The World at War (44 page)

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

You look and behind you could see the whole sky clearing and a mass of black specks following you. Ahead, in a bullring of light, you could see the whole of the Berlin searchlights and again this awful moment when you crawled in among them, the whole thing was a light nightmare, there were tracer bullets going past you, there was flak coming up and we were dropping the big cookie and the ritual took over. You could hear the captain chanting, 'Steady,' and then of course, 'Bombs away.' You followed it down, it was as if honestly a jewel had been thrown on black velvet, it sparkled, it shone. The whole of Berlin looked the most beautiful dazzling sight you ever saw until you realised this was civilisation burning below you. And in that moment, a slow East Anglian voice came on the intercom saying, 'Fighter attacking, sir.' The whole aircraft seemed to be filled with fumes and the captain calmed the whole thing down, the heroism of coolness. The East Anglian rear gunner had it absolutely taped and the captain held the whole crew together. You saw the tracer of bullets drop right below the nose and another burst of gunfire and the cool voice saying, 'Night-fighter shot down.' Everybody shouted, 'Isn't he lovely, there he goes,' and he went down like a burning piece of oily waste rag and my eye went lower down and it fell into this festering mess below, and suddenly the other side of the bullring came up, cloud came round again and I realised I'd been through Berlin.

ALBERT SPEER

I don't know how much, how strong you would have been if you could succeed really in destroying Berlin, which is a large area, much larger than any other town in Germany. Theoretically if you would have succeeded in destroying Berlin as you did with Hamburg it would have been disastrous for Germany, I think that is certain. Berlin did suffer heavy raids but this was like bombing several towns, because I was in Berlin at this time: if you had a bombing on one part of Berlin the other part was not involved, the distance was too large.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

The casualties in the
Battle of Berlin were no more than we would have suffered if we'd gone anywhere else in Germany. People seem to forget that Bomber Command fought a thousand battles during the war and you can't succeed in every one. I'm not saying the Battle of Berlin was a defeat or anything like a defeat – I think it was a major contribution towards the defeat of Germany. After all we didn't like when six hundred acres of London went up the spout – six thousand acres of Berlin went up, and Berlin's a much smaller city than London.
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PILOT OFFICER NOBLE FRANKLAND

RAF Bomber Command

The people I fought with in the war were in my view all heroes: they were tremendous believers in what we were trying to do. There was an amazing spirit of dedication to the task in hand; this was very moving and a tremendous inspiration. Whose idea it was you can never trace, but it was a sort of infection, and this applied to people who came from all over the world, and Bomber Command was an extraordinarily cosmopolitan sort of command. By the time I was in it about forty per cent of it came from overseas, mostly from New Zealand, Australia and Canada, but also from many other countries, and not all British. There were lots of Czechs and Poles serving in Bomber Command and the spirit of dedication was moving.

GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE

Despite the fact that Harris didn't come and see us and hand out cigarettes or anything else, he sent the most amazing signals. One I'll always remember, and this was something you read out to your crews at briefing, this one said, 'Tonight you go to the big city' – that's Berlin – 'you have the opportunity to light a fire in the belly of the enemy and burn his black heart out.' Well, after the crews stopped cheering a thing like that they didn't want aircraft. Just fill their pockets with bombs and point them towards Berlin and they'd take off on their own.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

There were high
losses on one occasion, on a
Nuremberg raid, but on other occasions the losses were not more than we expected, everybody expected, including the crews themselves. And they were the sort of losses that the ground forces had put up with in the first war, and the only reason they didn't have to put up with [them] in the second war [was] because of the bombing of Germany and the tactical bombing in front of them. And if you want confirmation of that ask General Montgomery – he knows. The boys we had were the pick of the litter and they were just full of guts and they deserved credit for what they did, and they get precious little credit for it.
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ALBERT SPEER

Hitler's reaction to the bombing was typical for him, he always wanted to see somebody else is responsible for a failure and not him, and so in this case it was Goring who was responsible. And more, he really started to attack Goring for the failure of the air defence and I was sometimes present when he really shouted at him and was telling him that it's disastrous how he failed. But of course Goring was not so responsible. Of course the output of our industry was at its highest peak in July 1944 but that was due to the steel reserve and then the output topped and in September/October we were at the end of everything. I wrote several memorandums to Hitler in which he was told we can't continue any more. He usually said, 'You will do it' and 'I think it's not as bad as that' and 'We had many situations before which were very catastrophic and we pulled through, we will pull through this situation too.'

GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE

My own interpretation of weaving was very slight. I liked to let my gunners get a good look but I didn't like to get too far off course. I just banked slightly to give the gunners a good view underneath; I moved off maybe ten degrees to port or starboard during this manoeuvre. The corkscrew was much more violent. I was discussing this with Willy Herget in Germany recently and this did put the night-fighters off because you made a very violent manoeuvre, activated by the gunner himself. If he saw a fighter closing in he immediately said, 'Corkscrew port' or 'Corkscrew starboard' and then you threw the aircraft into a quite violent corkscrew manoeuvre. Just imagine you're following round a quarter of a mile radius tunnel and you went down and then up and followed the corkscrew motion right around until you lost the fighter.

MAJOR HERGET

Usually I only had two successes in one night and then I landed, but that night I was in the middle of the bomber stream, I was flying through the propeller wash and my plane was shaking and so I dived on the first plane in front, the next to the right, the next to the left. I was shooting between the two motors, it was a Lancaster, and to the left another Lancaster, I shot again between two motors, only a short time, sometimes I needed only four to eight bullets until the plane was burning. I had five successes against aircraft with bombs on the way to Frankfurt and now on the way back I found another three. The last one was the hardest because the Lancaster saw me because I came from the direction of Frankfurt, which was one big fire. I came from right underneath and was firing in the body until it crashed to earth. At that time I was thirty-three years of age and I was not able to climb out by myself, to get out of the plane. They had to lift me out.
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FLIGHT LIEUTENANT WILLIAM REID, VC

617 Squadron, July 1944

There was a tremendous noise and this stick of bombs came down through us from above. One of the bombs went through the port wing and the engine started to fall off and then another bomb must have gone between the cabin and the mid-upper gunner because it severed the controls. The rudders went sloppy and I shouted, 'Stand by to bail out' and then, 'Bail out' and the plane started to fall. Chunky Stewart, my engineer, handed me my parachute and then he took his own and headed into the front bay to bale out. You just open the hatch and drop out. By this time it was spinning down and this tremendous noise of engines getting faster and faster and I couldn't get out of my seat. I tried to open the side window, although the props are quite close to you there, but I couldn't get out of there either and then I forced the stick forward and got out of my seat and I remembered the dinghy escape hatch which is above the pilot, behind, and as I turned the handle in the dinghy escape hatch the whole nose must have come off because the next thing it was quietness and I was falling through the air.

MAJOR HERGET

I was shot down in the night of 14–15 June 1944 by a Mosquito, burning, sitting three minutes in the burning Ju 88 and not being able to jump out. If you're sitting in a burning plane it's a horrible feeling and I was praying to the Lord and asked him if this was my last minute. Then a voice said to me, 'If you believe, no' and in the same second my mechanic could open the door to the ground in the Ju 88 and we could all jump out.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

What we've always claimed in the service was that we had asked originally for a first line of four thousand, with which we could knock out Germany. When we got down to the real bomber offensive it really only lasted for a year, with one quarter of that number. 1 know people say today, 'Bombing will never achieve what people will claim for it.' There was a long period in the peace when the people went about saying bombing can never sink a battleship – look what happened to battleships, what did any of them do except sink under air attack? They said bombing could never win a war – well, two bombs defeated Japan. It's quite true they were atom bombs but the atom bomb is only the equivalent.

URSULA GRAY

Dresden resident, post-war wife of author J Glenn Gray

The only idea was to get out in an open space and our house was situated close to a beautiful area called The Great Garden, which had lovely old oak trees, three hundred years old, and beautiful little pavilions. By that time already there were buildings falling apart and you had to make your way over stones and rubble and killed people and you just didn't care – you stepped on whatever you could just to get out and away from it all. Many other people already had gathered. They had the same idea, to get away from the burning houses, from that ocean of fire and bombing, and huddled up under the trees. While we were sitting there they sent bombs which kind of illuminated the city in red and green and for a moment it was a very strange picture. I will never forget it: it looked like the windows of a cathedral. After this raid was over the city was just an ocean of fire, thousands and thousands of people killed, killed right beside us, around us, and screams and smells. The most gruesome picture was the nakedness of the people killed by the bombing: the tornado or the air pressure of the bombs had apparently torn their clothes to shreds.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

It could have been more effective if we'd had the number we'd always asked for doing the job, and if we hadn't had so many diversions. But the diversions up to a point were necessary – everything in the aid of the armies was first priority and very rightly so. I'm quite sure of one thing, with the lesson of Japan in mind, it could have been fairly simple to knock Germany out without an invading force. Whether that would have been the proper thing to do in those circumstances I don't know, because maybe the result would have been that the Russians would have finished up sunning themselves on the beaches of Spain and Portugal.

CHAPTER 18
THE HOLOCAUST

The mass murder of Jews – and of Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, itinerant gypsies, homosexuals and other 'undesirables' – began with the deprivation, disease and brutality of the ghettos of eastern Europe and slave labour camps like Dachau, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. In addition, more than a million Jews, together with non-Jewish Polish intellectuals and Soviet Communist officials, were massacred by mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen). What distinguished Nazi genocide from the Japanese and the Soviet equivalents was the industrialised slaughter known as 'The Final Solution', ordered by Hitler in December 1941 and organised at a conference of senior Nazi administrators held at the Wannsee Villa in Berlin on 20 January 1942. Following the Wannsee conference the remaining ghettos in eastern Europe were wiped out by mass executions and deportations while some nations allied to, or occupied by, the Germans also deported their Jewish citizens. Many thousands died of suffocation and thirst in trains taking them to the new extermination camps, all in Poland. The ultimate death factory was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where four gas chambers could take two thousand people each compared to the ten chambers holding two hundred each at the next worst camp, Treblinka. The interviews conducted by
The World at War
team included the bitter testimony of the Slovak Rudolf Vrba, one of only five men to escape from Auschwitz, and the self-criticism of the Italian Primo Levi, who finally could not bear to continue living with his survivor guilt. There is a kernel of foul truth in Josef Stalin's aphorism that one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic, and the jolting memoirs in the following pages seek to keep the matter personal. At a time when the fate of Germany hung in the balance, the Nazis devoted
enormous resources and ingenuity to killing millions of helpless people who posed no military, political or economic threat whatever, and they continued doing so until the last days of the war. You cannot read what follows and doubt the fundamental evilness of Hitler's regime.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler's Armaments Minister

Hitler often mentioned his
hating the Jews and he gave many examples already in the early time when I was with him. And I should have been warned that he is serious about it because he proved to be serious about other things he predicted too, for instance when he was trying to be the superior nation in Europe. I can't say that I neglected it, it's more or less cowardice, it was just to avoid something which is coming up to me, which would force me to make decisions. And I was running away from my responsibility, which was now as a human being.