself to be in the business of survival. Most of his battery’s 20mm guns were lost during their retreat from Brussels. At one moment, they found themselves fleeing eastwards, while a column of British armoured cars raced them on a parallel road. By the time Bochum’s group reached the Albert Canal, just one of their guns was left, together with a hundred gunners. The wreckage of the canal bridge was negotiable by men on foot, but impassable to vehicles. They pushed their truck and gun into the canal, and swarmed across the bridge girders under British fire. Then they walked day and night in search of their unit, constantly losing stragglers. Bochum somehow evaded the questing military police, who were rounding up fugitives like himself, made his way home to Mönchengladbach, broke into his family’s empty apartment and sank gratefully into a bath: “We recognized that the war was lost, but there was nothing we could do to hasten its ending.” After considering his predicament, he saw no choice save to quit Mönchengladbach and rejoin the remains of his unit, with which he then served to the end.
“Throughout August,” wrote a British staff officer, “strategic policies remained confused . . . In the atmosphere of indecision combined with euphoria.” The first of the errors which denied the Anglo-Americans a breakthrough into Germany in 1944 was made on 21st Army Group’s front. On 4 September, the British 11th Armoured Division exulted as its men reported to Second Army that they had overrun the giant port of Antwerp in Belgium, with its facilities intact. This was a real stroke of fortune. Every officer in the Allied armies knew that supplies, and ports for unloading them, were now the vital factor in enabling the Allies to finish the war. At that moment, had they chosen to do so, the British could have driven onwards up the forty-mile coast of the Scheldt which linked Antwerp to the sea with nothing to stop them. The battered German Fifteenth Army, comprising 100,000 men who had lost most of their transport, would have been isolated if the British had advanced just a few miles further. For Fifteenth Army’s commander, General Gustav von Zangen, the arrival of 11th Armoured in Antwerp was “a stunning surprise,” which presaged doom for his forces.
Yet now the British made one of the gravest and most culpable errors of the campaign. They failed to perceive, as the Germans at once perceived, that Antwerp was useless as long as the Allies did not command its approaches. No ship could negotiate forty miles of German coastal artillery and minefields. The Royal Navy had repeatedly warned both SHAEF and 21st Army Group that it was essential to secure the banks of the Scheldt before the port could become operational. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay wrote to SHAEF, copied to Montgomery, on 3 September, the day before 11th Armoured Division reached the docks: “Both Antwerp and Rotterdam are highly vulnerable to mining and blocking. If the enemy succeeds in these operations, the time it will take to open ports cannot be estimated . . . It will be necessary for coastal batteries to be captured before approach channels to the river route can be established.” Even as the tanks of 11th Armoured deployed in Antwerp, Belgian Resistance leaders warned of the vital importance of the Scheldt. Exhausted British officers, sated by the dash across Belgium they had just accomplished, brushed the civilians aside. Many of the liberators were so weary that they fell asleep in the tanks where they halted.
While the British celebrated, refuelled and rearmed, the Germans acted. Von Zangen was ordered at once to move his forces across the Scheldt, to occupy the island of Walcheren, commanding the river estuary from the north-east, and to secure an escape route northwards into Holland for the rest of his army. “Pip” Roberts, the slight, energetic thirty-eight-year-old commander of 11th Armoured Division which had occupied Antwerp, believed the British would thereafter be driving on eastwards, towards the Ruhr. The northern fragment of Holland seemed to him irrelevant. His division’s post-war history observed apologetically: “Had any indication been given that a further advance north was envisaged, these bridges might have been seized within a few hours of our entry.” As the Germans blew the Albert Canal bridge a few hours after the arrival of Roberts’s men, “I realised that I had made a great error . . . This sort of situation is just like boxing; if your opponent seems a little groggy, you must keep up the pressure.” Roberts was too self-critical. It seems wrong to place responsibility for British failure upon either himself or his corps commander, Horrocks. It was not their business to identify strategic objectives. Blame must be laid at the doors of Eisenhower, Montgomery and possibly Dempsey, commanding Second Army. Each man had by this stage of this war enjoyed ample opportunities to recognize the importance of speed in all dealings with the Germans on the battlefield. Yet none made any attempt to galvanize Roberts’s tired soldiers. Given Montgomery’s contempt for his Supreme Commander’s lack of strategic insight, the British field-marshal might have been expected to see for himself the pivotal importance of the Antwerp approaches.