After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (12 page)

In matters of broader strategy, British influence progressively waned after the D-Day landings in France in June 1944. America was now the major contributor to the war effort – in manpower and material – and it was only right that it should drive forward the direction of the war. But this situation was made worse by the behaviour of Britain’s chief commander in northern Europe, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

Montgomery, who had been appointed overall commander of the Allied ground forces in Normandy – a post he exercised until Eisenhower arrived in person – never really accepted the American as his boss. In November 1944 matters between the two men had come to a head and Montgomery very nearly lost his job – only the tireless diplomacy of Freddie de Guingand, his chief of staff, saved the day. In January 1945 – during the Battle of the Bulge, the German Ardennes offensive – Montgomery gave a disastrous press conference in which his manner came across as so patronising that many American officers became completely alienated from him. General Omar Bradley, the commander of the 12th Army group, never forgave Montgomery for it. This effect of this was to further reduce the influence of Churchill and his advisers.

And yet, at the end of April 1945 the military situation in Italy changed dramatically. A well-planned Allied assault across the Po valley broke the German position and pushed their generals to the negotiating table. At Caserta on 29 April an unconditional surrender was signed – pending ratification from Kesselring, who had been appointed by Hitler overall commander of all German forces in southern Europe. The Soviet Union was fully informed of proceedings and invited to send a representative. Kesselring hesitated, but after the death of the Führer was confirmed and he had informed Dönitz of the agreement, he approved it on 2 May.

The German surrender in Italy was accepted by the overall Allied commander there, British field marshal Harold Alexander – and Alexander’s military and diplomatic success allowed Churchill to re-establish a measure of influence in this region, bringing British troops into Austria to counter the presence of the Russians. Surveying the scene from the map room, Churchill felt this was a necessary precaution against an unpredictable ally. But the encounters between the two sides took place with real cordiality. ‘I will always remember our meeting with our British allies in Austria,’ said Soviet sergeant Yuri Eltekov of the 40th Guards Artillery Regiment (part of the 57th Army). ‘We swapped gifts – we took the stars off our uniform; British soldiers gave us pens and cigarettes. Our allies spoke little German or Russian so we largely communicated by sign language. However, there was a tremendous sense of friendship nonetheless – and relief that the war would soon be over.’

Eltekov’s Red Army unit enjoyed a joke as they approached their British allies in Austria – that they were renewing the abortive marriage negotiations between the Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible and the English queen Elizabeth I. The image of two thwarted lovers – separated by great geographical and cultural distance, and trying to consummate a union nonetheless – appealed to the humour of the Russian troops. Churchill had professed himself delighted with Alexander’s success at Caserta – telling the war cabinet that it was ‘a magnificent achievement’ – but sadly the Soviet government was less romantically inclined than its soldiers. When Hugh Lunghi (serving with the British Military Mission in Moscow) relayed news of the German surrender in Italy to the Soviet Ministry of Defence, he was greeted with ‘a surly, couldn’t-care-less attitude’. The Russians – for ever focused on the need for a ‘Second Front’ in France – had always treated the Allied campaign in Italy as a sideshow.

But Churchill was not in the wooing mood either. He also ordered Alexander to occupy Trieste, in order to block the advance of Tito’s Yugoslav communist army. Tito’s partisans had been allies against the Germans and Churchill had recognised their government as legitimate, but now began to fear that they would secure this port on the Adriatic. Alexander moved his New Zealand troops into Trieste, only to find that Tito’s men were already in the town. An uneasy stand-off took place. Tito was unwilling to renounce his claim on Trieste as part of a greater Yugoslavia. In the interim, the soldiers carried out guard duties together.

A strategy of restraining communist ambition was being put in place and the race towards the Baltic ports formed an important part of it. On 30 April, in a meeting of the British war cabinet, General Sir Alan Brooke outlined the situation: ‘Bremen has been taken. We have crossed the Elbe and are advancing on Hamburg. The Second Army will now go direct to Lübeck – and we plan to push on to Wismar and Schwerin. We should get there before the Russians do.’

Churchill realised that a military advance – which would precede any political settlement – gave both sides (the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance) useful bargaining chips. He did not want too many of these chips in the hands of the Russians. Churchill’s policy was based on a lack of trust of his Russian allies. From that position, it made sense to be cautious. But since the Soviet Union also mistrusted him, it risked creating an impasse rather than allowing real engagement.

Field Marshal Montgomery understood Churchill’s political objectives and he also felt it important to secure Denmark. But Montgomery was concerned that he did not have the military means to bring about this dash to the Baltic – and that he was exposing his men to an undue level of risk. His army group had been stripped of American support after it had crossed the Rhine in March – and with the Germans still resisting in western Holland, was fully extended. Eisenhower’s transfer of the US Ninth Army to General Bradley’s 12th Army Group on 29 March 1945 still rankled. Montgomery wrote in his diary: ‘With victory in sight, the violent pro-American element at SHAEF is pressing for a set-up which will clip the wings of the British group of armies and relegate it to [an] unimportant role on the flank; the Americans then finish off the business alone.’

The British chief of general staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, was sympathetic to Montgomery: ‘Most of the changes are due to national aspiration and to ensure that the USA effort will not be lost under British command. It is a pity and the straightforward strategy is being affected by the nationalistic outlook of the allies.’

It was not in fact unreasonable – with America shouldering the greatest burden in prosecuting the war (both in manpower and resources) – for SHAEF to want American divisions under American command. Both Montgomery and Brooke underestimated how much Montgomery’s arrogance and aloofness rankled with the United States command – many American generals no longer wanted to serve under him for any length of time.

However, Montgomery – always a far-sighted and clear planner in military affairs, whatever his lack of personal diplomacy – was concerned by the chaos on the eastern side of the Elbe and the risk of sustaining casualties for a part of Germany that would probably then be returned to Russia anyway. As his army had pushed up towards the Elbe, his men were increasingly unsure whether the German troops facing them would fight with determination or not.

One British lieutenant, Geoffrey Picot, wrote of the fighting in Germany that spring: ‘Our advance was much easier than it had been in Normandy [the previous summer]. But danger attended us at every stage.’

Lieutenant Sydney Jary of the 4th Somerset Light Infantry gave an example of what that danger might be – foolhardy bravado from an enemy on the verge of military collapse. He was briefing one of his messengers when the alarm was raised:

‘I heard the cry: “Sir, they are charging at us!” Sure enough, from about one hundred and fifty yards ahead, a well spread out line of Germans were putting in a bayonet charge. Brave lads, but they didn’t stand a chance. No-one got within seventy yards of us.’

Sometimes, as British troops pushed ahead of or bypassed German units, they would then surrender to forces coming up behind. On other occasions, they did not. Advance formations would sweep past straggling German groups, which would then lie low and later re-emerge and attack British transport and supply lines. Outnumbered and surrounded Wehrmacht defenders would on occasion refuse to submit – whether out of a sense of battle honour or sheer stubbornness. In mid April 1945 the British 43rd Division had isolated a small group of German soldiers on the River Lethe. And yet, with only 200 soldiers and two tanks, they went on to the attack, which they continued – despite heavy losses – until the whole force disintegrated. One of the British officers wrote:

‘Later in the day, when our advance was resumed, old men and women emerged from the woods and neighbouring villages to carry away their dead, who lay in long rows in front of our position. Many were young boys; others were old men who had been hurriedly pressed into uniform. It was a sombre scene, pathetic in its utter futility – even to the battle-hardened troops of the Division.’

British soldiers were advancing into a landscape of destruction and chaos. William Lawrenson of the 7th Armoured Division noted:

‘The German towns that we have passed through have been terribly knocked about … Most of the German civilians we have seen have been women, many of them wheeling handcarts which carry their only remaining belongings …’

And Lieutenant Bill Bellamy said on witnessing the destruction at one town, Osnabrück:

‘I was stunned at the totality of it all and, despite my anger, horrified at the suffering which it had brought in its wake. Whatever the German people had done, I couldn’t gloat over their anguish, or get satisfaction from a feeling of revenge.’

British soldier Ronald Mallabar said: ‘Stories of SS atrocities made our men angry – but when you see a person face-to-face and he is helpless, unarmed and wants to surrender you lose that wildness.’ Others felt that desire for revenge and acted upon it. In mid April 1945 three German women were raped by British troops in the town of Neustadt-am-Rübenberge.

However unacceptable, for some, vengeance came into play when they gained a fuller understanding of what Hitler’s Germany stood for. On 11 April 1945 the British 11th Armoured Division had uncovered the death camp at Belsen. Within the camp, more than 60,000 inmates were suffering from disease, malnourishment and appalling mistreatment – a further 10,000 corpses of murdered victims lay about the camp and in open pits. British soldiers had little idea of the scale of the horror awaiting them. Although some information was already available about the death camps liberated by the Red Army in Poland – at Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945 – not a great deal had filtered through to the West, and virtually nothing to the British Army in north-west Europe.

‘I was not prepared for the horrific sights, even in the first few hundred yards of the camp,’ wrote Major Bill Close. ‘The huts were full of almost naked inmates, some dead, some only just alive and pitifully thin. There were bodies everywhere – lying in the ditches surrounding the huts; the stench was indescribable.’ Lieutenant Lawrence Aslen added: ‘The sheer scale of the horror just overwhelmed us – the SS guards seemed to us utterly evil, depraved murderers who should all be hanged.’

On 15 April the medical services of the British 2nd Army had arrived at the camp to assess the situation. At first, they struggled to get to grips with it – nothing comparable to Belsen had ever been encountered before – and tragically, the standard army food and supplies rushed into the camp were highly unsuitable for inmates in such a terrible condition. In the immediate aftermath of liberation, more than 600 of these unfortunates died each day. In time, greater understanding and better facilities brought the situation under control. But at the beginning of May 1945 the shadow of Belsen still strongly affected British soldiers in Germany.

It was hard to contain the emotions thrown up by such a terrible experience. ‘Some of the camp guards at Belsen who refused to help bury the bodies were shot for mutiny,’ Lieutenant Aslen acknowledged, ‘others succumbed to typhus through being forced to do so. And two of the guards were badly beaten up by our soldiers, thrown into a burial trench and left to die.’

Belsen – horrific though it was – was a piece in a broader mosaic of upheaval. As the British 2nd Army moved across Germany it had to house and feed an increasing number of displaced persons (DPs) – those slave labourers transported to the Reich from all over Europe. Montgomery communicated these difficulties bluntly to Eisenhower on 16 April, in the immediate aftermath of the medical inspection at Belsen: ‘I cannot possibly push up towards Denmark and also place under military governorship the large area of Germany that we now occupy.’ Eisenhower took Montgomery’s point – and released two American divisions to support his army group.

Displaced persons, and the increasing number of Germans wishing to surrender, placed a heavy logistical burden on the Allied armies, and made it hard for their forward units to maintain the speed of their advance. War correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas reported:

Our 11th Armoured Division, with the 6th Airborne on its southern flank, has raced down the main roads from Osnabrück towards the River Weser … The airborne boys travel in the most varied collection of transport I’ve yet seen … lorry-borne or tank-borne, motorbike-borne, even cart-borne infantry. The Germans have little to stop our racing columns – they rushed some units up … a regiment from Denmark, on its way to defend Osnabrück, oblivious to the fact that it had already fallen days before … But speed brings with it its own problems. Apart from that ever-present nightmare of supply, how to get the petrol and food up to our leading tanks, there are other headaches for our army – the problem of prisoners for example. What on earth are you to do with the thousands upon thousands of these survivors of warfare, cluttering up the roads and offering to surrender to the first of our troops that appear?

It’s difficult for an armoured division to begin to cope with them. Our tanks have got to get on and our lorries are wanted to bring up supplies. The only thing to do with these prisoners is to disarm them and send them off to the rear. And with an advance as fast as ours, the rear may be 60 miles away. These are just the ordinary spectacles – miles behind the lines, long columns of prisoners, sometimes led by their officers, quietly tramping along in the middle of our back areas. Nobody pays the slightest attention to them. And none of them make the slightest effort to escape.