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0230298214
| 9780230298217
| 0230298214
| 4.14
| 7
| Oct 28, 2011
| Oct 26, 2011
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it was amazing
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In his book, T. O. Smith mentions a curious fact that shaped Anglo-American relations throughout and after the Second World War: the United States had
In his book, T. O. Smith mentions a curious fact that shaped Anglo-American relations throughout and after the Second World War: the United States had never had a more persistent courtier than Winston Churchill. Churchill's interest in America developed slowly, but he sensed the enormity of American power and resources as early as 1895. Both in the First World War and, as a Prime Minister, in the Second World War, he was active in the British effort to bring America into belligerency against Germany and eventually into a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Although he formed a personal bond of sorts with Joseph Stalin during the Second World War and even collaborated with him briefly in a plan to divide post-war Europe, the old hostility remained just beneath the surface. Winston imagined the post-war world as dominated by Great Britain and America only. However, his plans were constantly rebuffed first by both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then by Harry Truman. Roosevelt enthusiastically traded off British interests to the Soviet dictator, repeatedly threatening Britain's status as an equal member of the Big Three, while Truman, inexperienced in foreign policy and burdened by the sudden heavy responsibility of being his brilliant predecessor's successor, initially preferred to follow Roosevelt's policy. Only when America began to shift towards the Cold War in 1946 was Churchill finally successful in winning the American government over. All of the aforementioned demonstrates that during the war period, the British Prime Minister's love for the United States was one-sided. While the two countries were allies with the common goal of vanquishing Nazi Germany, they diverged on virtually everything else. One such major bone of contention that manifested itself in the post-war world, but had existed since earlier, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's embracing of anti-colonialism. He was especially against allowing France to regain its Pearl of the East – the long-suffering colony of Indochina, whose people had suffered under cruel French colonial rule for about a century. Winston Churchill was in dismay, torn between his ever-lasting love for the overseas superpower and the need of his country to back French colonial aspirations. British policy-makers wanted to support the restoration of French colonialism for three reasons. First, they feared a successful American challenge to French control in Indochina might lead Washington to question British rule in other parts of Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma. Those colonies had played important roles in the British economy before the war and would help to reconstruct it now that it was shattered by war. “We’d better look out,” Alexander Cadogan, the Foreign Office’s permanent undersecretary, warned in early 1944 after Roosevelt had complained of the “hopeless” French record in Indochina. “Were the French more ‘hopeless’ than we in Malaya or the Dutch in the E[ast] Indies?” Like him, other British policy-makers believed solidarity with imperialist France was vital for Great Britain to avoid the horrible spectre of anti-colonialism. The second reason for Britain’s support of French imperialism was a belief that France stood a better chance than anyone else to maintain stability in Indochina. This was no small matter given the vital importance that British policy-makers attached to Indochina. Already in 1944, when America viewed that faraway country as distant from its geostrategic concerns, the British government considered it an important barrier between China and several British possessions. The loss of Indochina to a hostile power, British policy-makers believed, might affect the rest of Asia. (It sounds like an earlier version of the domino theory.) Japan's occupation of Indochina and its usage of it as a road towards the invasion of other Asian countries offered an ominous model of how such a scenario might play out. Naturally, Britain had some doubts about the capacity of France, badly weakened by the war, to defend the region, but its policy-makers were confident that if offered foreign assistance, France could once again take things under firm control. Furthermore, they saw no better alternative, and Chinese control, which they saw as the most likely outcome if France withdrew, made them shudder. Of course, it never crossed the minds of British policy-makers that the people of Indochina might be prepared to resist any sort of invasion if granted independence. While some British observers criticized the French for cruel repression, underdevelopment of the economy, and heavy-handed governing that did not allow Indochinese involvement, the majority of Britain's policy-makers stuck to the common stereotypes about Asian societies. They saw the Indochinese population as stunted by centuries of war, poverty, oppression, and the debilitating effects of a tropical climate. If granted self-rule, such people would, in the British view, unleash political and economic chaos, with potentially devastating consequences for the whole region. Furthermore, many policy-makers feared mass starvation across Southeast Asia if Indochina’s rice industry fell under indigenous supervision. The third reason that Britain supported French claims to Indochina was the agreement among British policymakers that they must do everything possible to restore France as a viable partner in European affairs. No matter what happened in the post-war years – German revival, Soviet expansionism, American withdrawal, or social and economic collapse – Britain needed a reliable France. In a 1944 speech, Churchill stated that his government, as well as the entire Commonwealth and empire, wished “to see erected once more, at the earliest moment, a strong, independent, and friendly France.” And while he was not ready to give up his cordial relations with Roosevelt for that goal, the British foreign service was. It knew losing Indochina would be a hard blow for France. It would deprive France of economic advantages in its difficult post-war recovery and destroy its morale. The loss would “cause bitter resentment in France,” asserted one Foreign Office paper, and might provoke it to look more favorably in the Soviet Union that on Britain and the United States. Motivated by all those concerns, the British government provided a good deal of military and diplomatic assistance for French efforts to recover Indochina. Although London was committed under its basic wartime agreement with Free France, the Anglo-French Protocol of Mutual Aid of February 1944, which called for cooperation not only in Europe but also overseas, to offer help anyways, British support in that case went beyond formal commitments. British policy-makers repeatedly took up the French cause in meetings with their American colleagues, hoping to persuade the Roosevelt administration to accept a significant French role in the Pacific War. Although the British Chiefs of Staff were reluctant to give French officers any part in war planning until the liberation of Indochina was certain, they advocated for involving French forces in the Far East as soon as possible. Nevertheless, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stayed rooted to his idea of a post-war UN trusteeship in and eventual independence for Indochina. Winston Churchill, for his part, towed the anti-trusteeship line when it came to British possessions, but was reluctant to back French colonial aspirations in fear of entering into a conflict with Roosevelt and severing the special Anglo-American bond that had been his dream for decades. Thus, he both short-sightedly regarded Roosevelt's trusteeship plan for Indochina as an anathema and persistently rebuffed all France-friendly Foreign Office suggestions. Despite his efforts, Churchill's overseas love, whom he had been courting tirelessly at every meeting, at every Big Three conference, was of no help either. Franklin Delano Roosevelt told his British friend how much he pitied him for having problems with his own Foreign Office, but did not go out of his way to reduce Churchill's suffering. On the contrary, Roosevelt only sought to accelerate his plan for colonial liberation and satisfy his desire to scold the French. "Churchill vainly believed that his Anglo-American pedigree would ensure that a balance could be maintained between American anti-imperialism and Foreign Office support for colonial spheres of influence. But in reality – in Indo-Chinese matters – the Prime Minister became a friendless and remote figure," writes T. O. Smith. Ironically, it was after Clement Attlee succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in the summer of 1945 that the problem of balancing good relations with America and aid for France in Indochina was finally solved. Having found his own footing in foreign policy and entered the Cold War, Truman recognized the vital importance of France for the success of the Marshall Plan in Europe and chose to back its colonial aspirations in Indochina. I loved CHURCHILL, AMERICA, AND VIETNAM. This short but informative study contributes greatly to the understanding of an often overlooked subject – Britain's post-war support for French colonialism in Indochina. Smith portrays Winston Churchill as a tragic figure watching his lifelong dream of Anglo-American cooperation slip away yet again, and his study, while well-researched enough to sound academic and persuasive, stands out with its compelling style. Recommendable for anyone interested in Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's foreign policy, Great Britain's relationship with France in the war and post-war years, or Vietnam history. ...more |
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1594206139
| 9781594206139
| 1594206139
| 4.06
| 5,314
| May 23, 2017
| Jan 01, 2017
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it was ok
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None
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0151003343
| 9780151003341
| 0151003343
| 3.83
| 103
| Jan 01, 1997
| Mar 31, 1998
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really liked it
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The title of this shocking book is pretty much self-explanatory. Jean Ziegler, a professor of Sociology at Geneva University, reveals startling eviden
The title of this shocking book is pretty much self-explanatory. Jean Ziegler, a professor of Sociology at Geneva University, reveals startling evidence of Switzerland helping to finance the Nazi war-effort. Switzerland escaped World War II by shrewd, active, organized complicity with the Third Reich. Az Ziegler asserts, from 1940 to 1945 the Swiss economy was largely integrated into the Great German economic area. It is estimated that in the years 1941-1942, sixty percent of the Swiss munition industry, half of its optical industry, and forty percent of its engineering industry worked for the Reich. The largest private arms manufacturing company in the country – and one of the largest in the world – was owned by Emil Buhrle, who was on friendly terms with Albert Speer, the Nazi minister of munitions and war production, and with Councilor Freiherr von Bibra, possibly the most important intermediary between the Nazi bosses and the Swiss industrialists. From the summer of 1940 to the spring of 1945, Buhrle's armaments firm worked almost exclusively for Hitler; those business transactions proved gratifyingly profitable – Buhrle's annual income rose from 6.8 to 56 million Swiss franks. The company's bestseller was the 2.0 millimeter Oerlikon antiaircraft gun that earned high praise from the Führer for the large numbers of Allied aircraft it shot down. When, in 1943, the Allied forces began their "saturation" bombing of German cities, Switzerland remained Hitler's single unscathed industrial area, one in which, without prejudice to the Nazi Government, precision equipment, optical instruments, and many other items of military importance continued to be manufactured. In addition, where the Reich was concerned, Switzerland fulfilled an important function in the gold market. Germany needed foreign currency to purchase strategic raw materials, even from allies like Romania. Most countries, Sweden and Portugal among them, refused to accept German gold, so the Reich's gold and foreign exchange transactions could be conducted with Switzerland alone. In 1943, gold reserves to the value of 529 million Swiss francs were exchanged for freely disposable foreign currency. Despite the fact that a considerable proportion of the German gold was looted, all this took place under the supervision of the National Bank and with the express consent of the Bundesrat. Although the Swiss bankers knew the gold was stolen, they eagerly agreed to pose as the Führer's "gnomes" (guardians of treasures), as the respectable, reliable, neutral banker Adolf Hitler needed. His invasion of Poland, Norway, and other peaceful, often prosperous, states yielded a sizable quantity of assets. These had to be laundered by an unsuspicious accomplice, and this accomplice, in turn, had to introduce the stolen goods into the world market under a new identity. Switzerland's financial "sharps" in Bern, Zurich, and Basel fenced and laundered the gold stolen from the central banks of Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Luxembourg, Norway, Italy, Albania, Lithuania, and elsewhere. The same went for thousands of gold teeth extracted from Nazi murdered victims by SS thugs, for the looted wedding rings and articles of jewelry, and for all the personal fortunes purloined all over Europe by the Nazis' so-called foreign exchange protection teams, whose job was to plunder private assets. When Hitler first launched his invasion of Poland, argues Ziegler, the Third Reich was practically bankrupt, a financially almost ruined dictatorship that "bluffed" the democratic world with a colossal show of military force. As Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht wrote in his remarkable memorandum to the Führer, economically speaking, Germany was down and out when Hitler had made his bid for world supremacy. Therefore, but for Switzerland's financial services and the willing "gnomes" of Bern, who supplied him the requisite foreign exchange, the Nazi dictator wouldn't have been able to wage his rapacious war of conquest. Switzerland, the world's only neutral financial center of international standing, readily accepted the Reich's looted gold throughout the war years in payment for industrial goods or as bullion that was fenced and laundered and exchanged for foreign currency or traded off to other financial centers under new, "Swiss" identity. It was Swiss bankers who financed Hitler's aggressive campaign. No less shocking is Swiss intransigence in the face of redress claims made by Holocaust survivors. In 1949, by an additional secret agreement to the official compensation treaty between Bern and Warsaw, the Swiss banks set out to liquidate "dormant" Polish, mainly Jewish, accounts and transfer these assets – which consisted of convertible foreign exchange the Polish communists needed – to Poland. The secret protocol prescribed that the Swiss francs, gold bars, and other assets held in Polish accounts be remitted to Warsaw's central bank and passed on to the descendants of the account-holders. Yet, while Switzerland indeed liquidated all "dormant" Jewish accounts and sent the funds to Warsaw, it conveniently omitted to enclose a list of the account-holders' names. This made it quite impossible to pay out the repatriated money to the descendants of the victims of Nazi mass murder. The Swiss banks also clung to a similar policy in other cases. They adamantly refused to pay out money deposited in their banks by Holocaust victims to those victims' descendants if those descendants could not present the depositor's death certificate. Since it wasn't Heinrich Himmler's custom to issue death certificates, all those Jewish people were permanently deprived of the money that's rightfully theirs. Why did Switzerland decide to become Hitler's accomplice? The customary excuse is that the Swiss had no alternative, that they had been hemmed in by the Nazi since 1940, and that the Führer's pressure was irresistible. However, as Ziegler shows, the records tell a different story. Most of the "gnomes" of Zurich were willing accomplices and eager henchmen. Unbridled, self-destroying greed was at work, as well as the (well-founded) hope of reaping exceptional profits in an exceptional situation. According to the author, the current worldwide and impressive financial strength of the big Swiss banks can be confidently attributed to their wartime profiteering. While Europe was subsiding in ashes, the Swiss National Bank's gold and foreign exchange were mounting in a highly satisfying manner. THE SWISS, THE GOLD, AND THE DEAD covers an appalling but, sadly, little-known subject in a concise, well-researched way. Drawing upon his thirty-year experience in domestic policy and international affairs, Jean Ziegler informatively and clearly demonstrates the terrible cost of Switzerland's well-being during the Second World War. ...more |
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0684813785
| 9780684813783
| 0684813785
| 4.40
| 23,125
| Sep 18, 1986
| Aug 01, 1995
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it was amazing
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Physicists had pondered the possibilities of atomic liberation since the turn of the 20th century. As early as 1904, during a lecture to the British C
Physicists had pondered the possibilities of atomic liberation since the turn of the 20th century. As early as 1904, during a lecture to the British Corps of Royal Engineers, the physicist Frederick Soddy noted the atom's potential: "The man who puts his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the world if he chose." Soddy is known to have later inspired H. G. Wells' novel in which the major cities of the world are destroyed by atom bombs the size of a cannonball. But it wasn't only scientists and sci-fi writers who envisioned a nuclear future. Since the First World War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had dreamt of a weapon that could be created in a laboratory, and that would somehow contain hitherto unfathomable destructive forces. He imagined something "the size of an orange" which would be inconceivably more powerful than any existing technology. Such a weapon would be used by a decisive air power that, simply by threatening innumerable lives, would paradoxically serve to save many others. This controversial political sentiment foreshadowed the weak beginnings of the relationship between scientists and the US Federal Government. During WWII years, physicists found they could exert little influence on the formation of atomic policy. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki surprised and horrified Hungarian refugee physicist Leo Szilard, who as one of the developers of this terrible weapon of war felt a full measure of guilt. In the petition to the President that he had circulated among the atomic scientists in July 1945, Szilard argued that large moral responsibilities devolved upon the United States in consequence of its possession of the bomb. Remarkably, Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime head of Los Lamos, the bomb design laboratory in New Mexico, refused to sign the petition, writing Szilard he felt "that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it to escape." In 1940, a British Government report hinted at a what would later be known as "nuclear deterrence" – an international restraint based on the threat of mutual annihilation. "It must be realised that no shelter are available that would be effective and could be used on a larger scale," noted the report in weighing responses to a Nazi bomb. "The most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar weapon." As Rhodes reveals, however, the United States, prodded at every step by its British allies, strove relentlessly for nuclear superiority even when Germany's defeat seemed inevitable. The ghost had indeed escaped from the bottle and there was no way to recapture him anymore. Now, it wasn't about restraining the Nazi – it was about the intoxication caused by ultimate power, about the possession of a formidable new weapon of destruction. To quote Isaac Asimov, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." If thousands, tens of thousands, of wolves wage a fight among themselves – with growls and bloodshed, and a myriad of stinking corpses – we would laugh at them for annihilating their own kind and ridicule their stupidity. Yet, we, the "rational animals", who are above such weapons as claws and fangs, devise arrows, spears, bullets, bombs to do the very same! The development of the atomic bomb provided the nations with just another, even more innovative, form of destruction of our own kind. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is as horrific a crime as the Nazi crimes against peace and humanity; it is a crime against morality and wisdom. The safety of a nation – as opposed to its ability to inflict appalling damage on the enemy power – cannot lie primarily in its scientific and technological capability. It can be based only on making future war impossible. But does the atomic bomb eliminate the possibilities of total wars in the future? Once, the Great War, with its two dozen varieties of poison gas and other terrible innovations, was "the war to end all wars" because a more horrible conflict could not be imagined. Yet, the Second World War, the "war to start them all again", broke out only twenty years later. In 1944, the book's most enduring figure, the Danish Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr, warned Roosevelt and Churchill that only an international cooperation on the bomb project could eventually grow into a negotiated peace that would tolerate nuclear weapons; the alternative was an arms race in which many nations would participate because there was no way to monopolize the atom's secrets. Yet, both statesmen had already agreed, in Quebec in August 1943, to keep the atomic secret to themselves, with the implicit goal of a Western atomic monopoly. What they haven't anticipated is their ally Stalin's spies pervading Los Lamos, and informing the Soviet dictator of the bomb's creation. Thus, FDR and Churchill's unwise policy led to even more distrustful attitude on the Soviet part and contributed to the subsequent Cold War. Just as Bohr had predicted, the nations' rush for atomic security would paradoxically make them even less secure, even closer to the brink of annihilation. "It did not take atomic weapons to make men want peace," justified his nightmarish creation Oppenheimer. "But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable." Yet, the moral drawn from the atomic "saga" and its legacy of arms development is that science can lead to evil and its temptations can hardly be resisted. Modern nations do not hinder their scientists because they put inordinate power in the hands of the government. But where will this steady march of technology onward bring us? How soon will the atomic bomb, just like the medieval torture devices, the sabres and the rifles, become an obsolete entity, a museum exhibit? And when it becomes, what is that power that will replace and overshadow it? Richard Rhodes gives one plenty food for thought. His richly detailed, thoroughly researched work provides unique insight into the dawn of nuclear age. It is more than a recount of the Los Lamos project and the razing of two Japanese cities; it is a study that intertwines early history of atomic physics with the complex political, military, and moral issues surrounding the development of the atomic bomb. ...more |
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4.29
| 17,365
| May 13, 2002
| Apr 29, 2003
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it was amazing
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Antony Beevor's work is a wonderful overview of the battle for Berlin. In the final year of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin wanted the Red Army to Antony Beevor's work is a wonderful overview of the battle for Berlin. In the final year of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin wanted the Red Army to occupy Berlin first, and there was a very strong reason for this wish. In May 1942, he had summoned Lavrenty Beria and the leading atomic physicists to his villa. He was furious to have heard through spies that the United States and Britain were working on a uranium bomb. Over the next three years, the Soviet nuclear research programme, soon codenamed Operation Borodino, was dramatically accelerated with detailed research information from the Manhattan Project provided by Communist sympathizers. Beria himself took over supervision of the work and eventually brought Professor Igor Kurchatov’s team of scientists under complete NKVD control. The Soviet programme’s main handicap, however, was a lack of uranium, reveals Beevor. No deposits had been identified yet in the Soviet Union. Therefore, Stalin and Beria’s greatest hope of getting the project moving ahead rapidly lay in seizing German supplies of uranium before the Western Allies got to them. According to Beevor, there have never been any doubt in the minds of the Nazi leadership that the fight for Berlin would be the climax of the war. "The National Socialists," Goebbels had always insisted, "will either win together in Berlin or die together in Berlin." He also used to paraphrase Karl Marx, declaring that "whoever possesses Berlin possesses Germany." "Stalin, on the other hand, undoubtedly knew the rest of Marx’s quote: ‘And whoever controls Germany, controls Europe,'" adds Beevor. The American war leaders, however, were clearly unfamiliar with such European sayings. They – at that stage – simply did not view Europe in strategic terms. They had a limited objective: to win the war against Germany quickly, with as few casualties as possible, and then concentrate on Japan. General Dwight Eisenhower – like President Truman, the chiefs of staff, and other senior officials – failed to look ahead and completely misread Stalin’s character, argues Beevor. This exasperated British colleagues and led to the main rift in the western alliance. Some British officers even referred to Eisenhower’s deference to Stalin as "Have a Go, Joe", a call used by London prostitutes when soliciting American soldiers. On 2 March, Eisenhower signalled to Major General John R. Deane, the US liaison officer in Moscow, "In view of the great progress of the Soviet offensive, is there likely to be any major change in Soviet plans from those explained to Tedder [on 15 January]?" He then asked whether there would be a lull in operations mid-March to mid-May. But Deane found it impossible to obtain any reliable information from General Antonov, the Soviet chief of staff. (And when finally the Soviets did state their intentions, they deliberately misled Eisenhower to conceal their determination to seize Berlin first.) As Beevor reveals, in the difference of views over strategy, American personalities unavoidably clashed. While General Montgomery, for instance, favored a single, "full-blooded" thrust towards Berlin, Eisenhower suspected that his demands were prompted solely by "prima donna ambitions." He weighted an attack southwards partly because he was convinced that Hitler would withdraw his armies to Bavaria and northwestern Austria for a last-ditch defence of the Alpine Fortress. He conceded later in his memoirs that Berlin was "politically and psychologically important as the symbol of remaining German power", but he believed that "it was not the logical nor the most desirable objective for the forces of the Western Allies". As Beevor explains, Eisenhower justified this decision on the grounds that the Red Army on the Oder was much closer and the logistic effort would have meant holding up his central and southern armies, and his objective of meeting up with the Red Army to "split Germany in two". Six days earlier, Winston Churchill had hoped that "our armies will advance against little or no opposition and will reach the Elbe, or even Berlin, before the Bear". Now he was thoroughly dismayed. It seemed to him as if Eisenhower was far too concerned with placating Stalin because the Soviet authorities were angry about an accidental shooting of several Soviet aircrafts by American fighters. Ironically, despite their efforts, it was the Americans who provoked the biggest row with the Soviet Union at this time: when Allen Dulles of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) had been approached by SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff about an armistice in north Italy, the Soviet leadership’s demands to participate in the talks were rejected in case Wolff might break them off. This, asserts Beevor, was a blunder. The Soviet Union was understandably alarmed, and Stalin began to fear a separate peace on the Western Front even more. "His recurrent nightmare," writes the author, "was a revived Wehrmacht supplied by the Americans." The Soviet dictator also suspected that the huge numbers of Wehrmacht troops surrendering to the Americans and British in the west of Germany revealed not just their fear of becoming prisoners of the Red Army but also a deliberate attempt to open up the Western Front to allow the Americans and British to reach Berlin first. In fact, the reason for such large surrenders at that time was Hitler’s refusal to allow any withdrawal. If he had brought his armies back to defend the Rhine after the Ardennes débâcle, explains Beevor, the Allies would have faced a very hard task. But he did not, and this allowed them to trap so many divisions west of the Rhine. "We owed much to Hitler," Eisenhower commented later. Meanwhile, Churchill felt strongly that until Stalin’s post-war intentions in central Europe became clearer, the West had to grab "every good card available for bargaining with him". Recent reports of what was happening in Poland, with mass arrests of prominent figures who might not support Soviet rule, strongly suggested that Stalin had no intention of allowing an independent government to develop; Molotov had also become extremely aggressive. The British Prime Minister's earlier confidence based on Stalin’s lack of interference in Greece had now started to disintegrate. He suspected that both he and Roosevelt had been the victims of "a massive confidence trick". As Beevor explains, Churchill still did not seem to realize that Stalin judged others by himself. It would appear that he had acted on the principle that Churchill, after all his comments at Yalta about having to face the House of Commons over the subject of Poland, had simply needed "a bit of democratic gloss to keep any critics quiet until everything was irreversibly settled." Stalin now appeared to be angered by the Prime Minister's renewed complaints over the Soviet Union’s behaviour in Poland. In any case, Eisenhower's view that Berlin itself was "no longer a particularly important objective" demonstrated, according to Beevor, "an astonishing naivety." Yet, the irony was that Ike's decision to avoid Berlin was almost certainly the right one, albeit for the wrong reasons. For Stalin, the Red Army’s capture of The Third Reich's capital was far too important a matter. "If any forces from the Western Allies had crossed the Elbe and headed for Berlin, they would almost certainly have found themselves warned off by the Soviet air force, and artillery if in range," comments Beevor. Stalin would have had no compunction in condemning the Western Allies and accusing them of criminal "adventurism". While Eisenhower gravely underestimated the importance of Berlin, Churchill, on the other hand, underestimated both Stalin’s determination to secure the city at any price and the genuine moral outrage which would have greeted any western attempt "to seize the Red Army’s prize from under its nose". At the end of March, the Stavka in Moscow put the finishing touches to the plan for "the Berlin operation". Marshal Zhukov, who was to be responsible for seizing Berlin, shared Stalin’s fears that the Germans would open their front to the British and Americans. His fear only intensified when Stalin showed him a letter from a "foreign well-wisher" tipping off the Soviet leadership about secret negotiations between the Western Allies and the Nazis. While it did explain that the Americans and British had refused the German proposal of a separate peace, the possibility of the Germans opening the route to Berlin still "could not be ruled out". "Well, what have you got to say?’ said Stalin. Not waiting for a reply, he said, " I think Roosevelt won’t violate the Yalta agreement, but as for Churchill… that one’s capable of anything." Equipped with such notions, Stalin, General Antonov, and Foreign Affairs Commissar Molotov met with the US ambassador, Averell Harriman, and his British counterpart, Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, on March 31 in Kremlin. Stalin talked about virtually every front except the crucial Oder (along which the Soviet onslaught on Berlin would be launched). He enthusiastically approved of Eisenhower's plan of an attack southwards, commenting that it was a good one "in that it accomplished the most important objective of dividing Germany in half". However, the very next morning the Soviet dictator received Marshals Zhukov and Konev in his study in Kremlin and showed them a telegram, presumably sent by one of the Red Army liaison officers at SHAEF headquarters. The message claimed that – in fact – General Montgomery would head for Berlin and that General Patton’s Third Army would also divert from its advance towards Leipzig and Dresden to attack Berlin from the south. The Stavka had already heard of the plan to drop parachute divisions on Berlin in the event of a sudden collapse of the Nazi regime. All of this, reasoned Stalin, evidently combined into an Allied plot to seize Berlin first under the pretense of assisting the Red Army. ("One cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that Stalin had the telegram faked to put pressure on both Zhukov and Konev," remarks Beevor.) "Well, then," Stalin asked the two marshals after the telegram was read. "Who is going to take Berlin: are we or are the Allies?" "It is we who shall take Berlin,’ Konev replied immediately, "and we will take it before the Allies." When Stalin asked how Konev intended to accomplish this, the marshal replied that Comrade Stalin "needn't worry". His desire to beat Zhukov to Berlin was unmistakable and Stalin, who liked to engender rivalry among his subordinates, was clearly satisfied. As Beevor further narrates, soon afterwards General Antonov presented the overall plan; then Konev and Zhukov presented theirs, and the Stavka started working in great haste, fearing that the Allies would be quicker than Soviet troops in taking Berlin. They had much to coordinate: the operation to capture the city involved 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns and mortars, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns and 7,500 aircraft. No doubt, asserts Beevor, Stalin took satisfaction in the fact he was concentrating a far more powerful mechanized force to seize the capital of the Reich than Hitler had deployed to invade the whole of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Soviet dictator also continued leading his Western Allies by their noses – after the main conference on April 1, he replied to the American supreme commander that his plan "completely coincided" with the plans of the Red Army, and assured his trusting ally that "Berlin has lost its former strategic importance" and that the Soviet command would send only second-rate forces against it. The Red Army, continued he, would be delivering its main blow to the south, to join up with the Western Allies; the advance of the main forces would start approximately in the second half of May, but this plan "may undergo certain alterations, depending on circumstances." Little did the Allies know what a Berlin operation "the genius commander-in-chief, Comrade Stalin," (as the political department of the 1st Ukrainian Front had called him) had prepared for them... "It was," observes Beevor with a tinge of humor, "the greatest April Fool in modern history." Every time I pick up a book by Antony Beevor I can't help but be completely astonished by his masterful recreation of dialogues, sketching of portraits of eminent historical figures, and wonderfully detailed descriptions. It is impossible to efficiently summarize "BERLIN: The Downfall" in a single review. While my favorite parts of the book are the ones dealing with the political schemes "at the top" and the battle's logistics, (which is probably obvious from my review), the work doesn't overlook neither the Nazi commanders' point of view, which by this stage of the war could be perfectly summarized by Guderian's reply to Hitler's assurances that the Eastern Front "had never possessed such a strong reserve" ("The Eastern Front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse."), nor the battle for Berlin itself or the suffering of ordinary Berliners, gaunt from short rations and stress and pestered by Allied air raids and Goebbels' propaganda. Beevor spares no horrific details, such as, for example, the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers in the Reich's capital. A chapter is even devoted to Hitler's last refuge, the bunker, to Eva Braun, and to Goebbels and his family's suicide; although I've read about this episode more than once, I have to say that none of the authors' I'm familiar with has depicted those scenes as cinematically as Beevor. A graphically, compellingly written and brilliantly researched book on the Wehrmacht's downfall, the battle for Berlin. ...more |
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0465075258
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| May 05, 2015
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it was amazing
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Michael Neiberg's book is a fascinating history of the Potsdam Conference, which goes far beyond simply recounting what the statesmen at Potsdam said
Michael Neiberg's book is a fascinating history of the Potsdam Conference, which goes far beyond simply recounting what the statesmen at Potsdam said to one another during the conference meetings. Rather, it uses the meeting to explore larger themes. For instance, argues the author, Potsdam was not the start of a new era of history, but the end of another. In the minds of the men who met in Potsdam in July 1945 "to put the pieces of the world back together," the war that ended in 1945 had begun in 1914, not in 1939. British Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden spoke not of two separate world wars, but one Thirty Years’ War. "The delegates at Potsdam lived with ghosts that haunted the Cecilienhof Palace in the picturesque neighborhood where the meeting took place," writes Neiberg. The palace, built during World War I as a retreat for the German crown prince and his wife, served as a living reminder of the failures of statesmen at the end of that war: the Germans, so convinced of their imminent victory, built the palace while simultaneously devoting enormous resources to fighting a world war. Yet, the "ghosts" of the Cecilienhof Palace "paled in their power to haunt compared with the ghosts of the Palace of Versailles," continues Neiberg. Everyone at Potsdam saw the Versailles Treaty as a horrible warning from history of the failures of making peace. They all believed that the mistakes of 1919 had directly led to the outbreak of war twenty years later. While the American president, Harry Truman, greatly admired one of the architects of that treaty, Woodrow Wilson – he had even taken his oath of office under a portrait of Wilson – he, nevertheless, saw the treaty as Wilson’s greatest failure. He opened the Potsdam Conference by reminding his fellow statesmen of the “many flaws” that the treaty had produced and warned the delegates to learn from that experience or risk repeating it. No one at Potsdam disagreed with Truman on that score. The task in front of the three allied leaders and their staffs was nothing less than giving Europe peace and stability, something it had not known since the catastrophic 1914. According to Neiberg, all three men, as well as their advisers, had had their worldviews formed during WWI. For Stalin, the Russian Revolution and the bloody Russian Civil War further proved that the transition from war to peace could present as many challenges as warfare itself. If the Big Three of Potsdam failed as their predecessors in Versailles had, then Europe would know not a future of peace but another age of strife, death, and more war. The three men had different postwar visions, based on the strategic interests and historical experiences of their nations in the first half of the twentieth century, which had seen revolutionary changes. World War I had eliminated the most powerful monarchies of Europe and "left in their wake a struggle between democracy, fascism, and communism to control the political and economic future of the continent." World War II destroyed fascism, as well as such traditional powers as Germany, Italy, and France. Even Britain, nominally one of the war’s great victors, sat on the edge of bankruptcy and at dire risk of losing the empire that had sustained its great-power status. In place of the traditional powers of Europe now came the United States and the Soviet Union. The former had largely turned away from Europe in 1919 and might still do so again in 1945. The latter, a revolutionary regime "fresh from a bloody but triumphal victory", presented a terrible nightmare to some and an alluring future to others. In either case, the future of Europe no longer belonged exclusively, or even primarily, to Western Europeans themselves, concludes Neiberg. The Western statesmen at Potsdam did all they could to dissociate their conference from the "unmitigated disaster" they all saw when they looked back at 1919, explains Neiberg. That they had gathered to negotiate an end to a catastrophic world war was proof enough of the futility of the Treaty of Versailles. Everyone, it seemed, brought his own criticism of the treaty, and the process that produced it, to Potsdam. To some, the problem was the process itself: the treaty had emerged from "a series of awkward compromises, trade-offs, and misunderstandings". Thus, explains Neiberg, many of the statesmen in 1945 came to the conference wanting it not to produce a definitive treaty with specific policies for which they or their successors might later have to answer, but rather to be a symbol to the world that the Big Three stood together and would work in unison to produce a more just and peaceful future. Yet an old "ghost" haunted Potsdam – the ghost of the appeasement of the 1938 Munich conference. Many American and British diplomats had already begun to see in Soviet behavior, especially the USSR’s "highly selective" implementation of the agreements made at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, echoes of Germany’s aggressive behavior in the 1930s. The Munich example carried with it a powerful reminder of the costs of appeasement, and implied that the Americans and British should use a firmer hand in their initial postwar dealings with the Russians. Whether or not the "ghosts" remained relevant to the problems the world faced in 1945, no one at Potsdam could avoid them, argues the author. They reminded the delegates of the cataclysmic failures of the men who had gone before them. "Virtually every decision the statesmen of 1945 made they made through the prism of events like the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the appeasement symbolized by the Munich Agreement of 1938," asserts Neiberg. And these events did not come from a distant past. Unlike the men of 1919, everyone seated around the conference tables at Potsdam had personally watched the murderous events of 1914–1939 unfold. Some had even played key roles in them. Winston Churchill, for example, had staunchly opposed his own government’s appeasement policy in the late 1930s, as had others in the British delegation at Potsdam. To them, especially, the "ghosts" of Munich and an expansive Bolshevik Russia haunted the halls of Potsdam. As Michael Neiberg further reveals, the Potsdam conference was also a "fascinating laboratory" of sorts. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in April 1945, he left "an enormous void in American policy," argues Neiberg. Roosevelt had conducted most of the key elements of American wartime diplomacy himself, often shutting out his new vice president, Harry Truman, who badly needed as much help as FDR could have given him. While Roosevelt had a vast reservoir of knowledge and, much more importantly, the deep respect of statesmen across the globe, the newbie Truman, "worried even those observers who came to like and respect him." Admiral William Leahy, who accompanied him to Potsdam and assumed much of the responsibility for helping him there, thought Truman so unprepared for his new role that he could not “see how the complicated critical business of the war and the peace can be carried forward by a new President who is so completely inexperienced in international affairs.” The British government went through a similar process: British elections, with results tabulated in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, stunningly voted Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party out of office in favor of the opposition Labour Party. Like FDR, Churchill had a deep understanding of many of the key issues and enjoyed a reputation as one of the most powerful and influential men in the world, explains Neiberg. His departure mid-conference left the far less imposing Clement Attlee, who had served as Churchill’s deputy prime minister in a coalition government but had rarely been involved in key strategic decisions, to wade through. Churchill liked to deride Attlee with characteristically witty insults, such as calling him a “sheep in sheep’s clothing.” Attlee, like Truman, came to Potsdam with far less of a profile on foreign affairs than his illustrious predecessor, having made his name as an advocate of the poor and working classes. "Attlee’s slogan, 'With cake for none until all have bread,' could not have sounded less Churchillian," comments the author. Yet, writes Neiberg further, for all these fundamental changes in personality, the policies of the Americans and the British changed remarkably little. Neither Truman nor Attlee made radical changes to their country’s main positions. According to Neiberg, this continuity in policy only underscores the role that history plays in the shaping of policy – Truman, Attlee, and the other members of the delegations at Potsdam all shared the same "nightmares" of their generation: World War I, the failed Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the outbreak of World War II. While the Soviet Union did not go through a similar transition at the top, Stalin’s paranoia and his concern about not only his own hold on power, but his own mortality as well, made the Russians "the hardest element to read at Potsdam because of the opaqueness of the Russian system even today and the high level of paranoia within the system itself," explains the author. Neiberg makes no attempt to assess winners and losers at Potsdam; nor does he assign credit or blame for any events that later resulted from it. Rather, he seeks to explain the conference by placing it in the context not just of 1945, but of the entire period of war and conflict from 1914 to 1945. Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe is an outstanding work, so comprehensive, masterfully written, and insightful that I cannot summarize it properly in a review. From fascinating peeks into the personalities of each of the Big Three (“There was no waste of word, gesture, nor mannerism. It was like talking to a perfectly coordinated machine," Harry Hopkins noted of Stalin, who had spent countless hours strategizing for the upcoming meeting at Potsdam despite the fatigue that had set in after four years of war, and had ordered the preparation of psychological profiles of Churchill and Truman in order to, just like in Yalta, be the best prepared.) to diplomatic blunders that worsened the relations with the USSR (such as Truman's disastrous pre-Potsdam meeting with Molotov that convinced the latter the era of cooperation with the West had ended) to sketches of each of the three great powers' post-war policies, Michael Neiberg's work is highly impressive in style and research and unique in approach to the subject, as well as interspersed with many valuable photographs. Words cannot describe how absorbed I was in this book – it is one of the easiest five stars I've given this year. Most definitely recommendable. ...more |
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| Feb 04, 2020
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really liked it
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Sinclair McKay's book is a riveting account of the Allied bomb raid on the German city. By the fateful February 13 1945, the citizens of Dresden had al Sinclair McKay's book is a riveting account of the Allied bomb raid on the German city. By the fateful February 13 1945, the citizens of Dresden had already endured their fair share of American attacks, one in the autumn of 1944 and the other on January 16 1945. Those raids have taken a heavy toll of human life – several hundred people on each occasion – and to add to the tension, the city's warning sirens had been howling every night, disturbing the people's sleep and reminding them of the war from which they had been removed for some years. This is why Dresdeners had found it hard to imagine any greater destruction than that which was already been wrought, explains McKay. Yet, now, the news that the Red Army was a little over sixty miles away was spreading rapidly through the city, and the nightmarish rumor that on their way the Soviets had happened on a Nazi concentration camp and discovered thousands of "living skeletons", prisoners who had been left behind to die, was disseminating anxiety among the German civilians. "Yet, the real shadow over the city was not being cast by the Soviets," writes McKay. Instead, the unsuspected threat lay in the secret plans and intentions of the Allies in the west. As McKay further reveals, by this stage of WWII, "the arguments, blazing and bitter, had long ago moved beyond ethics; possibly even beyond strict rationality," and the idea that civilians could be legitimately targeted was not new. As early as 1942, Joseph Stalin had told Winston Churchill that British bombers should be targeting German houses as well as German industry. But Churchill had not needed any such admonitions from Stalin: among senior British commanders and politicians, total war had already become an accepted fact. Before Stalin had made his views known, men such as the prime minister’s singular scientific adviser Lord Cherwell were insisting that bombing raids against Germany should aim to "de-house" the populations of the great cities; by doing so, they would begin to paralyse the industry and infrastructure of the entire country. The most enthusiastic proponent of this idea was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command. A man "whose only streak of sentimentality seemed to extend to beautiful rural landscapes and the farmers who tended them," Harris never had a flicker of doubt about the need to destroy German cities. He was blankly indifferent to the ultimate fates of the civilians who lived in them, so he could morally justify all of this with ease. In a talk he gave in 1942 he insisted that he was not interested in retribution for the havoc wreaked upon Britain by German bombers. This was, as he saw it, simply about "bringing a swift end to the war", and he clung to this belief with religious fervour. Just like Harris, comments McKay, other senior figures in RAF Bomber Command viewed cities such as Dresden simply as "coloured zones upon detailed maps, populaces presided over by fanatical authoritarians." There were few who bothered to make the exact distinction between civilians and soldiers, between German culture and Nazi cultism. Since the First World War, Winston Churchill had dreamt of a weapon that could be created in a laboratory, and that would somehow contain hitherto unimagined destructive forces. He envisaged something "the size of an orange" which would be inconceivably more powerful than any existing technology. Such a weapon would be used by a decisive air power that, simply by threatening innumerable lives, would paradoxically serve to save many others. As McKay explains, it "could in one sense be cleaner." Yet, reveals he, this is not how Britain began its air war with the Germans. The RAF did not enter the war with a well-developed plan to conduct a strategic bombing offensive, designed to kill as many German civilians as possible. Even if it had wanted to, the means were not there: flight distances were limited, navigational technology was still rudimentary, the aircraft were not able to penetrate deep into Germany. In addition, the British had genuine scruples due to the the international rulings and guidelines that had been debated throughout the previous decade, as well as US President FDR's plea that civilian areas outside combat theaters should never be bombed. The dissolution of the mutual code of aerial warfare was gradual, narrates McKay. For example, after the fall of France to the Germans in June 1940, when British forces were forced to retreat, the only way of taking the fight to the enemy was in the air. There was a British raid in August 1940 against Berlin, the targets including an airport near the centre. Ninety-five bombers flew in the raid, and though they caused some casualties and disruption, both were comparatively light. Nevertheless, the audacity inspired rage in Hitler. On the night of September 7 1940 the Nazi began bombing London: "bombs that sounded like the footsteps of giant ogres, sheets of flame hundreds of feet high bringing choking clouds of toxic smoke laced with burning sugar and cinnamon, the result of warehouse blazes." By 1941, Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal acknowledged that the approach of the RAF towards German targets was to change – the idea of precision bombing turned into area bombing. The targets were now large city centres, although generally, the industry lay on the peripheries of these urban areas. The intention now was to create wider social havoc, explains McKay. The US president was informed of the intensified strategy; there were no objections from America, and none from the Soviet Union either. Air Chief Marshal Harris never had any doubts about the area bombing strategy, even as the Royal Air Force was being pushed by others in the Air Ministry to aim for more specific targets: synthetic-oil plants and refineries, and ball-bearing factories. According to him, their idea was too optimistic: reaching and pinpointing such targets was one thing, but damaging them so severely that they would be permanently out of commission was another. So many other factors – "cloud cover, flak, defensive fighters" – meant that such highly specific missions would carry the double risk of a low success rate and high mortality among British airmen, reasoned he. In 1944, with D-Day and the invasion of Europe underway, there were many other senior Allied figures who shared Harris' opinion. "The administrative machinery that held the Nazi empire together continued to function, but now – with the Allies and the Soviets pushing from opposite directions through towns, across heaths and through forests – here was a chance to launch a different sort of mission," relays McKay. The target would be the city of Berlin and all of its people. The code name for this proposed mission was Operation Thunderclap. ("The term ‘thunderclap’ implies a moment of pure shock or fright, as opposed to damage. . . . But there is also the distant resonance of divine intervention: the angered gods sending forth punishing storms," explains the author.) Winston Churchill, meanwhile, was impatient to hear more of the possibilities. He wondered if a vast raid on Berlin was possible. And – asked he – "what of these other cities in the east of the country?" This is when Dresden, as well as Chemnitz and Leipzig, were added to the hit list. In Paris, at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), the HQ of the US and British in Europe, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder (Eisenhower’s deputy) drew up a memo concerning joint American and British air attacks on east-German cities. Although more about concentrating on bombing transport links, power plants and telephone exchanges, in reality this meant essentially the same as Sir Arthur Harris’s approach: the annihilation of the entire target city. Soon Harris received these orders, with the list of potential objectives, and in airbases around the country, British, American, and Australian pilots began preparing to again "fly deep into the darkness of Germany." When bomber pilot William Topper and his colleagues were briefed for Dresden, which they knew to be "a lovely city . . . full of refugees and art treasures," they were told it had been the Russians who asked for it because Germans, allegedly, were sending vast quantities of supplies through the city to the eastern front. Sinclair McKay pays little attention to the logistics of the raid itself, but he masterfully invokes the depths of human suffering and paints an amazing sketch of the picturesque Dresden, with its "fairy-tale architecture" and "exquisite galleries", a city that did not deserve to see any of the horrible things that occurred when 796 bomber planes flew over it and, in the words of one young witness, "opened the gates of hell." Dresden was suffused with music, an art perhaps "too sacred for the [Nazi] regime to defile," describes McKay, and the city was famous internationally for opera. There was also a widespread fondness for trees: a rich variety were grown all over the city. Rudi Warnatsch, a boy living with his mother in a residential block, recalled vividly that "the larger part of the courtyard was taken up with a cultivated garden. A magnificent chestnut tree and a linden tree were to be found there." First and foremost, Dresden was a city of science – just half a mile south of the central railway station there were laboratories where men were conducting a wide variety of experiments with cathode rays and thermionic valves. Here, in 1895, the first mouthwash was produced, the result of a heretofore unsuccessful former department store assistant called Karl August Lingner going into partnership with his old friend Richard Seifert, a chemist. People at that time were swilling their mouths with "anything from vinegar to brandy," but scientists had been examining the processes of tooth decay, and Lingner and Seifert’s new idea of making the liquid antiseptic was sensational, narrates McKay. The product was called Odol; it became a household item not only in Germany but across the continent and in Britain too. Dresden's attackers were young men, who despite being granted extraordinary power, didn't feel like avengers at all – they were undertaking a mission where both the advantageous weather conditions and the lack of any meaningful defence meant that their target was wholly vulnerable beneath them. For them, this was just another fear-filled night, and the city was just another target. For the Dresdeners hiding in the cellars, on the other hand, the fear and "the nausea of claustrophobia" were increasingly difficult to suppress. Gisela Reichelt, sitting in an ill-lit basement to the south of the railway station, had not just her own fear to cope with; her mother seemed absolutely paralysed, and the ten-year-old girl had no idea what to do. In other cellars, mothers sat on bare chairs, "staring into the eyes of strangers." There were other women, heads back, eyes closed. One witness recalled desperately trying to wake her mother, who was proving very hard to rouse. A cry of "The fire is burning here!" at last seemed to startle her, and they moved to another place. "Already there were uncountable numbers in that maze of cellars whose sleep had become death, either through suffocation or heart failure," graphically depicts McCay the unfathomable extent of civilian suffering. What the citizens did not know yet was that this was only the beginning. The civic authorities were unintentionally cruel when they told the people emerging from the cellars that the worst was over. In fact, there was no immediate prospect for peace – at roughly the same time the initial wave of 244 bombers were beginning their flight back to England, the next wave, very much larger, of 552 bombers were already reaching up into the dark over England crossing the Channel to the continent. Sinclair McKay doesn't overlook the moral side of the attack, showing that lies were often the way to lull heavy conscience. While for Harris it was almost too obvious that "the destruction of Dresden has fatally weakened the German war effort and is now enabling Allied soldiers to advance into the heart of Germany," and the attack was strategically justified, some eminent American figures, such as Telford Taylor, one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg, were preyed on by the issue of morality for the rest of their lives. "What Sir Arthur Harris’s purpose was, I do not know, but the British told the doubters that there was a German armoured division in or near Dresden blocking the Soviet advance from the east, and that the Russians wanted an aerial attack to clear their way," wrote he. "However, the British decoders had produced information that the German armoured division was not at Dresden but in Bohemia many miles to the south." Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness is a brilliant history of the bomb raid that razed a whole city and took tens of thousand of human lives. McKay's style is highly evocative, rich, and compelling; his research is meticulous, and his eye for curious details impressive. Interesting and important, albeit hard-to-read (because of its subject), book. ...more |
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| 9781453268575
| B07B6BDGD7
| 4.05
| 77
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| Aug 06, 2013
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it was amazing
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Nikolai Tolstoy's book covers the forceful repatriation of over two million Russians to the Soviet Union in the years 1944-47. In 1944, the Soviet off Nikolai Tolstoy's book covers the forceful repatriation of over two million Russians to the Soviet Union in the years 1944-47. In 1944, the Soviet official attitude still appeared to be that there were no Russians "worth speaking of" serving with the German Army or captured therefrom. Yet, reveals Tolstoy, the facts pointed the other way: of all the nations in Europe, the USSR was the only one to witness nearly a million of its subjects enlisting in the enemy army. ("A protracted campaign to raise a similar force from among British prisoners resulted in the recruitment of thirty drunken misfits.") Despite Soviet denials that there weren't any Russians in the Wehrmacht, the British Foreign Office soon felt obliged to raise the matter with the Soviet Government: something had to be done soon, in view of the arge number of Russian POWs in the country. On 17 July 1944 the War Cabinet met to consider the matter. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, spoke in favour of handing the POWs back to the Soviets, while Prime Minister Winston Churchill suggested that the Soviet authorities be notified of the presence of the Russians. Their "ambivalent position" as former allies of the Germans should be shown in the most extenuating light, argued he, and if possible their return should be delayed. According to Tolstoy, the feeling of the Cabinet was clearly uneasy as to the reception the prisoners might experience on their return. Eden proposed a proviso: "In order not to discourage surrender on the part of others impressed by the Germans to fight against us, we should ask that no steps should be taken to deal with these Russians until the end of hostilities." As the inevitability of the Nazi downfall increased, however, the view of the British Foreign Office on the repatriation question passed through what Tolstoy calls "a succession of logical stages". Firstly, the British refused to send back any prisoners whom it was feared the Soviets might punish before the cessation of hostilities. The next step was to send all back, at the same time requiring an undertaking by the Soviet authorities that no public punishment of repatriates should occur until the collapse of Germany. Yet, such an undertaking was not forthcoming, and finally the weak hope of obtaining it was completely abandoned and the policy of repatriating all, regardless of their wishes, came fully into being. As Tolstoy explains, this gradual progression in policy took place over the summer months of 1944, and it was events themselves that in large part shaped policy decision-making: firstly, the Soviets, for reasons of their own, remained "commendably discreet" over the fate of their returned citizens; secondly, the Germans also showed no desire to "take up the cudgels" on this question because, indeed, every month that the war progressed saw the power of the Third Reich dwindle. Thus, by June 1944 the Foreign Office was determined that all the Russians should be returned eventually, whatever the fate in store for them. Antony Eden's argument in favor of forcible repatriation was that (allegedly) "a large proportion of the prisoners, whatever their reasons, are willing and even anxious to return to Russia". He was relying on a report of 1 July, containing information based on interrogations of Russian prisoners held at Devizes. After noting that virtually all had been forced to join German units, and had thenceforward been treated abominably, the report went on to claim that most of the Russians, though fearing punishment on their return, wished to go back to the USSR. But what about those who didn't agree to be send back? (And they, by the way, were in the majority.) What about those who were sure that they "are due for liquidation on their return"? It is important to note that the British Foreign Office was fully aware of the Soviet Government’s callous abandonment of all its citizens who fell into German hands. In February 1942, the International Committee of the Red Cross telegraphed Molotov that the United Kingdom had given permission for the USSR to buy food for the prisoners in her African colonies, the Canadian Red Cross was offering a gift of five hundred vials of vitamins, and Germany had agreed to collective consignments of foodstuffs for POWs. "All these offers and communications from the ICRC to the Soviet authorities remained unanswered, either directly or indirectly," states the report of the Red Cross. This was an obvious sign that that were strong motives of policy behind the Soviet attitude since Stalin was not opposed to Red Cross aid in general – he readily provided British and Dutch soldiers fighting the Japanese with such; it was only Russian prisoners that he wished to deny any aid and comfort. What then did he plan to do with those men once were sent back to him? Eden, however, was a practical man and didn't ask himself such questions. He simply wasn't at all enthusiastic about diverting already overstretched Allied resources to assist Russian prisoners, men whom in any case he regarded as traitors. In addition, to refuse the Soviet Government’s request for the return of their own men would lead to serious trouble with them, reasoned he. They would know that "we were treating them differently from the other Allied Governments on this question and this would arouse their gravest suspicions." Finally, he and the rest of the Foreign Office feared that any act which might seriously endanger the alliance between Britain and the Soviets would prove risky at such a critical juncture of the war. "The Foreign Office was convinced of the dangers of not falling in wholly with Soviet wishes, and then, as all too often occurs, tried to persuade itself and everyone else that such a policy was not only politically expedient, but also morally justified," writes Tolstoy. The delicate part, reveals he, was to convince large sections of the British public not to revolt against the application of brutal measures to compel the return of unwilling Russians, particularly women and children. When, after finding out about their imminent repatriation, a number of terrified Russians held in camps in Britain committed suicide, Patrick Dean of the Office noted that, if the news got out, it might "possibly cause political trouble," urging "that the Foreign Office should speak to the News Department with a view to doing all that is possible to avoid publicity," "which might be embarrassing." Another official, John Galsworthy, admitted: "I think that any publicity given to the Soviet demand ... is a good thing. An enlightened public opinion can only strengthen our position in refusing to transfer these luckless folk to the Russians." But, asserts Tolstoy, such alleged candour was for a purpose. In fact, the actual operations, with their irregular procedure, cheating people into accepting repatriation to the USSR etc., were carefully concealed from the British public. Instead, to lull the people's suspicions, the Office claimed that retainment of Russians unwilling to return would have "imperiled the return of British prisoners liberated by the Red Army." Would Stalin have actually considered holding such liberated British and American prisoners hostage for the return of the millions of Soviet citizens held in Western Europe? This questions is explained in detail in Victims of Yalta. As Tolstoy argues, there exists no evidence that Antony Eden or anyone else in the Foreign Office at the time feared such a possibility. Although Stalin might not have been very co-operative at the time, the worst the Foreign Office envisaged was "that Britons in Red Army hands might continue for a few weeks to return home by sea from Odessa instead of overland through Germany." Neither Eden, nor any of his advisors, believed Stalin contemplated retaining them. Also, if the return of the British prisoners was the issue at stake, why was the policy continued for nearly two years after the last prisoners had come home? In fact, points out Tolstoy, by implementing forcible repatriation of Russians in Wehrmacht uniform, the same British prisoners for whom the supporters of forcible repatriation profess such overriding concern were exposed to a very real risk of Nazi reprisals whilst they were still in German hands. This was a far more terrible danger, one which the Foreign Office somehow deemed acceptable at the time. Interesting to read is how different the United States policy on the matter was. The State Department delayed acceptance of the principle of forced repatriation for months after the British had conceded it. It then reluctantly gave in, but became so revolted at the relatively minor scenes of bloodshed that ensued that it temporarily abandoned the policy. Eventually, under strong British pressure, a few hundred Russians who had served in the German Army were sent back to the Soviets. This attitude on the part of the Americans did not result even in a one-day delay for any soldier returning from Russia, nor did the Soviets ever threaten the reprisals which the British Foreign Office officials claimed to have feared; the British Government was fully informed of the American stance and of Soviet failure to react harshly. "It was not necessary to speculate on the merits of an alternative policy; it was there to be seen," concludes Tolstoy. The episode of the Cossack repatriation and the tragic fate of the Cossack occupants of the camp Lienz are also explored quite effectively, (although I personally recommend General V.G. Naumenko's "Great Betrayal" as a particularly potent, shocking first hand account of the event.) Victims of Yalta is a very long book, which deals with its subject in meticulous detail. To establish his arguments, Nikolai Tolstoy draws upon an impressive number of first hand sources and key documents. This is a brilliantly written, and highly important, historical account of appalling injustice and horrible suffering. ...more |
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1787209288
| 9781787209282
| B07858Y7X5
| 4.43
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| Feb 1970
| Jan 12, 2017
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it was amazing
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The Yalta Conference – February 4-11, 1945 – was not only the longest meeting of President Roosevelt with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin,
The Yalta Conference – February 4-11, 1945 – was not only the longest meeting of President Roosevelt with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin, but also the first time that the three leaders reached fundamental agreements on post-war problems as distinct from mere statements of aims and purposes. Although many problems of a non-military nature had been discussed in Teheran, basic agreements were not reached or even attempted, and the same goes of the second front and related military questions. "It was not until Yalta that sufficient confidence existed among the three nations for a free and open examination of future operational plans," writes Edward R. Stettinus, Jr., U.S Secretary of State under FDR and the author of this amazing work. While the Yalta Conference marked the high tide of British, Russian, and American cooperation on the war and on the post-war settlement, narrates he, many bitter statements had been made in recent criticism of Yalta, resulting mainly from the wrong, according to him, notion that Great Britain and the USA made much more concessions to the Soviet Union than there were made to them by the Soviet Union. This is why he, with his deep respect for the memory of Roosevelt, set out to write a book about the Yalta Conference and prove that Yalta was a symbol not of a appeasement but of an honest effort on the part of Great Britain and the United States to determine whether or not long-range cooperation with the USSR could be achieved. Although Anglo-American cooperation had developed to a considerable degree during the war, their diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union had been far from satisfactory most of the time. Russian disappointment over the delay in opening a second front across the Channel was real, explains Stettinus, and even at the end of 1944 some high-rank Russians were suspicious of both British and American motives regarding the future of liberated Europe. In the months before Yalta, all three powers faced an urgent need to reach decisions which could be applied as soon as the fighting ended. It was, after all, obvious that peace would be endangered if the major powers failed to cooperate. Interesting is Stettinus' account of the debates surrounding the selection of the location of the Big Three Conference. Stalin had informed both the President and the Prime Minister that, while the Soviet winter offensive was on, because of the many decisions he personally had to make, he could not leave Soviet territory. "While we were at the Yalta Conference we had many opportunities to see the immense amount of time the Marshal devoted to top military strategy," observes Stettinus. Therefore, President Roosevelt, who was a keen geographer in his own right, was studying maps in order to find a possible location for the conference at a warm-weather port in Russian territory. Finally, Harry Hopkins, at FDR's request, raised the possibility of the Crimea. Despite the objections to the President traveling that far, Hopkins wrote, "I was sure the President would wind up going to Crimea, the primary reason being that it was a part of the world he had never visited and his adventurous spirit was forever leading him to go to unusual places . . ." Churchill was as bitterly opposed to the Crimea as some of the President's advisers. He remarked that no one could have selected a more inconvenient location for a conference. On the other hand, he, like Roosevelt, wanted to achieve a stable world. "When I visited Churchill in England in April 1944 he had remarked, 'The world is a wounded animal,'" relates Stettinus. The author proceeds with a detailed, day-by-day account of the Yalta Conference itself at which the Big Three discussed such problems as the treatment of Germany, the future of Poland, General de Gaulle and France, and Russian participation in the Far Eastern war. He chronicles the immense pressure put on FDR by U.S military leaders to bring Russia into the war against Japan. At this time the atomic bomb was still an unknown quantity, and no one knew how long the war would last nor how great the casualties would be. Stalin had replied that certain concessions had to be made in order the USSR to declare war on Japan, or the declaration would seem unjustified. Therefore, "Agreement Regarding Japan", a top-secret document that did not appear in the protocol of the Yalta Conference, was signed by the three leaders; it returned Kurile Islands and the southern part of Sakhalin together with its adjacent islands to the Soviet Union, as well as ensured the safety of Soviet interests in the international port of Darien and the establishment of a Soviet-Chinese company for the joint operation of the Chinese-Eastern and South-Manchurian Railroads. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Minister, had tried to stop Churchill from signing the document, reveals Stettinus, but the Prime Minister had declared that the whole position of the British Empire and the war in the Far East might be at stake. Very curious are the diverging views of Marshal Stalin on the distribution of power. FDR and Churchill believed that although the Big Three would necessarily have to bear the major responsibility for the peace, it was essential to exercise this power with moderation and with respect for the rights of the smaller nations; Stalin, however, declared: "Yugoslavia, Albania, and such small countries do not deserve to be at this table. Do you want Albania to have the same status as the United States? What has Albania done in this war to merit such a standing? We three have to decide how to keep the peace of the world . . ." His aversion to recognizing any other countries as worthy enough extended, interestingly, to France too. "The eagle should permit the small birds to sing, and care not wherefor they sang," replied Churchill. Since Edward R. Stettinus was present in Yalta as Secretary of State, a lot of details are known to him alone, and this highly contributes to the compelling nature of his work. For example, he presents masterful insights into Roosevelt's personality, describing his impressive grasp of complex problems. ". . . this world statesman, like Churchill, seemed to have an instinctive comprehension of the problem even before I had finished my explanation." His first impression of Stalin is that of a man with a fine sense of humor, but also with power and ruthlessness along with it. "During the various conferences in Yalta," notices he, "the other members of the Soviet delegation would change their minds perfectly unashamedly whenever Marshal Stalin changed his." In addition, his account is deffinitely not short of funny anecdotes. During a dinner with dozens of toasts hosted at Livadia Palace by the President for Churchill and Stalin, for instance, Stettinus was highly amused to observe that Stalin drank half of his glass of vodka and, when he thought no one was watching, surreptitiously pour water into the glass. The main aim of his record of the Yalta Conference, however, remains that to demonstrate clearly that, in reality, the USSR made greater concessions to the States and Great Britain than were made to the Soviets. The agreements reached in Yalta among President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Marshal Stalin were, on the whole, a diplomatic triumph for the USA and Britain, argues he. He also lists the main Russian concessions. At Roosevelt's request, Marshal Stalin agreed – for the first time in the war – that there should be coordination of Russian and Western military activities, and that Soviet airbases near Budapest and elsewhere should be made available to for use by the United States Air Corps. Additionally, there was, for the first time as well, a frank statement by the Soviet Union if its future plans for offensive operations. Another concession was the early withdrawal of Soviet objection to the recommendation made by both FDR and Churchill that the French be assigned a zone of occupation from the British and American zones due to their familiarity with the task. Furthermore, Stalin sided with President Roosevelt on one of the most controversial issues of the conference – German Reparations: when V.M. Molotov, at the meeting of the foreign ministers, stated that the President at Yalta had agreed to ten billion dollars of reparations for the USSR, which was incorrect, the Marshal confirmed that FDR had agreed "purely as a basis for discussion", which did not commit the Allies to the exact figure. Even the most controversial issue of the Yalta Conference – Poland – saw Stalin concede with the other two leaders. By the time of the conference the Soviet Union had established the Lublin Provisional Government. Both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill adamantly refused to recognize this puppet regime, and the agreement of the government of Poland proved to be the most time-consuming and difficult question at Yalta. Nevertheless, Stalin eventually agreed to the reorganization of the Lublin Government by the inclusion of democratic leaders from home and abroad and to the organization of free and unfettered elections at an early date. Thus, President Roosevelt did not surrender anything significant at Yalta which was within his power to withhold. The agreements, on the other hand, speeded up the end of the war and reduced American casualties. The failure to agree would have been a serious blow to the morale of the Allied world, already suffering from the five years of war; it would have meant the prolongation of the Japanese-American conflict and would have led "to other consequences incalculable in their tragedy for the world," concludes Stettinus. Roosevelt and the Russians is an impressive record of the Yalta Conference as seen from the perspective of a participant. Highly recommendable. ...more |
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Nov 01, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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0714633518
| 9780714633510
| 0714633518
| 4.60
| 5
| 1991
| Apr 04, 1991
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really liked it
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Samuel J. Newland's work is a finely researched study of the Russian and Soviet people who took arms and fought alongside the invading Germans in the
Samuel J. Newland's work is a finely researched study of the Russian and Soviet people who took arms and fought alongside the invading Germans in the Second World War. The book is particularly focused on the Cossacks in the German army. The first three to four months of Operation BARBAROSSA saw only victories for the German army. Not only were vast tracts of land taken, but the German army seemed to be "tearing the vitals out of the Red Army." In the last half of July 1941, German forces succeeded in completing the encirclement of Russian forces in Smolensk, and that resulted in the capture of 300,000 POWs. The culmination of these staggering victories came in the period from August 28 to September 26, 1941, when General Ewald von Kleist and General Guderian’s Panzer Corps joined cast of Kiev. After weeks of slaughter over 650,000 Russians were captured, together with roughly 1,000 tanks and 3,000 transport vehicles. Nevertheless, within such impressive successes the roots of defeat could also be found. German Blitzkrieg depended on speed, the experience of well-equipped units and the ability of German forces to concentrate their maximum effort on a Schwerpunkt (the mailed fist of armour and firepower). Although the Germans advanced at an unprecedented pace through the first three months of the war, smashing Soviet armies at a rate which would have mortally wounded any other European power, in fact the further they penetrated the Soviet land mass, the less able they were to "cripple the Soviet colossus," writes Newland. When the Germans launched their offensive into Soviet territory on June 22, 1941, their forces were stretched across a front which reached from the Baltic Coast to the Rumanian frontier. This was a distance of roughly 1,500 miles. But, as the German armies moved eastward, their successes stretched the length of the battle-lines which became increasingly longer, causing logistical and transportation problems of nightmarish proportions. Therefore, the crucial issue for the Russian campaign was mobilizing the manpower and equipment necessary to destroy the Red Army and to occupy the enormous land mass. The more successes the Germans had, however, and the thinner their forces were spread, the more difficult it was to mobilize the forces for final victory. Schwerpunkt became increasingly difficult to achieve due to the enormous land mass of Russia. On top of that, as the Germans were to learn belatedly, the Soviet mobilization machinery was well-organized: once the war started, the Soviet mobilization apparatus, aided by the National Military Organization, put one million additional men into the field before July was out, and continued to mobilize more. The German army had planned to strike Soviet Russia with maximum force, and within six to eight weeks destroy possible Soviet resistance. Due to the immense manpower and industrial capabilities of the Soviet Union, BARBAROSSA failed miserably. Considering the drain on German manpower and the Soviet regenerative ability, the question remains as to how the Germans were able to continue this offensive for so long. "The solution to the manpower problem is not easily found in the official policy of the Nazi party and the overall intent of the Russian campaign, at least for Hitler and the majority of the party hacks, was the destruction of the Slavic Stale and the subordination of its people. The German army, however, had to pursue a more pragmatic and less doctrinaire policy," reveals Newland. In short, the Wehrmacht, desperate for manpower, began recruiting Russian civilians and prisoners of war to fill the ranks of its depleted forces. While today it might seem incomprehensible, considering Nazi atrocities, that any substantial number of conquered people could welcome the advance of the German army, narrates Newland, many Ukrainians, Cossacks, Tatars, and Armenians still dreamed of autonomy, and naively believed that the German invasion offered liberation. Consequently, as the German soldiers advanced, they found a large number of Soviet people willing to welcome them. They also found out some of the Soviet soldiers facing them were willing to fight on the German side in order to bring about the destruction of the Stalinist system. The idea of sparking a massive revolt of the Soviet peoples had occurred to some German officers, even before the German attack had been launched. The year 1941, however, was not the time for open appeals for the liberation of Russia or for German planners to utilize significant numbers of Slavic soldiers in the campaign to destroy Bolshevism. "Drunk as they were with the heady wine of success", the men at the top saw no reason to change their plans for the Russian campaign, explains Newland. For the commanders at the front, on the other hand, the situation was quite different because manpower shortages only became more dire with each passing week of the campaign. Due to this desperate need for replacements and the willingness of Soviet soldiers and civilians to work with the Germans, local commanders began on their own initiative to recruit various Soviet peoples to fill their depleted units as early as the autumn of 1941. According to the ideology of National Socialism, the Slavs were "a subhuman species", incapable of intellectual development and unable to comprehend the aspirations of Western philosophy and Western civilization. While these ideas were not universally accepted by all Germans, they did affect many. As Soviet volunteers appeared in the German ranks in increasing numbers, prejudices against Slavic peoples became increasingly evident. Despite the unwillingness of the German High Command and the Fuhrer to permit widespread recruiting of Soviet volunteers, however, their use continued throughout 1941 and dramatically increased from 1942 through 1945. Especially numerous proved to be the instances of Cossacks being recruited in the German Army. In his brief but interesting history of the Cossack people, Newland establishes that – although the debate on their origins might never be settled – the Cossacks emerge as a noticeable group in historical accounts written after the 1400s. They acquired prominence for their role in guarding the steppes of southern Russia. While the fall of the Mongol Empire brought peace to the Russians, the Muscovite state was still subject to regular Tatar raids. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries two distinctive groups of Cossacks emerged on the steppes, that is, in terms of the services they performed. The first were the free Cossacks who served as guides, patrolled the steppes, and were known to turn to banditry if the need arose. They lived a free and almost nomadic existence on the steppes. The other group was the town Cossacks, in essence cavalry units based in frontier communities. These Cossacks were virtually mercenaries who fought for pay or occasionally received land grants for their services. The traditional Cossack governmental structure centred on a local societal group called a host (voiska). Since earliest times, Cossack hosts had gathered together in a democratic style of meeting or assembly. They would discuss items of concern or questions of policy, and ultimately reach decisions by acclamation. From their number they elected an Ataman (headman) to represent the host and carry out the decisions of the assembly. As the voiskas grew in size, the Ataman utilized a council of elders, composed of former Atamans and other local leaders, to give their advice in the interim since assembly meetings were infrequent. As it slowly extended its control over the voiskas, the Russian government did not obliterate this traditional societal structure, but instead asserted its control over it – the Cossacks began to effectively serve the crown in times of civil disorder. The Bolshevik rule proved highly unpopular among the Cossacks since the Bolsheviks stabled their horses in churches, pillaged Cossack farms for supplies, and used the Revolution as an excuse to wage their personal vendettas. The Bolsheviks had pledged recognition of the Cossacks, their military units and their traditional uniforms, but once in power they quickly forgot their pledge. Their broken promises and the privations of the early 1920s fed the discontent in the Cossack regions. After a brief period of relief provided by the New Economic Policy, the collectivization of agriculture, beginning in 1929, brought new misery to them, narrates Newland. Consequently, when the German army launched its offensive against the Soviet Union, there were substantial numbers of Cossacks who regarded the prospect of liberating themselves from the "Bolshevik yoke". Furthermore, the Cossack emigre communities in France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Germany watched the German advance with enthusiasm and, from the beginning of the campaign, offered volunteers from their ranks to liberate the Cossack territories from Bolshevism. According to Newland, it is difficult to determine when exactly the first Cossack volunteers were organized. Somewhere on the eastern front in the summer or autumn of 1941 German commanders began to use Cossack cavalry for scouting or reconnaissance purposes. As happened in so many other instances with volunteer units, success brought about an expansion of their use. Throughout 1941-42 German records indicate numerous examples of Cossack volunteer units being organized all over the eastern front. "It is important to remember that since so much of this recruitment was at least in part clandestine, it would require a total review of all German army records to ferret out every individual citation on Cossack volunteers," points out the author. Occasionally the Germans acknowledged the assistance of their eastern volunteers. As an example, a 1943 issue of Die Wehrmacht, the official armed forces magazine, included a major article entitled “Unsere Kosaken” (“Our Cossacks”). The article featured the Cossacks fighting against the Soviet Army and the Soviet-backed partisans operating in the German rear areas. According to the article, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Tatars and Caucasians were fighting side by side with the German army against the hated Bolsheviks; the nationality that was first in its hatred of the Bolshevik system was the Cossacks. When the 14th Panzer Corps moved into the vicinity of the River Mius, during mid-October 1941, they were surprised to find an engagement in progress behind the Red Army’s front line. Thinking that an advance German unit was trapped, they quickly pressed their attack. They found not German troops but a Russian militia unit which had attacked the Soviet Army from the rear. The militia group was commanded by 1st Lieutenant Nicholas Nazarenko, a Don Cossack who had a long-standing tradition of opposition to the Soviet regime. An agreement was struck whereby the Cossacks could retain their identity and receive German uniforms, ammunition and supplies. Nazarenko’s unit was called the “Cossack Reconnaissance Battalion” and Nazarenko became its leader. The basic uniform issued to the battalion was German, but its members all wore a white armband with a large К (for Kosak) printed in black on the armband. Shortly thereafter, the battalion was transferred to the First Panzer Army. In 1942, increasing numbers of Cossacks were deployed in the Wehrmacht. The reasons for the greater deployment is the original German advance into Russia (1941) had taken the Wehrmacht into the western fringes of Don Cossack territory. When Novocherkassk, the Cossack capital, fell to the advancing German army on June 22, 1942, the commander of Army Group South authorized the Cossacks to retain their weapons and form military units to assist the Germans. Notably, despite the leadership shown by Cossacks such as Nicholas Nazarenko, the Germans sought to exert their leadership over the Cossacks. They did not make use of Cossacks in any major leadership role in commanding large military formations. Instead, they chose a German cavalry officer Helmuth von Pannwitz, who would become a highly significant figure in the formation of Cossack units. Von Pannwitz had a genuine love for Slavic people and an understanding of their languages, customs and beliefs. The years he spent in Poland when he had worked closely with the peasants caused him to ignore the Nazi "inferior-people" theories and proceed with his plans to mobilize the former Soviet citizens. His choice of the Cossacks as the specific nationality he hoped to mobilize was due to the fact that the Cossacks had apparently impressed Hitler with their tradition as excellent soldiers. When von Pannwitz was awarded the Oak Leaves for his Knight’s Cross because of his heroic actions during the encirclement of the German Army at Stalingrad, he scored himself a brief audience with Hitler, which proved to be significant – the Fuhrer indicated his knowledge of Pannwitz' activities with Cossacks and gave his implicit approval of the project. Thus, with Hitler’s apparent acceptance, the creation of a Cossack division seemed imminent. Interestingly, Von Pannwitz was concerned not only with developing a strong combat-ready division, but also with creating cultural units which would promote the traditions of the hosts within the division. With this goal in mind, the division staff had a cultural and propaganda platoon consisting, relays Newland. This platoon was responsible for editing and publishing a weekly paper entitled Kasatschi Klitsch (The Cossack Call). A special service group worked with new recruits and gave basic political orientation and lectures on Bolshevism and its evils. Von Pannwitz showed a good deal of wisdom with this appeal to the past in order to build a strong unified fighting unit, narrates Newland. For example, he coped with the confusion provided by Red Army agents who joined the divisions to carry out subversive activities by organizing a special unit commanded by a former Bolshevik commissar to ferret out “Red” agents. The Cossacks themselves had some bad habits which caused concern among the German cadre – at the conclusion of a victorious battle over a village, excessive alcohol, together with the intoxication from winning a baltle, sometimes led to destruction, looting and even rape. Punishment in such instances was "swift and often severe". The Cossack troops were punished by their Cossack commanders, and death sentences and confinement to a dark cell with bread and water, were used to maintain discipline and order. The Cossack Division engaged in several important operations in 1944 against both Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Army. In the first few days of May, 1944, the division participated in an anti-partisan sweep entitled Operation SCHACH. The aim of the operation was to clean the Petrova Gora region, which was a stronghold for Tito’s partisans. In the summer of 1943, the Soviet army launched a powerful offensive against Rumania. This offensive caused Rumania to terminate her alliance with Germany and join the Allied cause in support of the Soviet advance. Despite Hitler’s desire to separate volunteers, including the Cossacks, from the Soviet front, the rapid Soviet advance into the Balkans brought them into pitched battles with the Cossack Division. The most significant engagement occurred on December 25, 1944 when the 133rd Soviet Infantry Division launched an attack on Pitomacha on the River Drava. Opposing the Soviet Division, the Cossack Division fought bravely and successfully. However, it was indeed too late on all fronts. While the Cossack Division was successfully destroying the Soveit Division on the River Drava, the combined British and American armies had already gathered along the western border of Germany for the final attack "into the heart of" The Third Reich. Moreover, the Soviet army was on the eastern fringes of Germany, preparing to launch its final attack. "No amount of National Socialist optimism could alter the fact that Germany was losing the war," concludes Newland. For the Cossack Corps, an ultimate Soviet victory brought about a major problem; given its location, it would be captured by the Red Army. Yet, even while the war was coming to an end, the Cossacks faithfully fulfilled their final duties. They supported the March 9, 1945 German offensive in Hungary by launching its own offensive against the enemy bridgehead at Volpovo on the River Drava. After this last successful counter-offensive, the Cossack Corps engaged in a number of minor actions during the month of April, and then began to prepare itself for the withdrawal from Yugoslavia. It was felt that the Cossacks’ best chance of survival lay with the British. Although von Pannwitz sought to surrender the corps conditionally, it soon became obvious that there was no freedom for negotiations – the British expected full and unconditional surrender. On May 10, after General von Pannwitz was assured that the Cossacks would be protected from Yugoslavs, the Cossack Corps surrendered. In the days following the surrender, von Pannwitz tried repeatedly to obtain some type of assurance from the British that his men would remain safe in Western captivity. He implored his captors either to utilize the Cossacks as an organized military unit or to hand them over to the Americans. "In every instance, in dealing with their captives, the British army was very correct and polite, but was by and large non-committal about the future of the Cossacks. The traditional responses given seemed to say wait until an official decision has been made," describes Newland. As he further reveals, in reality, the decision for the Cossacks, Caucasians, Georgians, and a myriad of displaced persons of Soviet nationality, had already been made at the Yalta Conference, where representatives of the major Allied powers met to conclude the final strategy and the necessary agreements which would bring to a close the war in Europe. Among the problems to be resolved was the Soviet demand for the immediate return of all Soviet prisoners of war and any displaced persons of Soviet nationality caught up in the Western theatre of operations. Therefore, negotiations between Moscow and the other Allied powers had already sealed the fate of von Pannwitz and his Cossacks. General von Pannwitz and a number of the German officer cadre were surrendered to the NKVD at Judenburg, Austria, on May 28, 1945. The Cossack units encamped at Althofen were informed that they would be moved to Italy on May 26, 1945. The British army loaded the Cossacks into trucks and proceeded to take them to Judenburg. There they turned the Cossacks over to the NKVD and an uncertain fate. The final, tragic episode was what happened to the members of the Cossack nation camped close to Lienz, Austria. A band of refugees who had left their homeland in early 1943, these Cossacks had been moved repeatedly since their departure with the retreating Wehrmacht following the Stalingrad disaster. On the morning of May 28, 1945 the officer corps were loaded into vehicles and transported to the Austrian village of Spittal. The next day they would be turned over to Soviet authorities. Generally, on May 28-29 between 1,500 and 2,000 Cossack and Caucasian officers were handed over to Soviet authorities by the British army. The leadership of the Cossack Corps, both German and Cossack, perished in the hands of the NKVD. Moscow announced in 1947 that General Krasnov and General Helmuth von Pannwitz had been sentenced to death and hanged. Thus, the story of the Cossack Corps ended. Samuel J. Newland has done a wonderful job recounting the unique, tragic episode of Cossack recruitment during World War II. "Cossacks in the German Army" is engaging and has an impressive bibliography. Recommendable for anyone who is interested in the less known incidents of WWII. ...more |
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Hardcover
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1511524170
| 9781511524179
| 1511524170
| 5.00
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| Mar 30, 2015
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it was amazing
| "An exposed lie is as important for the wellbeing of humanity as a clearly expressed truth." This book is a digest of personal recollections, in th "An exposed lie is as important for the wellbeing of humanity as a clearly expressed truth." This book is a digest of personal recollections, in the form of letters, diaries, and notes, of the survivors of the forceful repatriation of Cossacks who had served in the German Army, as well as of their women and children, to the Soviet government in 1945. Somewhere on the eastern front in the summer or autumn of 1941 German commanders began to use Cossack cavalry for reconnaissance purposes, and as happened with other volunteer units, success brought about an expansion of their use. The Cossacks believed that Hitler's army was their chance to overthrow the Bolshevik yoke. The Soviet Government had proved extremely unpopular among them because the Soviets disregarded Cossack military units and traditional uniforms, stabled horses in Cossack churches, pillaged Cossack farms for supplies, and used the Revolution as an excuse to wage their personal vendettas. The Cossack emigre communities in France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Germany also watched the German advance with enthusiasm and, from the beginning of Operation BARBAROSSA, offered volunteers from their ranks. Throughout 1941-42 German records indicate numerous examples of Cossack volunteer units being organized all over the eastern front; at this point of the war, German commanders had already begun to experience serious shortages of manpower. Although according to the Nazi ideology all Slavs were "subhuman species", occasionally the Germans acknowledged the assistance of their eastern volunteers. As an example, a 1943 issue of Die Wehrmacht, the official armed forces magazine, included a major article entitled “Unsere Kosaken” (“Our Cossacks”), which featured the Cossacks fighting against the Soviet Army and the Soviet-backed partisans operating in the German rear areas. It seemed as if the Cossack Nation's dream was coming true – they had been given the arms and the opportunity to confront the loathed Bolshevism in direct combat and liberate their lands from its tyrannical rule. Yet, among all those who wronged the Cossacks, the Germans also stand in the forefront: many a former Cossack soldier accuses German commanders of breaking their main pledge – to let the Cossacks fight the Red Army. Instead of employing them in the Soviet Union, as was promised, the Nazi soon dispatched the corps to Yugoslavia to skirmish with Tito's partisans against whom the Cossacks held no grudge. At some point, the corps realized they had been fooled, and their recollections reek with bitterness and indignation, their motivation to fight gradually dissolving. Another remarkable fact regards the German occupation of the Don Cossack territory, which was anything but the promised liberation from Bolshevik yoke. According to a local's notes, in fact, the Nazi troops weren't at all interested in uprooting the local Soviet authorities: to the Cossacks' surprise, the Germans retained the oppressive kolhoz together with its former head, a Bolshevik. As the Cossacks were to realize belatedly, the Wehrmacht had no intention to regard them as equals, as allies, and to help them reinstate their autonomy. They were for Germany what the whole Red Army was for Stalin – fresh meat to hurl at the enemy – and the Nazi commanders were only happy to send those ready volunteers to the vanguard, thus sparing at least some of the soldiers of the "master race". The Cossacks fought bravely to the very end of the obviously lost war. They supported the March 9, 1945 German offensive in Hungary by launching its own offensive against a dangerous enemy bridgehead at Volpovo on the River Drava; after this last major and successful counter-offensive, the Cossack Corps engaged in a number of minor actions during the month of April, and then surrendered to Great Britain, placing their fate in her hands. A war is like a curtain behind which people and nations succumb to such sins that the world would not suffer otherwise. What the Germans did to the Cossacks was a breach of faith, but what the Allied powers did was a horrible, ruthless act of betrayal. Having no scruples about using neither false promises, nor propaganda, the British assured the Cossack prisoners of war of their safety only to repatriate them and their wives and children to the Soviet union at Stalin's demand. Two of the most tragic episodes are the subject of this book. The first episode was what happened to the members of the Cossack nation camped close to Lienz, Austria. A band of refugees who had left their homeland in late 1942/early 1943, these Cossacks had been moved repeatedly since their departure with the retreating Wehrmacht following the Stalingrad disaster. On the morning of May 28, 1945 the officer corps were loaded into vehicles and transported to the Austrian village of Spittal under the pretension that they were called for a conference. The Cossacks doubted the existence of this conference and wondered why they were going to be convoyed by armed British soldiers; the older, more experienced ones pointed out that there is no need for so many people for a conference. However, the British officers resolved their worries by promising that the convoy is only for their protection. The next day those men, who had trusted the "honest word of an English officer", would be turned over to Soviet authorities by the British army. The second was the massacre at refugee camp Peggetz, Austria, where on June 1 1945 British officers forcefully loaded Cossack women and children in trucks and repatriated them to the Soviets. On this day, many innocent people lost their lives; the most shocking was maybe the death of a local doctor and her two children, who threw themselves in the nearby river, choosing death over Bolshevik revenge. Later, when confronted with the responsibility for their actions, the same those British officers pleaded that it was "their duty" as British soldiers to hoodwink and repatriate the Cossacks; that the fact that it was done under an order from their commanders somehow justified the unjust deed. The most ordinary and widespread reason for telling lies is the desire to deceive not other people, but oneself. This is also the most noxious kind of lies. This tragedy was not an accident, not a mistake. It was a deliberate policy, a secret agreement reached at the Yalta Conference. Edward R. Stettinus, Jr., U.S Secretary of State, who accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta, later boasted in his memoir that the Western allies had made no significant concessions to Stalin. The agreements reached in Yalta among President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Marshal Stalin were, on the whole, "a diplomatic triumph for the USA and Britain", brags he. Oh, indeed they were! After all, the repatriation of two million Russians, the Cossack nation among them, to a blood-thirsty, vengeful, tyrannical government was a far less substantial concession for the Western allies than would have been the yielding of occupation zones, for instance. They did what they deemed better for their own interests, and this perfectly justified the glaring injustice, the sacrifice of soldiers, who had the right to be protected by the Geneva convention, and of innocent women and children. There was one man out there, who stood for the Cossacks to the end like a beacon of light in the dense darkness. His name was General Helmuth von Pannwitz, this book's most enduring figure, that pervades every fond memory and evokes deep admiration. He was a German, raised in Poland, who harbored a deep love for the Slavic people and their customs. Under his supervision the Cossack Corps was created, and he labored to save it to the very bitter end. The Cossacks affectionately called him "a real Cossack", so he proved himself to be one. Although as a German, he had the right to remain under Allied protection as a POW, he resolved to share his Cossacks' terrible lot and surrendered to the NKVD to meet his death by hanging in 1947. Thus ended this story that again demonstrates the universal evil of war. There are conquerors and conquered, but there aren't good and bad sides; there are just the universal, contagious evil and corruption. As Leo Tolstoy said, when we fight evil with evil, in the end what remains is a victorious evil. ...more |
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0670025313
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| Nov 18, 2015
| Nov 03, 2015
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it was amazing
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Antony Beevor's work is an engaging overview of the Ardennes offensive, Adolf Hitler's "last gamble." On September 16 1944, the day before Operation M Antony Beevor's work is an engaging overview of the Ardennes offensive, Adolf Hitler's "last gamble." On September 16 1944, the day before Operation Market Garden (a series if battles fought in southern Holland) was launched, Hitler bewildered his entourage at the Wolf's Lair with his decision to counter-attack from the Ardennes. The Führer was determined never to negotiate, explains Beevor. He continued to convince himself that the "unnatural" alliance between the capitalist countries of the west and the Soviet Union was bound to collapse, and he calculated that, instead of being ground down in defensive battles on both eastern and western fronts, a final great offensive stood a far better chance of success. "By remaining on the defensive, we could not hope to escape the evil fate hanging over us,’ explained Generaloberst Alfred Jodl (chief of the Wehrmacht planning staff). "It was an act of desperation, but we had to risk everything." On the eastern front, an attack with thirty-two divisions would be overwhelmed by the immense forces of the Red Army, reasoned Hitler further; a sudden victory on the Italian front would also change nothing. However, he believed that in the west, by driving north to Antwerp, two panzer armies could split the western Allies, forcing the Canadians out of the war and perhaps even the British in "another Dunkirk"; it would also threaten the war industries of the Ruhr. As Beevor explains, the Führer had selected Ardennes as the sector for the breakthrough because it was thinly held by American troops. Another great advantage was the thickly forested region on the German side of the frontier, which offered concealment for troops and tanks from Allied airpower. Everything would depend on surprise and on the Allied leadership failing to react quickly enough. Eisenhower, he assumed, would have to consult with the other Allied commanders, and that could take several days. Ever lacking realism, he wanted to launch the offensive in November, "the period of fogs," although he knew that it would take most of the month to prepare. Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, known as "the Old Prussian," and Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, commander-in-chief of Army Group B, could hardly have been more different in appearance, tastes and political outlook; yet, even they agreed that Hitler’s "grand slam", or "large solution", was one of his map fantasies, narrates Beevor. They, as well as the rest of the field commanders, realized that fuel was going to be a problem big enough, and of course, soon any hope of keeping to Hitler’s original plan of attacking in November disappeared. Even the beginning of December looked increasingly uncertain – the transport of fuel, ammunition and the divisions themselves was delayed, partly due to Allied bombing of the transport network and partly due to the earlier difficulties of withdrawing formations to prepare. "Hardly a single panzer division found the time and fuel to train many of the novice tank drivers. German forces on the western front had been receiving priority for the replacement of panzers, assault guns and artillery. Waffen-SS divisions received the bulk of the new equipment and had the pick of reinforcements, but even then they tended to be mainly youngsters transferred from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine," describes the situation Beevor. And tensions between the Waffen-SS and the German army were growing because of Hitler’s insistence on saving SS formations in a retreat while ordinary divisions were left to fight on as a rearguard. On top of that, Hitler's never-slackening obsession with secrecy further complicated matters. According to his orders, no troops were to be briefed until the evening before the attack, regimental commanders would know nothing until the day before, and no registering of artillery could take place in advance; maps were to be distributed only at the very last moment, for security reasons, and total radio silence was to be observed. Commanders of corps artillery had to reconnoitre all the gun positions themselves. Not surprisingly, remarks Beevor, many officers were soon able to work out that a major offensive was in preparation, since the artillery dispositions alone indicated that the deployments were not for defensive purposes. Meanwhile, Goebbels "kept repeating the mantra of the Nazi leadership that ‘the political crisis in the enemy camp grows daily’." Yet, many of their most loyal followers were not convinced by this message of hope anymore; they simply felt that there was no choice but to fight on to the bitter end. Beevor cites the shocking words of a captured Waffen-SS Standartenführer: " . . . if the whole German nation has become a nation of soldiers, then it is compelled to perish; because by thinking as a human being and saying – 'It is all up with our people now, there’s no point in it, it’s nonsense' – do you really believe that you will avoid the sacrifice of an appreciable number of lives? Do you think you will alter the peace terms? Surely not. On the other hand it is well known that a nation which has not fought out such a fateful struggle right to the last has never risen again as a nation." As "X-Day" for the Ardennes approached, continues Beevor, the delays in the delivery of fuel and ammunition became worse – each panzer division needed seventy trains alone – and the attack had to be pushed back to dawn on 16 December. So far, nobody below the level of corps command had been informed, but SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper of the 1st SS Panzer-Division guessed what was afoot on 11 December when Krämer, the Sixth Panzer Army’s chief of staff, wanted to discuss a hypothetical offensive in the region. He asked Peiper "how long it would take a panzer regiment to move eighty kilometres at night." To be sure of his answer, Peiper himself took out a Panther (a German armored tank) for a test run over that distance in darkness, and realized that moving a whole division was a much more complicated matter. What he and his superiors had underestimated, though, was the state of the roads and the saturated ground in the Ardennes. To say that the German commanders were optimistic about Hitler's gamble would be a huge exaggeration, argues Beevor. When, on September 13, Oberstgruppenführer-SS Sepp Dietrich of the Sixth Panzer Army visited the headquarters of Army Group B, Model said to him that this was "the worst prepared German offensive of this war." Rundstedt noted that out of the thirty-two divisions promised, four divisions were withdrawn just before the attack. While most generals were deeply sceptical of the operation’s chances of success, younger officers and NCOs, especially those in the Waffen-SS, were desperate for it to succeed. On the evening of 15 December officers were finally allowed to brief their troops. Hauptmann Bär, a company commander in the 26th Volksgrenadier- Division, told his men: "In twelve or fourteen days we will be in Antwerp – or we have lost the war." In the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg, the briefing on the offensive produced "an extraordinary optimism" because the Führer had "ordered the great blow in the West." They believed that the shock of an unexpected attack would represent a massive blow to Allied morale, explains Beevor, and according to an officer in the highly experienced 2nd Panzer-Division, "the fighting spirit was better than in the early days of the war." Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army alone had more than 120,000 men, with nearly 500 tanks and assault guns and a thousand artillery pieces. As Beevor remarks, "the Allied command had no idea of what was about to hit them on their weakest sector." One of the great debates about the Ardennes offensive, asserts Beevor, has focused on the Allied inability to foresee the attack. There were indeed many pieces of information which taken together should have indicated German intentions (Right from the start, Hitler’s orders for total secrecy cannot have been followed. Word of the forthcoming offensive even circulated among senior German officers in British prisoner-of-war camps.), but "as in almost all intelligence failures, senior officers discarded anything which did not match their own assumptions," explains he. Plus, the Allies could not believe that the Germans, in their weakened state, would dare to undertake an ambitious strategic offensive, when they needed to save their strength before the Red Army launched its winter onslaught. Such a gamble was definitely not the style of Gerd von Rundstedt, reasoned they. In London, the Joint Intelligence Committee had also concluded that "Germany’s crippling shortage of oil continues to be the greatest single weakness in her capacity to resist." Yet, reveals Beevor, the Allied command had gravely underestimated Hitler’s "manic grasp on the levers of military power." Another reason why the Germans succeeded in surprising their enemy was that the Ardennes sector was deemed a low priority for air reconnaissance, and as a result of bad weather, very few missions were flown in the region. This is why, when the Germans began bringing new divisions to the sector and then relieving them out for commitment elsewhere, the Allied headquarters wrongly perceived this practice as an indication of Hitler's desire to have this sector of the front remain quiet and inactive. Thus, when at 05.20 hours on 16 December, ten minutes before "zero hour", the artillery of Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army opened fire, most American soldiers, "avoiding the chill of damp snow in the sixteen hours of darkness", were asleep "in farmhouses, foresters’ huts, barns and cow-byres." As Beevor explains, German artillery commanders, knowing that American soldiers preferred shelter, always targeted houses, so sentries were instructed to never be in the house by the door, but in foxholes at a short distance away to watch for German surprise attacks. "But it was only when the shells began to explode all around that there was a panic-stricken scramble by the men to extricate themselves from their sleeping bags, and grab equipment, helmets and weapons," writes Beevor. It was Hitler who had laid down that infantry divisions would make the breakthrough so that the precious panzer divisions would start fully intact farther on. The first reports to reach him were most encouraging – Jodl reported "that surprise had been achieved completely." Indeed, surprise had been achieved, analyzes the situation Beevor, but what the Germans really needed was momentum to turn surprise into "a paralysing shock." However, while some American troops, together with frightened civilians, "lost their heads" and began to save themselves, "in other places there was supreme valor," as an officer in the 99th Division relayed. According to Beevor, these feats of extraordinary courage would slow down the German onslaught with critical results. Although Hitler refused to face reality until it was far too late, German generals realized that the great offensive was doomed by the end of the first week, reveals the author further. They may have achieved surprise, but they had failed to cause the collapse in American morale that they needed. It was German morale instead which began to suffer. "Officers and men began to show more and more their loss of confidence in the German High Command," wrote Generalmajor von Gersdorff. "It was only the realization of the immediate danger of the homeland and its frontiers, which spurred the troops to increase their effort against an unmerciful enemy." The commander of Panzer Lehr, Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, described the Ardennes offensive as "the last gasp of the collapsing Wehrmacht and the supreme command before its end." Fighting in the Ardennes had reached a degree of savagery unprecedented on the western front. The Nazi cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners and civilians was chilling. For instance, Belgian civilians who hadn't flown the onslaught and had resigned themselves to another German occupation, were subjected to indiscriminate arrests and executions because SS Sicherheitsdienst security service was bent on taking revenge for the harassment the retreating German forces had suffered from young Belgians in Resistance groups in September. The surprise and ruthlessness of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west. But, as with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the shock of total warfare did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected. It provoked instead a critical mass of desperate resistance. "When German formations attacked, screaming and whistling, isolated companies defended key villages against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice bought the time needed to bring in reinforcements, and this was their vital contribution to the destruction of Hitler’s dream," concludes Antony Beevor. "Perhaps the German leadership’s greatest mistake in the Ardennes offensive was to have misjudged the soldiers of an army they had affected to despise." Another, less known but rather entertaining, part of the narrative deals with the two "special" operations the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) had planned. The first one concerned the Führer's order of "a parachute attack in the framework of a powerful offensive": Oberstleutnant Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte was to drop on the first night south of Eupen; the mission was to block American reinforcements coming south from the Aachen sector. Heydte’s 300 paratroopers dropped, indeed, but the mission was a disaster. Sitting in his forest hideout, Heydte was getting increasingly bitter about the "amateurish, almost frivolous manner displayed at the higher levels of command, where the order for such operations originated". While Dietrich had assured him that he and his men would be relieved within a day, there was no indication of a breakthrough round Monschau, and without radios, there was no hope of discovering the progress of the battle. Not to mention that the paratroopers had so little food left they had to creep up to an American artillery battery to steal some boxes of rations. Isolated paratroopers and air crew from the scattered drop soon fell into American hands. On 22 December Heydte, by then feeling very ill and utterly exhausted, went into Monschau on his own and broke into a house. When discovered by a civilian, he was relieved when the man told him that he would have to report him to the American military authorities. After a spell in hospital, Heydte was transferred to a prison camp in England. "It was comfortable, but he and other officers held there never realized that their conversations were being recorded," remarks Beevor with a tinge of humor. The other special operation which the OKW planned was a commando venture, using picked troops in captured American vehicles and uniforms to penetrate Allied lines and cause mayhem in the rear. The infamous SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, known for his role in Operation Oak (Hitler's raid to save Mussolini), was assigned with supervision of the mission. Eight of Skorzeny’s nine Jeep teams slipped through American lines on the night of 16 December. They consisted of the best English-speakers, but, as Beevor reveals, even they were not good enough, so some carried vials of sulphuric acid to throw in the faces of guards if stopped. Some groups cut wires and changed road signs. One even managed to misdirect an entire infantry regiment. According to Beevor, however, the greatest success of the operation, combined with Heydte’s disastrous parachute drop, was to provoke an American over-reaction bordering on paranoia – the "idea of German commando troops charging around in their rear areas turned the Americans into victims of their own nightmare fantasies." Roadblocks were set up on every route, greatly slowing traffic because the guards had to interrogate the occupants to check that they were not German. American roadblock guards came up with their own questions to make sure that a vehicle’s occupants were genuine: they included a baseball quiz, the name of the President’s dog, the name of the current husband of Betty Grable, and ‘What is Sinatra’s first name?’ American General Bruce Cooper Clark gave a wrong answer about the Chicago Cubs. "Only a kraut would make a mistake like that," declared the guard. Having been told that he should look out "for a kraut posing as a one-star general", he was convinced he had discovered his man, and Clarke found himself under arrest for half an hour. (Another way of checking was to make the soldier or officer in question lower their trousers to check that they were wearing regulation underwear.) In summary, "Ardennes 1944" is an outstanding historical work in all aspects. From the experience of soldiers to the day-by-day account of the battle to the logistics of the whole offensive, it is impressively researched, brilliantly detailed, and compellingly told. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Hardcover
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030435449X
| 9780304354498
| 030435449X
| 3.57
| 92
| 1994
| Jun 01, 2004
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Paul Adair's work is a brief overview of the first main offensive in the series that Stalin planned for the summer of 1944 and that were intended to b
Paul Adair's work is a brief overview of the first main offensive in the series that Stalin planned for the summer of 1944 and that were intended to bring about the destruction of Army Group Centre and the liberation of Belorussia, the last area of the Soviet Union still under German occupation. In 1943, after the fateful battle of Kursk, which, argues Adair, was the turning-point on the Eastern Front as the Wehrmacht was never able again to take more than a local initiative, Stalin agreed to meet Churchill and Roosevelt at Teheran. This was the first occasion on which all three leaders were able to discuss their strategy for the destruction of Nazi Germany and eventually Japan, and to share their views on the post-war structure of Europe. To Stalin's evident satisfaction, the date of Operation OVERLORD (the codename for the Allied invasion of Normandy) was confirmed; "I am satisfied with this decision," the Russian dictator remarked calmly, "but I also want to say to Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt that, at the moment the landings begin, our troops will be preparing a major assault on the Germans.'" As Adair narrates, this was the birth of the offensive that was to liberate Belorussia and "inflict the greatest defeat on the German army in its history." Although Stalin had told Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran that the OVERLORD landings in Normandy would be followed by a major attack on the Germans, there was no evidence that any planning had begun. It is possible that the offensive was discussed at the meeting of the State Committee for Defence, which Marshal Zhukov attended in December, with members of the Stavka present, but no decision was recorded as it was too early to tell how the winter and spring offensives would develop. The four main options the Stavka had examined all had their difficulties. The first was to continue the advance through Roumania into the Balkans. Yet, while this was politically highly desirable and would threaten Germany's dwindling fuel supplies, such advance would leave strong German forces on the Soviet flanks, explains Adair. The second was to launch a major offensive from northern Ukraine across Poland to the Baltic. However, to sustain an advance of this magnitude was proved to be beyond the capabilities of Soviet forces in the area, and it again would have left strong German formations on the Red Army's flanks. The third was to attack in the north, but this was rejected because of the many natural obstacles that would hamper movement. The last option was to cut off Army Group Centre in the Belorussian "balcony", which barred the shortest route to Warsaw and provided airfields from which Moscow could be bombed. "It also had great symbolic importance, being the last area of Russia to be occupied by the Germans," writes Adair. Finally, it would have the advantage of clearing the forces that would threaten an advance to the Vistula from the Lvov area. The Stavka weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of each option, bearing in mind that the Front had already failed in Belorussia during their winter and spring offensives. Yet, as it was considered that the failure was more the result of Soviet planning and conduct of the offensive rather than the strength of the German positions, it was decided by Stalin and the Stavka on 12 April that the destruction of the German forces in Belorussia should be a priority. The Stavka now began planning the details of the operations for the forthcoming summer – the timing of the attacks was critical so that the enemy would not have time to move reserves into the threatened sectors, explains Adair. The sequence of operations for the summer was produced by late April. The plan was to open with a distracting offensive in the north (Karelia and the Lake Ladoga area) in early June. When German attention had been drawn northwards, the main offensive would be launched against Army Group Centre in Belorussia later in the month. This main offensive in Belorussia was codenamed Operation BAGRATION after the Russian Marshal mortally wounded before Moscow in 1812. The terrain was crucial in shaping the course of the forthcoming operations, argues Adair; the southern sector of the lines ran through the Pripyat Marshes, "home of myriads of wildfowl and mosquitoes," and virtually impassable for armoured vehicles. The difficult ground influenced the Soviet decision to use the cavalry/mechanized group, a strange but very effective formation. It consisted of a cavalry corps and a tank or mechanized corps, and gave the Soviet troops the ability to operate across terrain that was unsuitable for tanks and in all weather conditions. As Adair reveals in his well-researched overview of BAGRATION's logistics, an offensive on this scale required a supreme effort from the Red Army's logistic services, which had to rely upon primitive roads and a heavily damaged rail network, only recently recaptured from the Germans. The required amount of ammunition and fuel was enormous. The Stavka had laid down that Fronts should have five first and second basic loads of ammunition, 10 to 20 refills of fuel, and 30 days' rations, but in many cases this goal was not met because of delayed transportation. Zhukov reported on 11 June: "The movement of trains with ammunition for First Belorussian Front is extremely slow. Only one or two trains a day . . . There is reason to believe that the Front will not be fully provided for on time." Although at Stalin's insistence the railway timetable was revised and trains were speeded up, the operation had to be postponed until June 23. While there were deficiencies in the Red Army's logistics, especially regarding the provisioning of food, fuel, and ammunition for the cavalry/mechanized groups, there was something that the Soviets had, by this stage of the war, developed into a fine art – maskirovka. (Adair cites the official Soviet definition of the term: "The means of securing combat operations and the daily activities of forces; a complexity of measures, directed to mislead the enemy regarding the presence and disposition of forces, various military objectives, their condition, combat readiness and operations, and also the plans of the command.") As Adair further relays, during the virtual collapse of the Red Army in the first months after the start of Operation BARBAROSSA, Soviet military thought was devoted to survival and little attention was given to formulating a concept for maskirovka. German tactical intelligence, particularly their radio interception units, were able to reap "rich harvests as Soviet units appeared to be unable to grasp the principles of radio security." During the battle for Moscow, however, German strategic intelligence was inadequate because it did not detect the presence of three new armies arriving to take part in the first major Soviet counter-offensive at a time when the Germans were confident that the Soviets had little left in the way of reserves. "It is not clear whether this was the result of a definite maskirovka plan or whether it was a combination of coincidence and the appalling conditions," writes Adair, "but it did have the effect of alerting the Soviet High Command to the advantages of deception." The Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad in November 1942 was the first major example of this newly found confidence in conducting maskirovka operations on a large scale. The extent to which the Soviets had been able to conceal their preparations is confirmed by the Chief of the German General Staff, General Zeitzler, who stated in early November: "The Russians no longer have any reserves worth mentioning and are not capable of launching a large-scale attack. In forming any appreciation of enemy intentions, this basic fact must be taken fully into consideration." Just over two months later the German Army suffered its greatest defeat so far in the war. Thus, once the Stavka had decided upon the strategic plan for their 1944 summer offensive, they began to discuss how the Germans could be deceived about the objectives and scale of BAGRATION. The first question was "how the Stavka be sure that German attention was directed to the south and remained there." The solution, explains Adair, was to assume an aggressive attitude in the areas where activity was to be simulated, namely in the south and, to a more limited extent, in the north: an attack was launched by 27th Army and 2nd Tank Army across the River Prut near the Roumanian border. This was the one of the first occasions in which the Grossdeutschland Division met the new Josef Stalin heavy tanks; although the Soviet forces were overpowered, in reality it was a success for the maskirovka plan because the Germans thought that they had defeated a major Soviet thrust. "It is also interesting to note that this reverse, known as the Battle of Targul-Frumos, was regarded by NATO forces in the early 1980s as an ideal example of the handling of armour in the defensive battle," comments Adair. The other deception measure consisted of reconnaissance in force along the front so that the actual area of attack could not be isolated. However, as June passed, it became clear that a major offensive was imminent. The Stavka hoped, though, that although the Germans were aware of the intense activity behind the Soviet lines, they would still be unaware of the goals and the scale of the offensive. The scene was now set for the opening of BAGRATION, which was to lead to a German defeat even greater than Stalingrad. Soviet superiority was awesome. The four armies of Army Group Centre had a total strength of 800,000 men of whom only half were front-line troops; they had five hundred tanks and self-propelled guns. The Red Army, meanwhile, had mustered 2,500,000 men, with a front-line strength of 1,250,000. It had 4,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 22,000 guns and mortars, and 2,000 Katyusha multiple rocket-launchers. As Adair demonstrates, this represented an overall superiority of 3:1 in men and 10:1 in tanks, although in key areas it was increased dramatically by concentration of force. "Although the morale of the German front line troops was high, they would have been far less confident if they had been aware of the vastly superior numbers of tanks and men poised to attack them," writes he. Despite its well-written examination of the offensive's logistics, in my opinion, Paul Adair's book has some major drawbacks. Maybe the outstanding works of Antony Beevor, Rick Atkinson, and David Stahel have spoiled me too much, but I can't help but notice how dry and boring the account of the offensive itself is – Adair fails to evoke vivid pictures of the battles; his narrative is sometimes even confusing, as it jumps from one episode to another much too quickly. On top of that, there aren't enough maps, and the ones provided are perplexing. (A map must have a legend!!) In addition, his attempt, in the earlier chapters of the book, to present concise histories of the German and Soviet Armies is also, I'm afraid, a failure: both accounts seem like badly done paraphrases of some much better written, more detailed and engaging works. Nevertheless, I read "Hitler's Greatest Defeat" to the end because aside from the well-examined logistics, it also offers an interesting, insightful explanation of why Operation BAGRATION, which succeeded in liberating Belorussia, was also such a crucial contribution to the downfall of the German Army in 1944. Apart from their great superiority in tanks, guns and aircraft, the Soviet success was the result of their use of maskirovka and the flexibility in concentrating their forces to achieve a crushing superiority in critical sectors, explains Adair. Because of their relative weakness, the Germans could not react to these Soviet concentrations of strength until it was too late. However, on the German side even these disadvantages could have been partially mitigated had it not been for Hitler stultifying operations on every level: German generals, for instance, were denied the opportunity to use the mobility of their still powerful armoured divisions to bring the Soviet tank formations to a halt. (Soviet production for tanks had risen to 29,000 tanks in 1944, while Germany was producing 19,000 tanks and assault guns a year.) Furthermore, unlike the Soviet Union, which had only one major front to furnish with armoured vehicles, Germany had the "ulcer" of Italy and the overhanging danger of Allied invasion of north-western Europe. "Germany's historical fear of having to fight a major war on two fronts was now a reality," describes Adair the Nazi situation. Also, in German accounts of BAGRATION one of the most consistent complaints is that few German aircraft were available either to provide tactical air support or to deter the Soviet ground attack, which had harried the columns withdrawing across Belorussia mercilessly. As Adair asserts, to some extent these facts illustrate the fruits of Hitler's insistence on giving priority to the west, where Allied air power was having a devastating effect upon German movement in Normandy. The same aircraft were also needed to counter Bomber Command's raids on German cities. Yet, Göring's much-vaunted Luftwaffe was "on its last legs." After the numerical superiority of the Soviets in tanks and aircraft, the most decisive factor of the Soviet planning for the offensive was their use of maskirovka. While the Germans were expecting a Soviet summer offensive, they had no idea where the first blow would fall and how deep it would penetrate. The Soviet success depended upon the secret deployment of three armies, 6th Guards and 28th on the north and south flanks, and 5th Guards Tank as the Stavka reserve. The concentration of these forces achieved an overwhelming superiority that enabled the Red Army to crush the German defences and strike deep into their rear areas before the Nazi troops got an opportunity to summon their reserves. The defeat of Army Group Centre resulted in the destruction of about 30 divisions. Although the Soviet success wasn't at all cheap – 178,000 dead and missing – the destruction of the Army Group Center was the greatest military defeat suffered by Germany during the Second World War, surpassing even that of Stalingrad. The two senior staff officers of the panzer divisions that fought so hard to prevent the disaster, recognized its significance. General Gerd Niepold stated: "The loss of the entire Army Group Centre greatly accelerated the collapse of the German State. The war would have lasted much longer and the defence of the east could have continued if the divisions of Army Group Centre had not been smashed." And according to General von Kielmansegg, it "was the beginning of the end. The end on the Eastern Front, and in conjunction with the recent invasion of France, the beginning of the end of the War." As I already stated, Paul Adair's work is far from impressive both in style and in bibliography. A WWII buff will discover nothing new and exciting in the chapters dealing with the previous major battles on the Eastern front or Stalin and Hitler, or the Stavka. Nevertheless, when it comes to Operation BAGRATION, the book has its valuable parts. Worth a read if you are interested in the strategy behind the Soviet offensive of summer 1944. *3.25 stars ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 28, 2020
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Oct 28, 2020
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Paperback
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0805062904
| 9780805062908
| 0805062904
| 4.47
| 10,160
| May 14, 2013
| May 14, 2013
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it was amazing
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This is the third volume of Rick Atkinson's exceptional Liberation Trilogy, and it covers the whole Allied war in Northwestern Europe from Operation O
This is the third volume of Rick Atkinson's exceptional Liberation Trilogy, and it covers the whole Allied war in Northwestern Europe from Operation OVERLORD in Normandy to Germany's surrender on 8 May 1945. In July 1943, the Anglo-American forces overran Sicily in six weeks before invading the Italian mainland in early September. Mussolini's Fascist regime collapsed, and the new government in Rome renounced the Axis Pact of Steel. Yet, as Atkinson narrates in THE DAY OF BATTLE, a bloody struggle at Salerno foreshadowed another awful winter campaign as Allied troops struggled in one sanguinary fight after another – San Pietro, Ortona, the Rapido River, Cassino, Anzio. Still, led by Eisenhower, many of the troops had left the Mediterranean for England in mid-campaign to begin preparing for Operation OVERLORD. Upon returning from Italy five months earlier, General Montgomery had widened the OVERLORD assault zone to fifty miles. The grander OVERLORD, explains Atkinson, required 230 additional support ships and landing vessels such as the big LSTs ("landing ship, tank") that had proved invaluable during the assaults at Sicily and Salerno. As he further reveals, the difficulty of assembling that larger fleet was the reason why the Normandy invasion was postponed from May until early June (an interesting fact I wasn't aware of despite having read James Holland's NORMANDY '44). While some officers in SHAEF – Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force – believed that German resistance might collapse from internal weakness, Montgomery disagreed and "ticked off" the expected enemy counterpunch. "After a sea voyage and a landing on a strange coast, there is always some loss of cohesion," reasoned he. As Atkinson explains, an arduous struggle to amass combat power would determine the battle: OVERLORD's plan called for Allied reinforcements to land "at a rate of one and one-third divisions each day," but a bit more than a week into the fight, ten dozen Nazi divisions could well try "to fling eighteen Allied divisions back into the sea." Montgomery envisioned a battle beyond the beaches in which British and Canadian forces dealt with the main force of German defenders, while the Americans on the right invested Cherbourg. Three weeks or so after the initial landings, Patton's Third Army would "thunder into France." Paris would likely be liberated in mid-fall, giving the Allies enough lodgment to stage the fateful drive on Germany. To agglomerate power for the ultimate war-winning drive into central Germany, some forty-five Allied divisions and eleven major supply depots would advance along a front south of Antwerp through Belgium and eastern France in early March 1945. "Precisely how that titanic final battle would unfold was difficult to predict even for the clairvoyants at SHAEF," though. But that lay in the distant future; the immediate task required reaching Normandy. The Allied commanders knew very well that if OVERLORD succeded, it would "dwindle to a mere episode in the larger saga of Europe's liberation"; if it failed, however, the entire Allied enterprise faced abject collapse. That's why troops continued to pour into Britain. Since January the number of GIs had doubled to 1.5 million. Nearly 400,000 prefabricated huts and 279,000 tents had been erected to accommodate the "Yank horde". Despite improving logistics, confusion and error abounded: the American force included 23 million tons of matériel, most of it carried across the Atlantic in cargo ships that arrived months after the troops. "Truck drivers were separated from their trucks, drummers from their drums, chaplains from their chalices," describes the situation Atkinson. Thousands of items arrived with indecipherable bills of landing or without shipping address other than GLUE (the code of Southern England), or BANG (Northern Ireland), or UGLY (unknown). Furthermore, although "no alliance in the war proved more vital or enduring than that of the English-speaking countries," this vast American encampment rather strained the "fraternal bond": detailed glossaries translated English into English (chemist/druggist, geyser/hot water heater); the soap shortage caused GIs to call unwashed Britain "Goatland", and the fact that British quartermasters stocked only 18 shoes sizes compared to 105 provided by the U.S Army didn't make things any better. Yet, American authorities urged tolerance and gratitude. "It is always impolite to criticize your host," advised A Short Guide to Great Britain. "It is militarily stupid to insult your allies." They say no military plan survives first contact with the enemy, but, of course, on June 6, 1944, the date OVERLORD was launched, the Allied plan didn't even need to face the enemy to go downhill: Operation ALBANY, the foremost Airborne mission, which was intended to seize four elevated causeways from Utah Beach to the Cotentin interior, was a fiasco. American planners knew that marshlands in the area had been flooded with two to four feet of water by German engineers; they, unfortunately, did not know that the enemy had closed some of the dams, canals, and locks in the southeast Cotentin and had opened others, allowing the tide surges to create "an inland sea" ten miles long and up to ten feet deep. "Reeds and marsh grass now grew so dense," writes Atkinson, "that not even the one million aerial photographs snapped by Allied reconnaissance planes had revealed the extensive flooding." Obviously, no one was more surprised that the paratroopers who upon arriving over the coast of France had removed their life vests only to be "pulled to brackish graves by their heavy kit." While thousands of lost and scattered parachutists blundered about in the dark, the first fifty-two gliders arrived "like a swarm of ravens," in one German description. While some of the pilots, who had rarely ever flown at night, indeed found the landing zone near Blocsville, most found "stone walls, tree trunks, dozing livestock, or the pernicious German antiglider stakes known as Rommel's aspargus". Thus began the Normandy campaign, and knowing the Allied aptitude for disaster, which Atkinson often exposes, it wasn't that much of an unexpected start. What never fails to impress me is Rick Atkinson's skill in recreating the smells, the sounds, and the sights of war. He is unflinching in his descriptions of the brutality of death – "a few GIs were butchered . . . including one young trooper who dangled from a tree bough 'with eyes open, as though looking down at his own bullet holes' – but also beautifully descriptive in his scenes of battlegrounds, such as Hell's Beach of which he writes, "June airs usually wafted out of the south, but on this fraught morning the wind whistled from the northwest at almost twenty knots . . . running easterly or westerly depending on the tide. That Norman tide was a primordial force unseen in any previous amphibious landing. Rising twenty-three feet, twice daily it inundated the beach and everything on it at a rate of a vertical foot every eight minutes, then ebbed at almost an inch per second . . ." From OVERLORD to Berlin, this book perfectly intertwines battle logistics with the actions and reactions of Eisenhower, Montgomery, and other eminent commanders, and the sometimes hilarious, often tragic, experiences of ordinary soldiers. Atkinson doesn't have any scruples about criticizing the faulty decisions of the Army and the Navy when they deserve it, but he does it in the most objective way possible. His style, like usually, is fluid and highly compelling. His gift for recreating key conversations and capturing the smallest details (such as Montgomery pinching his cheek in a gesture of contemplation), as well as his impressive research, shine through the narrative. I don't have enough words to praise GUNS AT LAST LIGHT I've read very well-written books on the Normandy campaign, the Ardennes, MARKET GARDEN, Berlin – in short, most of the important events tackled in this work – but I have to acknowledge that no one does it like Atkinson. Outstanding. * Here is a list of great books covering some of the campaigns discussed in GUNS AT LAST LIGHT: Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble It Never Snows in September: The German View of Market-Garden and the Battle of Arnhem, September 1944 ...more |
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Oct 25, 2020
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Oct 25, 2020
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Hardcover
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0802129420
| 9780802129420
| 0802129420
| 4.45
| 2,259
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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it was amazing
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James Holland's work is a brilliant study of D-Day and the Allied invasion of France, one of the most important, at least for the Western powers, epis
James Holland's work is a brilliant study of D-Day and the Allied invasion of France, one of the most important, at least for the Western powers, episodes of World War II. Despite its enormous popularity, remarks Holland, little has been told about its "mechanics" – economics and logistics – so he sets out to examine the whole 77-day Normandy campaign at its tactical level. The objective of Operation OVERLORD, as the invasion of Normandy was codenamed, was to get foothold in France, build up sufficient weight of force, then drive the German armies out of the country, back into the Third Reich itself, and finally force them to surrender. In World War I, Germany had eventually signed an armistice because it had run out of supplies and cash and had no hope for winning. That moment had passed once again in 1941 when Operation BARBAROSSA, the Wehrmacht's invasion of the Soviet Union, had failed; yet, two and a half years on the Germans, in retreat and materially with no hope of ever regaining the initiative, were still fighting on. The Allies knew enough about Hitler and his monstrous regime to accept that Germany would most likely slug it out to the bitter end. They also recognized that, despite their decline, German forces still posed a major threat, and that if a cross-Channel invasion took place, it could not, under any circumstances, fail. That didn’t just mean a success on D-Day itself, when, if deception plans worked, they would achieve tactical surprise, explains Holland, but also on D plus 1, D plus 2, D plus 3 and D plus 4. Ensuring enough men and materiel were landed quickly enough to secure a lodgement before any concentrated enemy counter-attack could be mounted was the absolute number-one priority of Allied planners. This is why James Holland underscores how crucial the planning, organization and scale of OVERLORD were for the overall operation. "The level of detailed planning involved, and the many different strands that all needed to be pulled together by men and women of different nationalities is quite astonishing," writes Holland. As he argues further, it was not just a matter of training enough men and making enough rifles and machine guns, but of keeping them fed, supporting them with the right amount of medical assistance, fuel, clothing, ammunition. Between January and June 1944, for example, Britain alone produced 7 million 5-gallon jerry fuel cans. They then had to be stored, transported, and filled. It was also estimated that the Allies would need a staggering 8,000 tons of fuel every single day, so oil terminals, largely out of reach of the Luftwaffe by this stage of the war, were specially built around Liverpool and Bristol. Meanwhile, the fuel had to come from the US and the Caribbean and could only do so by ship across the Atlantic. Some 1,720,900 tons of fuel had reached Britain in the first five months of the year, three times the amount already used by Germany. Vast depots of munitions and food also had to be established, describes Holland. Enormous numbers of warehouses were designed, built and filled throughout Britain, but especially around the ports. Every port in southern England was crammed for the invasion, while enormous quantities of shipping continued to cross the Atlantic. Another key factor for the success of OVERLORD, asserts Holland, was air superiority – the troops needed it in order to land without interference from the air because for all the millions of men and massive amounts of weaponry and supplies being built up in Britain, shipping and port restrictions limited the number of men and amount of materiel that could be landed in Normandy on D-Day and the days immediately after. If the Germans were to have any chance of throwing them back into the sea, they would need to launch a coordinated counter-attack with all their mobile forces as quickly as possible. Intelligence had shown there were ten German panzer and mobile divisions in the West, so it was vital for the Allies that these units should be delayed and obstructed as much as possible in their efforts to reach Normandy by bombing every vehicle of theirs that moved during the nine weeks leading up to D-Day. "This was why winning air superiority was so important to the Allies," describes Holland the situation. "Without it, OVERLORD was a non-starter." (Meanwhile, like the rest of Nazi Germany, the Luftwaffe was in terminal decline. General der Flieger Adolf Galland mourned: "The fighter arm and the defence of the Reich, which had seen in the jet fighter the saviour from an untenable situation, now had to bury all hopes.") Yet, while those were definitely dark days for the Wehrmacht, the Allies had their own "headaches", continues Holland. One of them was the failure to take control over the French Resistance, on which the Allies relied and which Eisenhower hoped to arm. When it dawned on Général Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French and the self-proclaimed head of the French government-in-exile in London, that all liberated areas in France would be administered by the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories, AMGOT, which had run civil affairs in Italy, and he could hope neither to have a part in the invasion, nor to return to his country as its head, he flew into a rage, forbidding Général Pierre Koenig, a Free French commander who in 1942 had led their heroic stand against Rommel’s forces at Bir Hacheim in Libya, to have any more communications with Eisenhower or his staff. This was an additional problem for Eisenhower, who needed the cooperation of Koenig because of the role of the Résistance and other French forces in OVERLORD. Another "headache," narrates Holland, was the continual fear of an intelligence leak by which the Germans would learn when and where the invasion was to be launched. To keep the Germans guessing, an elaborate deception plan had been put into action, known collectively as Plan FORTITUDE. Every German agent attempting to infiltrate Britain had been caught, imprisoned and either turned or executed, but German intelligence was not aware of that. Double agents, overseen by the MI5, were busily spinning large amounts of false information in amongst the real but unimportant intelligence. As Holland explains, in the field of wartime intelligence, it unquestionably helped that the western Allies were democracies; in Nazi Germany, intelligence organizations tended to operate independently of one another and generally mistrusted each other – intelligence was power and so all too often jealously guarded. The British and Americans, on the other hand, pooled their intelligence very effectively. The code-breakers and cryptanalysts joined forces to swiftly and effectively pull together all the information they received. Even civilian help was sought: via the BBC, British civilians had also been asked to send in any postcards and photographs people might have kept from France before the war; millions poured in and those from Normandy were carefully put to one side and analysed to help create a clearer picture of the cities, towns, villages, beaches and countryside from the ground. Consequently, narrates Holland in his elaborate account of D-Day itself, while the Allies assaulted the Normandy coastline on June 6, 1944, the German reaction to what was happening was "a chaotic mess." Achieving tactical surprise had been such a key objective for the Allied planners that, despite the hints, leaks and signals, this was exactly what had happened. As General Miles Dempsey, the commander of British Second Army, pointed out, assuming surprise was achieved, D-Day would always favour the attacker. ‘Everything is in his favour,’ he noted. ‘Detailed plans, rehearsals, tactical surprise, morale.’ The Nazi command was, indeed, in disarray. The Allied forces made great progress. Nevertheless, D-Day was a very sad day, one of unfathomable violence. As Holland reveals, the success of the Allies was largely due to the fact that they had come up against the very old and the very young, German men recovered from debilitating wounds or unwilling to fight. "Once, there had been infantry divisions brimming with young, lean, fit, motivated men," describes the author, "but by this fifth year of the war they had gone, consumed by long years of fighting in far-off lands – in the Soviet Union, in North Africa, in the Mediterranean." Yet, converging on Normandy were not only many more Allied troops and supplies, but also among the very best troops in the entire German Armed Forces – the panzer divisions. While they weren't defending the coast, they were deployed inland, and still represented a potent threat to anyone taking them on – and especially in the difficult, hedgy terrain of Normandy. In the weeks to follow, there would be a massive concentration of panzer divisions in Normandy. D-Day, for all its awfulness, was only the first of what would stretch out for another seventy-six long, difficult and brutal days until the battle for Normandy was finally done. Holland continues his meticulously researched work with an overview of the rest of the campaign, exploring questions such as "Why was it taking the Allies so long if the claim that German soldiers were well-trained has been disproved?" In fact, as he explains, it was largely because it didn’t require a huge amount of training to sit in a foxhole behind a hedge and fire a machine gun, rifle, mortar or Panzerfaust while the Allied soldiers battled through the hedgerows. What was needed was discipline and courage, and the Germans, soldiers under a totalitarian regime, had these in abundance. He also disproves the myth that despite materiel wealth, the Allies were facing a German Army equipped with far better weaponry. According to him, in terms of small arms – pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns and machine guns – there really wasn’t much of a difference. In addition, some important innovations were adopted by both the Americans and British, including improved means of communication between infantry and armor; for instance, telephones had been placed on the back of tanks. Interestingly, Americans especially had a willingness to soak up new tactics and absorb lessons, narrates Holland. For all the concerns about how long it was taking them to grapple their way through the bocage, actually it was only around six weeks from D-Day until the middle of July and in that time they had captured the Cotentin and Cherbourg – all of which had been done in dense hedgerow country and with only gradually increased armour, artillery and tank destroyer support. "And what was six weeks in the big scheme of things? Before the invasion, Montgomery had reckoned it would take them ninety days to get to Paris. They were currently about halfway through that," remarks the author with a tinge of humor. James Holland's Normandy '44 is an outstanding work that clearly and compellingly covers its vast subject. The author does a wonderful job studying the operational level of the invasion and reinserting it into his narrative, thus creating an exciting picture of what actually happened in that corner of north-west France in 1944. Recommendable for all WWII buffs. ...more |
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0711030626
| 9780711030626
| 0711030626
| 4.17
| 493
| 1990
| Jan 01, 2007
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it was amazing
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Robert J. Kershaw's work is a history of the battles fought in southern Holland in September 1944 as part of Operation MARKET-GARDEN. The book is rema
Robert J. Kershaw's work is a history of the battles fought in southern Holland in September 1944 as part of Operation MARKET-GARDEN. The book is remarkable mainly because it recounts the events as seen through a human perspective and reflects the sights and experience of the ordinary German soldier. In September 1944, the Allies believed, despite stiffening German resistance, that one more good push after the debacle in Normandy would bring "the whole crumbling German defence edifice down." The front line was held by remnants of depleted Wehrmacht units. Allied thrusts were intended to improve local tactical positions, and deprive the weary German troops of any chance of rest in the line. "Some of the dead are so mutilated as to be unrecognizable," wrote a German sergeant. "One of our mates committed suicide by hanging. During the night British aircraft drop flares and attack with fighter bombers. We are in a hell of a fine place . . ." Kershaw creates fascinating descriptions of the structure and psychological outlook of the Wehrmacht units defending southern Holland in September 1944. Those soldiers had undergone quite the transformation from the armies that had manned the Atlantic Wall (an extensive system of coastal defenses and fortifications built by the Nazi between 1942-1944, along the coast of continental Europe and Scandinavia) in June. "A number of different 'types' could be identified among the rank and file," writes the author. Firstly, "and occupying paramount place", were the alte Hasen (veterans). Many had been previously wounded, some for the third or fourth time. These soldiers preferred after recuperation to return to the same unit, where they could reunite with friends and serve under known officers. Although small in number, this returnees were always greeted with pleasure. They were, describes Kershaw, "the most worthwhile reinforcements": veterans developed their own peculiar "front atmosphere" – a sense of established camaraderie intensified by danger – and, while working within the accepted duty framework, contributed the flexibility required to make an otherwise harsh and uncompromising system work. As Kershaw explains, thus they could generate the sense of "belonging" and "unit pride" essential to any combat formation that was to have any staying power. A second "element" were the young and inexperienced soldiers, born between 1924–26, now beginning to arrive in waves as replacements. Most were highly-motivated volunteers, convinced by their National Socialist education that they might achieve final victory. Few of them could boast even days of training, nothing to say of weeks. "Disciplined and willing, their conception of heroic service was to prove a bitter disappointment," comments the author. Older age groups were also appearing for the first time: fathers of families of up to 40 years old were mixed with previous exemptions from service, such as the non-essential factory workers, small shop-keepers, and petty officials who had hoped to remain in the Reich until the end of the war. After a short training they "fitted in", often looking after the youngsters in their units "with the same fatherly concern they might have shown their own offspring". Most problematic was the fourth group – the pressed or physically disabled soldiers. Pressed recruits, writes Kershaw, were virtually useless. Called "Hiwis", or Hilfswillige, they were Poles, Czechs or Alsace Germans often employed in logistic units. They were not suitable for combat and often deserted at the first available opportunity. The weirdest group, however, was born from Goering's unexpected announcement to Hitler that the Luftwaffe was suddenly able to offer 20,000 men to alleviate the acute manpower shortage problem. Recruited primarily into the Luftwaffe-controlled Fallschirmjäger regiments, they were the potential pilots, observers, navigators and signallers who were "emptied from the now redundant Luftwaffe training schools in Germany". As Goering believed, although completely untrained for their role, they were to fight tenaciously, making up for inexperience with courage and zeal. "This collection of fresh youth, picked from among the best manpower in Germany, had yet to experience the carnage and disillusionment of combat as infantry soldiers," recounts Kershaw. Until they did, they were to prove formidable opponents. But first of all they had to be trained. Unit commanders did what they could in the scant time available. Yet, among those recruits, freshly detached from airforce staffs, signals, or from airfields, only the few veterans available were in a position to impart at least a rudimentary infantry training before they departed to the front. As Kershaw further narrates, the difficulty with all the five types of soldiers entering service in September 1944 was to quickly train and assimilate them. Experience suggested that only unconditional obedience to orders enabled units to survive when engaged in protracted combat. Discipline was therefore harsh, "even draconian", whilst concepts of soldierly "duty and order" were extracted with no compromises. However, relays Kershaw, some varieties of unit, particularly the physically disabled, were "beyond all this": to qualify for admission into an "ear" battalion, for instance, a recruit had to prove he was deaf, had one or two ears missing or badly damaged, together with an additional minor disability such as a missing finger or rheumatism. Thus, the consequences at the front could be practically insurmountable: "Verbal orders could only be given by a frantic series of gestures. Inspecting the guard at night was a nerve-wracking and hazardous task since the men on duty could not hear anyone approach. Thus when suddenly confronted in the dark they fired first and attempted to find out who it was later. In one ear battalion, two sergeants of the guard had been killed this way shortly after the unit went into action. Casualties from artillery fire were also inordinately high because the men could not hear the sound of approaching shells and therefore took to shelter much too late," cites Kershaw POW interrogations. He also explores an important question – what motivated these disparate and untrained elements in the German army in September 1944 to fight on, when the war at this stage had so clearly been lost. The catastrophic defeats experienced by the Wehrmacht, both in the east and west, in the summer of 1944 served to emphasise the main factor holding it together until the end: an increasing awareness that the Homeland was now in danger. "This factor alone probably encouraged a will to resist more than the whole sum of National Socialist propaganda," comments Kershaw. Fears that the war may be lost were seldom stated openly, and certainly not mentioned by officers and NCOs to lower ranks; doubts about a happy outcome would have weakened resistance. While the only realistic happy outcome at this stage might be to defend the frontiers of the Reich and negotiate for the pre-war status quo, nobody could imagine the consequences of a total defeat. Even in the "shambles" of the Falaise pocket in Normandy, for example, a corporal had written to his wife on 18 August: ". . . All the other units pulled out without firing a shot and we were left to cover them . . . I wonder what will become of us. The pocket is nearly closed . . . I don't think I shall ever see my home again. However we are fighting for Germany and our children, and what happens to us matters not. I close with the hope that a miracle will happen soon and that I shall see my home again." In any case, the German soldier's immediate concern was survival. A universal worry was not death, but worse - that one may not come out of the war sound in mind and limb. "Nobody wanted to die a hero's death or suffer mutilation at this stage," asserts Kershaw. "For most, and particularly the veterans, the nerve-racking period was waiting in assembly areas prior to going into battle." The green replacements were blissfully ignorant. In SS-Corporal Wolfgang Dombrowski words, "we believed the war was probably over. But you must realise that we lower ranks were only 18 to 19 years old. Our officers were 24 to 29. Still youngsters! Life's deeper issues did not concern us too much. We were prepared to fight on." Aside from examining the German army of '44, Robert J. Kershaw provides a brilliant, meticulously detailed and graphic overview of Operation MARKET-GARDEN. While the reader won't find any information about the Allied logistics, the operation itself is excellently recreated through the eyes of the Nazi. On September 17, an Allied force of 1,545 transport planes and 478 gliders had taken off from airfields around Swindon, Newbury and Grantham. They were escorted by 1,131 fighters. "The stream was 16km wide and 150km in length. Nothing like it had ever been seen before," describes the author. Although the Germans in Holland, used to Allied bombardment, were not alarmed at first, the massive nature of this airborne onslaught gradually became apparent in radio messages from the front. SS dispatch rider Alfred Ziegler was wistfully regarding the landscape north of Arnhem. (He was, as he claimed, "an imaginative fellow, always contemplating things", a characteristic which as a soldier often got him into trouble.) When the transport planes lumbered into sight and began dropping parachutists, he jocularly remarked to his first Sergeant: "They're dropping from the heavens, and it won't be long before we're up there and join them!" Many, like SS-Lieutenant-Colonel Harzer, saw the British parachutes in the sky over Arnhem, but concluded that it could not be proved at this stage that a large-scale operation was underway, and "sat down quietly to lunch". SS-Captain Hans Moeller was out walking with his adjutant on "a Sunday with a wonderful blue sky and cirrocumulus clouds above the western horizon". He called to his companion to share his admiration of "such a beautiful spectacle". They were enjoying the stroll. However, as Moeller relates, the scene gradually took on a more sinister hue. "Screwing up their eyes", the commander and the adjutant tried to focus on a strange phenomenon taking shape in the distance: "These can't be cirrocumulus clouds, these are parachutes!" "Others stopped too, including civilians; everybody seemed captivated and gazed in that direction, where more and more 'fluffy clouds' were appearing," narrates Kershaw. Lieutenant Enthammer wondered too: "That cannot be. It never snows in September! They must be parachutists!" (Here we learn where the book's bizarre title is derived from.) Field Marshal Model, the commander of Army Group B, was sitting down to lunch with his staff in the Hotel Tafelberg in Arnhem. At about 14:00 his chief of staff Colonel von Tempelhoff excused himself to answer an urgent telephone call. As soon as he left "a succession of explosions accompanied by a deafening roar led to a mad scramble to take cover beneath the dining table," writes Kershaw. After a second series of explosions further away, everyone ran outside to see what was happening. The sky was "black with aircraft". Von Tempelhoff, "disheveled and evidently ruffled", shouted his report: "What an absolute swine! There are one to two parachute divisions right on top of us!" During the first hour or two, German commanders could not even begin to estimate the size and scope of the Allied operation. Moeller, "driving frantically to his divisional headquarters", tried to collect his thoughts: "What did the future have in store for us? What was going on?" "A total of 331 British aircraft with 319 gliders and 1,150 American planes towing 106 gliders had aid an airborne 'carpet', concentrating over three zones between Eindhoven and Arnhem," describes Kershaw. Over a period of one hour and 20 minutes, approximately 20,000 parachute and glider-borne infantry landed in good order far behind German lines. It certainly does not snow in September. The war had reached the Reich, and the blow moreover, had come as a total surprise... Robert J. Kershaw continues his work with an impressive hour-by-hour account of the battle for the Arnhem bridgehead, which is impossible to summarize in a review. He brilliantly intertwines the suffering of the soldiers caught up in MARKET-GARDEN, the anxiety of the German commanders, and the surprising twists of the sanguinary battle. What is important to note is that, as Kershaw argues, one of the greatest impacts the battle had upon the German homeland was the overwhelmingly growing awareness of Allied air superiority. The air-landings at Arnhem had changed the status of the lower Rhine communities, causing the area to become an active combat zone. At the beginning of the war Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering had declared "if ever an enemy plane flies over German soil, I shall henceforth be known by the name 'Hermann Meier[ 'meier' – administrator of a manor, independent peasant]'". "The Luftwaffe supremo had been Hermann Meier for a long time already," remarks Kershaw with a tinge of humor. "'Meier' lost even more credibility as the airborne armadas of 4,600 aircraft hove into sight." Whatever desperate counter-measures were fielded by the Luftwaffe, soldiers and population alike realised just how impotent the Luftwaffe had become. Largely grounded on airfields for lack of fuel, many aircraft were destroyed on the ground without a chance of fighting back. As far as the Germans were concerned, 'Meier's' cause had long since been given up as lost. IT NEVER SNOWS IN SEPTEMBER is truly an outstanding history. It has it all: graphic descriptions, insightful analysis, pulse-pounding action, a large set of rare photographs, and easily graspable maps. Robert J. Kershaw's style is compelling and fluid; his research is obviously extremely well-done. This book deserves nothing short of five stars. ...more |
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Paperback
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0306813963
| 9780306813962
| 0306813963
| 3.81
| 58
| 2005
| Aug 23, 2005
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it was amazing
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Greg Annussek's work is a suspenseful, entertaining historical account of Operation Oak, Hitler's infamous raid to save Benito Mussolini. On June 24, Greg Annussek's work is a suspenseful, entertaining historical account of Operation Oak, Hitler's infamous raid to save Benito Mussolini. On June 24, 1943, during a nightly session of the Grand Council of Fascism, "the lofty name given to a glorified gang of Mussolini's political henchmen", a band of rebellious subordinates staged a dramatic revolt. One after another, several of the Duce's top lieutenants criticized him and his disastrous conduct of the war. "You have imposed a dictatorship on Italy," declared Dino Grandi, the band's ringleader. "You have destroyed the spirit of our Armed Forces . . . For years when selecting someone among several candidates for an important post, you have invariably selected the worst." Indeed, the Duce's star had dimmed in recent months, and the crisis culminated with the Allied invasion of Sicily. Mussolini knew that an invasion of the Italian mainland could not be far off, and he was helpless to stop it. He had hoped to receive reinforcements from Hitler, but the Nazis' resources were already stretched to the limit, and the Führer was doubting the Italian will to fight. The Duce was desperately trying to secure the support of his fellow Axis partner Japan; in general, as Annussek comments, three years after plunging Italy into World War II at Hitler's urging, the Duce was scrambling to stave off the inevitable. Meanwhile, King Victor Emmanuel, in a league with a cabal of Italian generals, was the main mover behind a conspiracy designed to overthrow the dictator together with his Fascist regime. When Mussolini arrived at Villa Savoia, Victor Emmanuel's residence on the outskirts of the capital, for an audience with him, the king reminded the Duce that he is "the most hated man in Italy", tactlessly recited the chorus ("Down with Mussolini, murderer of the Alpini"), and announced that he is forming a new cabinet. To Mussolini's astonishment, the king named Pietro Badoglio, the former chief of Comando Supremo, who had been dimissed by the Duce in 1940 and who was considered his enemy, as the head of the new Italian government. The dictator was visibly crushed by the blow, but the biggest surprise was yet to come. After Victor Emmanuel escorted him to the door, the unsuspecting Mussolini – before he could even reach his car – was placed under arrest and spirited away to a secret location. The King had no intention to continue the bloody, destructive war, narrates Annussek. He was prepared to break away from the Axis and seek the mercy of the Allies as soon as the time was ripe, and the ex-Duce, reasoned he, might prove to be a valuable peace offering to the would be invaders. Victor Emmanuel was also planning to conceal his peace offensive from Hitler while reaffirming Italy's commitment to the Axis. Yet, the Führer was not be deceived so easily. He had become increasingly suspicious of the Italian royal house in recent months, and as soon as the news of the Italian coup reached the Wolf's Lair, he knew that Mussolini "must be rescued, speedily, otherwise they will deliver him up to the Allies." Why was Hitler so determined to save Mussolini? Greg Annussek compellingly explores the two dictators' relationship to show that while the two men weren't friends, they still had a strange, dysfunctional bond. Hitler showed surprising loyalty to Mussolini, but never trusted him. In fact, he was always worried that the Duce and Ciano, Mussolini's son in law and Foreign Minister of Italy, would inform the enemy of his intentions – as they sometimes did. "Every memorandum I wrote to the Duce," remarked the Führer, "immediately reached England. Therefore I only wrote things I absolutely wanted to get to England. That was the best way to hey something through go England quickly." Although the coup of July 25 was certainly a personal affront to Hitler, whose friendship with Mussolini was well-known, there was much more at stake. An Italian surrender could prove catastrophic for the Nazis, who were counting on their Mediterranean partner to help defend the southern front against the Allies. If the Italians suddenly threw open the gates to the enemy, Hitler feared, the British and American forces might attack the Third Reich itself. To foil the plans of Badoglio and the Allies, therefore, it was crucial to find the Duce and place him at the head of a restored Fascist government. Thus, Operation Oak was born, with Otto Skorzeny, General Student, the paratroopers, the failures, and the bombing of the airport. I will reveal nothing more in this review, though; I'd rather keep the suspense fresh for you. Annussek draws upon first hand accounts to piece together his gripping story of Mussolini's rescue. While some details remain unclear due to contradictory claims made by Rodl, Student, and the paratroopers (for example, whether Skorzeny had or had not played a major role in the planning of the operation), the book is clear, graphic, and much fun to read. Especially remarkable is Annussek's talent for recreating dialogues – they are engaging enough for a novel. ...more |
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0805062890
| 9780805062892
| 0805062890
| 4.35
| 15,115
| Oct 02, 2007
| Oct 02, 2007
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it was amazing
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The events of Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle, the second volume of his exceptional Liberation trilogy, take place after the exhilarating Allied vic
The events of Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle, the second volume of his exceptional Liberation trilogy, take place after the exhilarating Allied victory in North Africa. In Casablanca, at the last big strategy conference, the Allies had decided the next Anglo-American blow – Operation HUSKY, which was summarized by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the mixture of American and British commanders who directed the war for FDR and Churchill, as "an attack against Sicily . . . in 1943 with the target date as the period of the favorable July moon." As Atkinson reveals, American strategists were wary of waging war in the Mediterranean, but Roosevelt triggered the campaign by siding with Churchill and overruling his own generals, who argued that Allied forces should instead be concentrated in Britain "for a direct lunge across the English Channel toward Berlin." The American high command at Casablanca agreed to support HUSKY because capture of Sicily would (hopefully) divert Axis strength from the Soviet union ("Never forget there are 185 German divisions against the Russians. . . . We are not at present in contact with any," Churchill had dictated.), provide air bases for bombing Italy and other targets in occupied Europe, and (perhaps) cower weak-kneed Rome into abandoning the war by abrogating its "Pact of Steel" with Berlin, explains Atkinson. Yet, beyond Sicily there was no plan, no consensus on what to do with the immense Allied army now concentrating in the Mediterranean. For that reason, the Trident conference was convened in Washington, and Atkinson opens his work with a masterful account of it. As he argues, the essential of the Italian campaign was Allied strategy, or rather the diverging views on strategy between the USA and Britain. While British believed that it was imperative to use the great Allied armies to attack Italy, the Americans shrunk from the thought of putting large armies on Italian soil, a diversion that, according to Roosevelt, could "result in attrition for the United States and play into Germany's hands." It was far better, reasoned he, to continue staging a mighty host in Britain; the subsequent invasion, a "knockout punch" aimed at the Third Reich itself, should be decided upon as an operation for the spring of 1944. American general George Marshall also added that invading Italy would open a prolonged battle in the Mediterranean that would tie down men and equipment need elsewhere. Despite the disagreements, a compromise was finally achieved. Following Sicily, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as supreme commander in the Mediterranean, was to plan an operation that would be able to knock Italy out of the war and, at the same time, contain as many German forces as possible. The Americans agreed with the plan, narrates Atkinson, but problems materialized instanter: General George S. Patton's first airborne attack on the ancient Sicilian town of Gela, for example, was a spectacular fiasco. On the night of July 9-10, more than three thousand paratroopers were supposed to parachute onto several key road junctions outside Gela to forestall Axis counterattacks against the 1st Division landing beaches. However, much of the HUSKY planning had been done by officers who had no airborne expertise whatosever. Transport pilots had little experience at night navigation. Airborne units had yet to figure out how to drop a load heavier than three hundred pounds, much less a howitzer or a jeep. "An experimental 'para-mule' broke three legs; after putting the creature out of its misery, paratroopers used the carcass for bayonet practice," writes Atkinson with a tinge of dry humor. "Still, the ranks 'generally agreed that training proficiency had reached the stage where the mission was in the bag,’ wrote one officer, who later acknowledged 'possible overoptimism.'” While the blacked-out planes were approaching Sicily, the men inside were dozing, unaware that the strong wind had deranged the formations. Most of the pilots did not found the critical turn at Malta – Pilot Willis Mitchell, who had spied Malta and turned accordingly, found himself approaching Gela without thirty of the thirty-nine planes that were supposed to be behind him. More than a hundred paratroopers from this bobtailed formation landed close to the drop zone, but badly scattered and limped with jump injuries. Others – aware only that they were somewhere over land – jumped from fifteen hundred feet at two hundred miles per hour, rather than from the preferred six hundred feet at one hundred miles per hour. Smoke and dust from earlier bombing obscured key landmarks and further befuddled the navigators. Some mistook Syracuse for Gela, fifty miles to the west. "Machine-gun and antiaircraft fire ripped through the formations and the descending paratroopers, killing some before they hit the ground," Atkinson describes the havoc that ensued. The 82nd Airborne commander, Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, lamented this “miscarriage”, caused as much by bad luck as by overweening ambition: “At war’s end, we still could not have executed that first Sicily mission, as laid on, at night and under like conditions.” On top of that, throughout the whole campaign, the terrain hugely favored the defender, Hitler was bent on fighting for every meter north of Naples, the conditions, winter and summer, happened to be much harsher than anyone had anticipated (Lucian Truscott's 3rd Infantry Division "covered thirty miles a day or more in blistering heat"), and – argues Atkinson – the American attitude toward this appallingly costly invasion was half-hearted anyway. As he further observes, the U.S Army "would convict 21,000 deserters during World War II, many of them in the Mediterranean." Another big problem facing the Allies was the slow buildup of troops and matériel caused by American insistence that the formation of the 15th Air Force take priority over troops on the ground, thus using much of the limited transport. In fact, reveals Atkinson, one of the main reasons the U.S chiefs were persuaded to support the invasion of Italy was the promise of airfields from which the strategic bombing of Germany could be intensified. One of the most remarkable aspects of "The Day of Battle" is its author's gift for sketching brilliantly observed character portraits, graphic enough to make the reader feel as if he knows the described historical figures personally. Compelling, for instance, is his description of General Bernard Montgomery, who commanded British forces in HUSKY. Montgomery was a man of contradictions, writes Atkinson, that would define him throughout the whole Mediterranean campaign. “What a headache, what a bore, what a bounder he must be to those on roughly the same level in the service,” a BBC reporter wrote of Montgomery. “And at the same time what a great man he is as a leader of troops.” The general carried from World War I the habits of meticulous preparation, reliance on firepower, and a conception of his soldiers “not as warriors itching to get into action, which they were not, but as a workforce doing an unpleasant but necessary job." He also accumulated various tics and prejudices: a habit of repeating himself, an antipathy to cats, a tendency to exaggerate his battlefield progress, "an obsession for always being right”, and the habit of telling his assembled officers, “There will now be an interval of two minutes for coughing. After that there will be no coughing.” No battle commander kept more regular hours, describes him Atkinson further; he was awakened with a cup of tea by a manservant at 6:30 a.m, and went to bed promptly at 9:30 p.m. Admirable is the sympathy with which Rick Atkinson regards the frontline troops and unfortunate civilians who suffered from the miscalculations made at the top. Among the book's most powerful passages are those depicting the "hellhole" Naples became, the desperate battle for San Pietro, and the bloody Rapido crossing. The sounds, smells, and pointlessness of war penetrate his powerful narrative. "Perhaps only a battlefield before the battle is quieter than the same field after the shooting stops," writes he of the aftermath of the Salerno landings. "The former is silent with anticipation, the later with a pure absence of noise." The Day of Battle offers a gripping, cinematic account of the Sicily and Italian campaign, which traces the American and British troops, struggling against fierce German resistance and many other obstacles, from torrid Sicily to Rome. When the Allies eventually prevailed, even the Italians kept asking: "Why did it take you so long?" ...more |
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0714649333
| 9780714649337
| 0714649333
| 4.08
| 858
| 1999
| Sep 29, 1999
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liked it
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This book is a collection of materials related to the battle for the Kursk bridgehead, one of the greatest battles of the Great Patriotic War. In July
This book is a collection of materials related to the battle for the Kursk bridgehead, one of the greatest battles of the Great Patriotic War. In July 1943 forces of the Voronezh and the Central Front, led by the Red Army's Supreme High Command, won a brilliant victory at the Battle for Kursk, and the Nazi high command's final attempt to achieve a large-scale strategic success on the Eastern Front failed. While I disagree with the editor's statement that Kursk was the pivotal point of Hitler's war in the east – in fact, it occurred as early as Summer 1941, when Operation Barbarossa failed to reach its ultimate goal – the strategic results of the Battle for Kursk undeniably significantly influenced all subsequent Red Army offensive operations. To better orient the reader, the chief editor of the collection, Major-General P.P. Vechnyi, points out one main feature of the battle: the Soviet defenses in the Kursk bridgehead "had the aim of exhausting and bleeding dry the enemy's enormous advancing forces so as to shift subsequently to a decisive offensive by introducing fresh reserves." Indeed, as the collected materials show, this principle defined the overall structure of defense, the operational formation of forces, the quantity of equipment, the maneuver of reserves, as well as the methods of conducting the defensive operation in each of the fronts. Another thing Vechnyi underscores, however, is that the main aim of this collection is to acquaint generals and officer cadres with "this most important and highly instructive operation." Mind my words: his is not an empty warning. While the collected materials value is indisputable – they do offer a incredibly comprehensive picture of the Soviet logistics, operations (air and land), engineering support, telephone communications, and maneuvers with remarkable downrightness and without any propagandistic glossing-over – the book's style is very dry and the amount of tables with statistics is overwhelming. Furthermore, I, being a layman, found the complex maps extremely confusing; they all lack much needed explanations. In summary, the collection is a valuable addition to any WWII buff's library because it sheds light on the Red Army's side of the Battle of Kursk, but it is not for the faint of heart. Prepare yourself not for reading, but for ploughing through it. 3.5 stars ...more |
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1408822415
| 9781408822418
| 1408822415
| 4.17
| 2,361
| Aug 30, 2011
| Jan 01, 2012
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it was amazing
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Anna Reid's book is a riveting account of the siege of Leningrad, the deadliest blockade in human history, which lasted from September 1941 to January
Anna Reid's book is a riveting account of the siege of Leningrad, the deadliest blockade in human history, which lasted from September 1941 to January 1944 and claimed an appallingly heavy toll on human life – three quarters of a million civilians. While briefly outlining operation Barbarossa and the German advance towards Leningrad in the beginning of her work, Reid's utmost focus is the unfathomable depths of human suffering experienced by Leningraders. Although all people of the city over the age of thirty were no strangers to death, starvation, exile, or impoverishment – they had already lived through three wars (WWI, the Russian Civil War, and the Winter War with Finland), two famines (the first during the Civil War and the second the collectivization famine of 1932-1933, caused by Stalin's cruel seizure of peasant farms), and two major waves of political terror – the siege was unprecedented in the number of its deaths, physical and spiritual. Anna Reid does not overlook the question "Why did this happen?" which I was searching an answer for. In the beginning of her work, she explains that Stalin, who expected a German invasion sooner or later, still did not, and could not, anticipate the timing of Operation Barbarossa. As the Russian-Polish border was overrun immediately and the Red Army found itself defending the major cities of Russia herself, Leningrad fell main victim of this unpreparedness. When in mid-September 1941 the German and Finnish armies cut the city off from the rest of the Soviet Union, over half million civilians were evacuated. However, 2.5 million civilians remained trapped within the city. Why did more people not get away in time? Reid reveals the reasons behind this "mouse trap": to blame was a mixture of deliberate government policy and Leningraders' own faulty decision-making, aggravated by fear. From the outset of the war, policy was to prioritize industrial evacuation over that of non-working population. The railway network, Reid explains, became chaotically overloaded because identical raw materials were simultaneously shipped in and out of the city, and some factories were dismantled when it was already too late for them to leave. Even more disastrous was the children evacuation program. The Leningrad soviet announced the evacuation of 392,000 children with their schools, nurseries or children's homes, but without their parents, which of course, proved to be extremely unpopular. Yelena Skryabina, one of the diarists whose accounts Reid draws upon, wrote, "The idea of separating from [five-year-old] Yura is so horrible that I am ready to do anything to keep him. I have decided to evade the order. I won't give my son for anything." Many other parents successfully evaded the order. Furthermore, it turned out that the evacuated children were put right in the path the advancing German army. "When we arrived in the village they put is in a cottage," fifteen-year-old Klara Rakhman wrote. "Oh yes, I quite forgot, while we were in the truck a German plane flew right overhead. That's evacuation for you!" The awful rumors about the muddled children's evacuation were not the only reason why civilians chose not to leave Leningrad, narrates Reid. Many were tied to the city by relatives. A friend of Skryabina offered her a post as governess to a factory kindergarten, which was leaving for Moscow region. When she telephoned a day later to say that all plans had fallen through, however, Skryabina was actually relieved: "My agonizing problem has been resolved by circumstances. . . . I no longer have to worry about abandoning Mama and Nana; there will be no parting." This was the beginning of the blockade. The mistakes had been made, the tragedy would inevitably play out. Yet, at the time few anticipated a siege: either the Germans would quickly be pushed back, it was assumed, or Leningrad would fall. Some, like fiercely anti-Bolshevik Lydia Osipova watched with cynical detachment as friends and acquaintances tried do decide what to do. On 17 August she wrote about a split that had arisen between "patriots" and "defeatists": "'Patriots' try to get themselves evacuated as fast as they can, and the latter, including us, try by every means possible to evade it." Like many, she disbelieved reports of Nazi atrocities. "Of course," she wrote in her diary. "Hitler isn't the beast that our propaganda paints him." Hunger, Reid narrates, set in almost immediately, though. Failure to lay in adequate stores of food and fuel before the siege ring closed was due to the same lethal mixture of denial, disorganization and carelessness as the failure to evacuate the population. While the most efficient administration couldn't have prevented shortages, errors and the leadership's refusal to face reality made the situation much worse than it need have been, argues Reid. Most visibly, the authorities failed to redistribute food stores so as to minimize the risk of loss in air raids. As Reid demonstrates, the result was the "spectacular" Badayev warehouse fire of 8 September, which Leningraders believed to have destroyed almost the whole of the city's food stocks – the air is described as filled with the smell of burning ham and sugar. "It was when life ended, and existence began" writes Marina Yerukhmanova, the nineteen-year-old descendant of Peter the Great's favourite Alexander Menshikov. As early as October the police began to report the appearance of emaciated corpses on the streets. "Deaths quadrupled in December, peaking in January and February at 100,000 per month. By the end of what was even by Russian standards a savage winter . . . cold and hunger had taken somewhere around half a million lives," describes Reid the nightmarish months of mass death, on which her book concentrates. She masterfully and in stunning detail conveys what it was like to live through such hell. Many diaries she's drawn upon peter out in January or February, their authors too weak to write or at loss for words. Others condense into curt records of relatives' deaths and of food obtained and consumed. The siege winter meant existence narrowed to the "iron triangle" of home, bread queue and water source. Isolated in their dark and freezing flats, reliant on home-made lamps and scavenged fuel, Leningraders compared themselves to Robinson Crusoe, or even considered him a lucky man in comparison. Pre-war life seemed like a distant fairy-tale. Most shocking was the narrowing of emotions that came together with the narrowing of the physical world. Anna Reid cites survivors who describe themselves as having been "like wolves" or more commonly "like stones" – drained of feeling or interest except that of prolonging their own survival. One Aleksandr Boldyrev heard that his neigbor, "grown completely old and dilapidated in the last couple of months", had collapsed outside on the pavement and been dragged indoors by passing soldiers, who didn't want people to die outside because that meant they'd have more "flowers to pick up" (a dark-humored term for collecting corpses from the streets). "He's still there, in the stairwell, apparently dying. But I didn't go in, and went to get lunch," writes Boldyrev. "The journey there and back uses up all my strength, my little daily reserve." Yet, others retained a tinge of their humaneness, sharing their furniture with neighbors to use as fuel. For almost everyone, however, it was impossible to think about anything except for food – obtaining it, preparing it, calculating how long it could be made to last. Leningraders, Reid narrates, also resorted to the most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. On sale in the street markets was "Badyev earth", dug from underneath the remains of the burned Badyev warehouses and supposedly containing charred sugar. Another aspect of the siege Reid touches is crime. Murder for food or ration cards became frequent. Most Leningraders feared attacks by strangers on a lonely street, but sadly, the cases detailed by the NKVD are of people killing family members, colleagues, and neighbors. Reid presents such pathetic examples as that of an eighteen-year-old who killed his two younger brothers with an axe and was arrested while trying to kill his mother. Questioned, he explained that he had lost his job, and with it his worker's ration card, when caught in a petty theft, and that he wanted to use his brothers' coupons. Most notorious and hair-raising of the blockade crimes was cannibalism. As Reid shows, however, the real cannibals of Leningrad were nothing like the terrible pictures our mind may conjure upon hearing this gruesome word. While there are incidents like those of a twenty-six-year-old man, who had murdered his eighteen-year-old roommate for food, the overwhelming number of cases was not of людоедство ("person-eating") but of трупоедство ("corpse-eating"). Those cannibals subsisted on easily accessible corpses, such as those of colleagues and relatives who died of starvation: a woman factory worker shared the corpse of her eleven-year-old son with two female friends; a cleaner shared the body of her husband with her unemployed neighbor. "The typical Leningrad 'cannibal', therefore," concludes Reid, "was neither the Sweeney Todd of legend nor the bestial lowlife of Soviet history writing, but an honest, working-class housewife . . . scavenging for provinces to save her family." The following two siege winters, as Reid reveals, were less deadly, mostly because there were fewer mouths left to feed. In January 1943 fighting cleared a land corridor out of the city, through which the Soviets were able to build a railway line and supply provisions. Nevertheless, mortality remained high, taking one in every three or four of the pre-siege population, by January 1944, when the Wehrmacht finally began its retreat to Berlin. In her meticulously researched work, Anna Reid spares us none of the ghastly details of the epic siege of Leningrad. Her book graphically conveys the unspeakable horror of the blockade through the eyes of Leningraders themselves, especially through those of strong, courageous women, such as Vera Inber, poets Olga Bergholz and Anna Akhmatova, and many others. An outstanding study with a unique approach to its subject. Note: Keep in mind that the logistics of the blockade – the besieging of the city by Nazi forces, the routes of delivery of provisions, and the Soviet defense – are not covered in this study. Otherwise, it is highly recommendable. ...more |
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3.83
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it was amazing
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