World War II: The Autobiography Read online

  Seaman Kim Malthe-Bruun

  ITALIAN PARTISANS TAKE THEIR REVENGE, TRIESTE, 13 APRIL 1945

  Geoffrey Cox, British Eighth Army

  HOLOCAUST: A REPORTER VISITS BELSEN, 19 APRIL 1945

  Richard Dimbleby BBC

  THE GERMAN ARMY SURRENDERS, LÜNEBERG HEATH, 3 MAY 1945

  Field Marshal Montgomery

  VICTORY IN EUROPE CELEBRATIONS, 8 MAY 1945

  Mollie Panter-Downes, London

  Part VII The Road to Berlin: The Eastern Front, February 1943-May 1945

  INTRODUCTION

  “CONCENTRATED SLAUGHTER”: A RUSSIAN CAVALRY AND TANK ATTACK, KORSUN, UKRAINE, 17 FEBRUARY 1943

  Major Kampov, Red Army Officer

  CITADEL: TANK BATTLE AT KURSK, 4 JULY 1943

  General von Mellenthin, Wehrmacht

  WOUNDED SS TROOPS, CHERKASSY, FEBRUARY 1944

  Leon Degrelle, Legion Wallonie

  ONE MAN’S WAR: AN UNFORTUNATE DAY ON THE EASTERN FRONT, JULY 1944

  Lieutenant Zhuravlev Alexander Grigoryevich, Red Army

  WARSAW UPRISING: A PARTISAN GROUP IS TRAPPED IN THE SEWERS, 26 SEPTEMBER 1944

  Anonymous fighter, -“Polish Home Army”

  GERMANS FLEEING THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE, DANZIG, 9 MARCH 1945

  Hans Gliewe, schoolboy

  GOTTERDAMMERUNG: HITLER PLANS THE DESTRUCTION OF GERMANY, 18 MARCH 1945

  Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, Chief of the General Staff

  A MEETING WITH HITLER, APRIL 1945

  Gerhardt Boldt, Wehrmacht

  THE BATTLE OF BERLIN: SOVIET GUNS OPEN FIRE, 20 APRIL 1945

  Colonel-General Chuikov, Eighth Guards Army

  THE BATTLE OF BERLIN, 24 APRIL-1 MAY 1945

  Anonymous German Staff Officer

  THE FALL OF BERLIN: A CITIZEN’S VIEW, 26 APRIL-1MAY 1945

  Claus Fuhrman, Berliner

  BERLIN: SS FANATICS HOLD OUT AT THE REICHSTAG, 28 APRIL-1 MAY 1945

  Anonymous German soldier

  ORDER OF THE DAY NO. 369, 9 MAY 1945

  Stalin, Marshal of the Soviet Union

  Part VIII Setting Sun: The War in the Pacific, July 1942-September 1945

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DEFENCE OF HENDERSON FIELD, GUADALCANAL, 24 OCTOBER 1942

  Sergeant Mitchell Paige, USMC

  THE KOKODA TRAIL, NEW GUINEA, SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1942

  George H. Johnston, War Correspondent

  BEHIND ENEMY LINES: DEATH OF A FRIEND, BURMA, 3 APRIL 1943

  Bernard Fergusson, Commander No. 5 Column “Chindits”

  AN ALLIED INTELLIGENCE OFFICER IS EXECUTED BY THE JAPANESE, NEW GUINEA, 29 MARCH 1943

  Anonymous Japanese soldier

  HOME FRONT: INTERNMENT OF JAPANESE AMERICANS, 1943

  Iwao Matsushita

  “ONE FOR EVERY SLEEPER”: FORCED LABOUR ON THE BURMA-SIAM RAILWAY, MAY 1943

  Jeffrey English, British POW

  A POSTCARD FROM A POW, 1943

  Thomas Smithson, British Army

  A MARINE CORPS PILOT IS SHOT DOWN, BOUGAINVILLE, 3 JANUARY 1944

  Gregory Boyington, VMF-214 Sguadron, USMC

  ONE MAN’S WAR: THE ARAKAN FRONT, BURMA, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1944

  Troop-Sergeant dive Branson, Royal Armoured Corps

  THE SKIRMISH AT ADMIN BOX, BURMA, 8 FEBRUARY 1944

  Brigadier Geoffrey C. Evans, 9th Brigade, 5th Division

  CLOSE-QUARTER FIGHTING, BURMA, MARCH 1944

  John Masters, Long Range Penetration Unit (Chindits)

  AN ENGLISH OFFICER ESCAPES THE JAPANESE, MALAYA, MAY 1944

  Colonel F. Spencer Chapman, 5th Seaforth Highlanders

  LIFE IN A JAPANESE POW CAMP, JUNE 1944-AUGUST 1945

  Anton Bilek, USAAF

  BAMBOO, DYSENTERY, LEECHES: A MARAUDER ON THE JUNGLE PATH, JULY 1944

  Charlton Ogburn, 5307th Composite Unit

  ASSAULT INTO HELL: A MARINE LANDS ON PELELIU, 15 SEPTEMBER 1944

  Eugene B. Sledge, 1st Marine Division, USMC

  ONE MAN’S WAR: A MARINE WRITES HOME, 25 SEPTEMBER 1944

  Lieutenant Richard Kennard, 5th Regiment, 1st Marine Division

  MARINES STORM A PILLBOX, NGESEBUS, 28 SEPTEMBER 1944

  Eugene B. Sledge, 1st Marine Division, USMC

  KAMIKAZE ATTACKS, LEYTE GULF, 27 NOVEMBER 1944

  Seaman First Class, James J. Fahey US Navy

  “A FRIGHTFUL FATE”: JAPANESE SOLDIERS HOLD OUT IN THE MANGROVE SWAMPS OF RAMREE, BURMA, 17 JANUARY-22 FEBRUARY 1945

  Captain Eric Bush RN, SNO Advanced Force “W”

  THE TUNNELS OF IWO JIMA, FEBRUARY-MARCH 1945

  USMC Correspondents

  THE DAGGER DIVISION TAKES MANDALAY, 20 MARCH 1945

  John Masters, Chindit

  OKINAWA: AN INFANTRYMAN’S NIGHTMARE, APRIL 1945

  John Garcia, 7th Division US Infantry

  “I SHALL FALL LIKE A BLOSSOM FROM A RADIANT CHERRY TREE”: A KAMIKAZE PILOT’S LAST LETTER, MAY 1945

  Flying Petty Officer First Class Isao Matsuo, Special Attack Corps

  THE ALLIES DECIDE TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB ON JAPAN, POTSDAM, 25 JULY 1945

  President Harry S. Truman

  HIROSHIMA, 6 AUGUST 1945

  Colonel Tibbets, USAAF

  NAGASAKI, 9 AUGUST 1945

  Tatsuichiro Akizuki

  Epilogue: The Execution of Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg, 1946

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD

  World War II was the most destructive conflict in history. More than 50 million people were killed. The conflagration touched six continents and all the globe’s oceans. It was the Second World War only in chronology; in everything else, the war of 1939–45 outdid that of 1914–18.

  The pages following bear witness to that war. They are not a shot-by-shot history of the 1939–45 conflict, but the communication of what it felt like to live and fight in that time – be it as a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, a GI in a foxhole on Okinawa, a Frontsoldaten in the inferno of Stalingrad, a woman worker at an aircraft plant, a tank gunner at Sidi Rezegh, or a US Marine in boot camp. Some of the witnesses are leaders of men (and women), but in general I have selected the ground-eye view of events.

  I have also consciously chosen words of testimony; that is, accounts of the holocaust against the Jews. The holocaust is the cruellest proof of the barbarity of Nazism. It reminds us that World War II was not a mere military happenstance, but a struggle for the soul of civilization. In the words of Herbert Mitang, for the Allies at least, World War II was “the good war”. An Axis victory would have turned the world's clock to a moral Middle Ages.

  This is not to say that the Allies were saints (think of the RAF’s fire-bombing of Dresden; racial segregation in the US’s armed forces), nor all the Axis forces sinners. It is just their masters were. What follows is the war of 1939–45 in all its brutality, glory, cock up, courage, inspiration and destruction.

  Originally I had intended to include eyewitness accounts of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the slide of the world into war, but even a book this size struggles to contain the main events, campaigns and theatres of war itself. (Some omissions are inevitable, but I hope few.) A little context is therefore in order.

  Musing on the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which concluded World War I, Marshal Foch of France remarked, “It is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.” The Marshal was right to the year. The terms of Versailles were punitive, demeaning, and left Germany shorn of considerable amounts of territory, money, the right to bear arms and, in the war-guilt clause, national honour. The new Germany was rackety and ashamed, thus wide open to a demagogue who promised economic stability, the restoration of German pride and geopolitical position. A more enlightened Treaty might have left Adolf Hitler as a small-time beerhall orator in Munich.

  Instead Hitler assumed power in January 1933, and wasted little time in installing dictatorship at home and land-grabs abroad. This should not have surprised anyone, for he
was as bad as his word, as given in his 1925 manifesto, Mein Kampf. Unfortunately, Hitler’s bent for territorial acquisitions – the demilitarized Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia – tended to be encouraged by the democratic powers of Europe under the naive policy of “appeasement”. The reasons for appeasement were various: some in Europe saw Hitler as a useful bulwark against Stalin’s Russia, some hoped that by sacrificing Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s territorial appetite would be satisfied.

  After so many green lights, it was with some surprise that, in September 1939, Hitler found France and Britain determined to defend the territorial integrity of Poland. Because, as even the most gullible Anglo-French politician had been finally forced to concede, there was no limit to Hitler’s demands. He had to be stopped sometime. Poland wasn’t the issue; it was the pretext.

  The Nazi invasion of Poland allowed the German Army to hone its theory and practice of “blitzkrieg” (lightning war), the connected use of air and armour in decentralized offensives. The Wehrmacht of early World War II was arguably the most accomplished professional army of all time, not least in the calibre and training of its officers and NCOs. Moreover, behind the Wehrmarcht, the armed SS, the Kriegsmarine and (which in combined strength numbered 2.75 million at the outset of war, rising to 6 million at peak) stood an economy geared to military endeavour: in 1939 Germany poured an extraordinary 20 per cent of its gross national product into armaments. Small wonder, then, that when the Wehrmacht turned west and north in May 1940 it bested France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark, plus the British expeditionary forces sent to aid them, in such dramatic fashion. The Wehrmacht of 1940 accomplished the invasion of France in six weeks; the army of the Kaiser hadn’t managed it in four years. By the end of June 1940 Britain was the only force in the world still standing against Hitler and Mussolini. A prospective invasion of the UK was then rebuffed in the air “Battle of Britain”, but that country was powerless to lift the Nazi occupation of mainland western Europe and was hard pressed in the theatres where it did conflict with the Axis, North Africa and Greece. Conversely, the Kriegsmarine was unable to break the power of the Royal Navy in the sea lanes around Europe.

  If the war had continued with these combatants only, it might have lasted indefinitely. However, 1941 brought more nations to the fray. On 22 June Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The attack was largely compelled by ideology – Hitler wanted lebensraum (living space) for Germans in the east – although the Russian oil reserves in the Caucasus tantalized. Despite the Wehrmacht great victories, reaching to the very suburbs of Moscow in late 1941, the Russian campaign never boded well. Hitler expected the Soviet Union to collapse like a rotten shack (“You have only to kick the door in”, he informed one field marshal), whereas even the considerable military ineptitude of Stalin was unable to undo the Soviet Union’s natural strengths: almost unimaginable manpower and limitless space. The Red Army lost some 1.75 million men in the first two months of fighting, but kept finding more reserves. Wehrmacht General Haider lamented in the War Staff diary in August 1941: “We reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360.” Even the Red Army’s retreats caused the Ostheer, as the Wehrmacht in the East was termed, severe problems, since they overextended its lines of communication and supply. More, Nazi brutality rebounded spectacularly in Russia; had Hitler urged his generals to promulgate the war there “with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness”. In practice, this meant that Russian prisoners of war were routinely massacred. The effect on the Red Army was to make it fight harder. For what had it to lose?

  Then, of course, there was the Russian winter. Like Napoleon, another adventurer in Russia, Hitler was unable to comprehend the Russian winter, with its temperatures touching minus 40 degrees. The Ostheer was unequipped for winter fighting and troops resorted to stuffing newspaper in their uniforms. By early December 1941 the German Army had ground to a halt. Then the Russians counter-attacked. In summer 1942, the Germans would again go on the offensive but any real chance of delivering a KO blow to Russia had long since disappeared.

  This was not only due to the Soviet Union’s tenacity, demography and geography. Its factories were beginning to outproduce Germany in war materiel. Additionally, Russia was also being supplied with armaments by Britain and, from December 1941, the Allies’ new partner, the United States.

  The United States entered World War II on 7 December, when its naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked by Japanese fighter-bombers. The attack wasn’t quite out of the blue, for the USA and Japan had rattled sabres following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. Determined to stop further Japanese expansion in the Pacific – which it saw as its sphere of interest – America imposed a trade embargo on Japan in July 1941. This embargo cut off nine-tenths of Japan’s oil supply.

  Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was not its only assault of 7 December. There were attacks too on Wake, Midway and Guam islands, Hong Kong, Malaya and the Philippines. Within three months the Japanese had conquered all these places (with the exception of Midway), plus the Dutch East Indies and were well on their way to subduing Burma. Yet Japan’s victories were flashy rather than substantial. Four US aircraft carriers escaped the “day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor. Japanese garrisoning of the new possessions was woefully thin.

  In truth there was little or no prospect of Japan winning a war against the US, let alone the US and the British Empire. Wars, at base, are won by those with the big pockets. The US was the richest and most dynamic power in the world; ergo, it was likely to win any conflict in which it participated. In 1943, for example, the US produced 37.5 billion dollars worth of armaments. Japan produced 4.5 billion.

  Japan was not the only country to feel the powerful effects of the US war economy for, in a fit of madness Hitler declared war on the US on 11 December 1941. By this act, what were essentially two wars – Hitler’s in Europe, Tojo’s in the Far East – became joined as one – with the Axis on the losing side. The intervention of the US in the conflict meant, in Churchill’s words, that the rest of the war was “merely the proper application of overwhelming force”. Unfortunately, the Axis powers, with the exception of Italy (which changed sides in 1943) either did not realize this or did not care. Indeed, all the war’s most ferocious battles came after December 1941: Stalingrad, Kursk, El Namein, D-Day, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Gassino. Despite being massively outnumbered, fighting on three fronts, the Wehrmacht of 1944 was still inflicting a superior casualty rate on its enemies; on the eastern Front it was killing five Russian soldiers for every one of its own lost. Japanese resistance was fanatical, buoyed by the belief that capitulation and defeat were slanders on a man’s character.

  But Churchill was right. After December 1941 the end of the war was never seriously in doubt. American productive capabilities were simply overwhelming. In 1943 alone, the US produced 85,898 aircraft; Germany and Japan produced 42,300. And, of course, to the US side of the balance sheet was to be added the 65,863 aircraft produced by the the USSR and Britain.

  The only possible salvation for the Axis side would have been the deployment of atomic weapons. That Germany in particular failed to develop atomic weaponry, given its general technological wizardry in World War II (Me 262 jets, V-l and V-2 rockets), is notable. And even ironic. For prominent among the brains behind the Manhattan project, the US’s atomic programme, were German Jewish scientists who had fled Hitler’s racial purging.

  It hardly needs to be added that the Nazis’ failure to build the A-bomb was freedom’s salvation.

  Part One

  Blitzkrieg

  The War in Europe, September 1939-October 1940

  INTRODUCTION

  The Second World War began at 04.45 hours on 1 September 1939, when German panzers rolled into Poland. Hitler’s previous annexations had met only with appeasement by the democracies of Europe, but Polish territorial integrity had been explicitly guaranteed by Britain and France. This
time there was no climbdown and generalized hostilities commenced on 3 September.

  Although units of the Polish army fought determinedly, they had small chance against a German army superior in numbers, equipment and military philosophy: the campaign in Poland was the Germans’ first proper demonstration of the coordinated air-armoured warfare they called ‘blitzkrieg’ (lightning war). As if this was not enough, Poland found itself stabbed in the back, or at least on its eastern frontier: the Soviet Union, by the terms of a secret treaty with Germany, invaded Poland on 17 September. By 6 October Polish resistance was finished. Not yet sated, the Soviet Union determined upon invasion of Finland, sending a million men into the “The Winter War”. For three months 170,000 Finnish soldiers resisted the Bear before Finland sued for peace. Their losses were 25,000 dead; the Soviet Union’s 200,000.

  Aside from some skirmishing on the Franco-German border, elsewhere in Europe the war slipped into quiescence. People talked of the “Phoney War” and more propaganda leaflets were dropped than bombs. British troops sang a hit song, “We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried line”. Yet, behind front lines the war was ticking away. In April 1940 it exploded. Deciding, after a spate of naval embarrassments, that the territorial waters of Norway should be denied to the Allies, Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark. The Norwegians, aided by British and French forces, resisted bitterly until late May 1940, when the Allies withdrew their troops through Narvik. By then the main show had started and these troops were needed at home: Germany had invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. To the horror and dismay of the French, the Wehrmacht inconsiderately ignored their magnificent concrete Maginot Line and wheeled into Gaul via Belgium and the supposedly “impenetrable” Ardennes, and then sped towards the Channel ports. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the French First Army became isolated in the north of France, and were evacuated in “the miracle of Dunkirk” between 29 May and 4 June. By 21 June France had fallen to the Stuka, the panzer and the soldat of Germany. The humbling of France had taken a mere six weeks.