Armageddon (103 page)

Insofar as any conflict in history has been waged between the forces of virtue and those of evil, it was the Second World War. Dwight Eisenhower could justly entitle his memoirs
Crusade in Europe.
Yet Soviet involvement in the Grand Alliance posed greater moral issues than the Western allies found it convenient to recognize at the time, and than some historians have acknowledged since. Degrees of evil are never easily measured, yet Stalin seems at least as great a monster of the twentieth century as Hitler. The Soviet dictator’s crimes have incurred less popular censure only because most people in the West know less about them, and have never seen films and photographs of Soviet mass murders, of the kind hideously familiar in the case of Nazi crimes. Allied victory in 1945 was deeply compromised by Anglo-American dependence upon one tyranny to encompass the destruction of another. This was not merely a political and moral issue, but a military one also. The democracies found it convenient, perhaps essential, to allow Stalin’s citizens to bear a scale of human sacrifice which was necessary to destroy the Nazi armies, but which their own nations’ sensibilities rendered them unwilling to accept. Marshall’s note to Stimson in May 1944, cited above, almost explicitly acknowledges as much.

The Western allies indulged the Soviet Union from 1941 onwards because they perceived its indispensability. Washington’s deference to Stalin in the last months of the war reflected a delusion, understandable at the time, that Soviet military assistance would be needed in the Far East after Germany was defeated, to encompass the swift defeat of Japan. Even given the demands of statesmanship, it is chilling to read the words of Truman’s 1945 testament to Stalin, in the hour of victory. Stalin, said the new president of the world’s greatest democracy, “had demonstrated the ability of a peace-loving people, with the highest degree of courage, to destroy the evil forces of barbarism.” Churchill was at least as fulsome. In the bitter words of a modern Russian historian, General Dmitry Volkogonov, Stalin had “translated the nation’s tragedy into his personal triumph.”

Even after the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, many thoughtful British and Americans restrained their strictures upon Soviet wartime behaviour because they recognized that Russian sacrifices had made it possible to defeat Hitler at relatively small cost in American and British lives. To this day, some people are surprised to be reminded that the U.S. and British armed forces each suffered fewer than 300,000 fatal casualties as a direct result of enemy action, about the same as the forces of Yugoslavia, and approximately half America’s 600,000 battle deaths in its Civil War. For every British and American citizen who died, more than thirty of Stalin’s people—many of them from his subject republics—perished.

No American or British commander in north-west Europe revealed the highest gifts of generalship, because a combination of cautious grand strategy and the limitations of Allied troops denied the few plausible candidates for greatness scope to demonstrate it. Had Patton, for instance, been leading Waffen SS formations, he possessed the energy and grasp of war to have performed spectacular feats. As it was, constrained by the nature of American citizen soldiers, he showed flashes of inspiration, but his army experienced as much hard plodding as any on the Western Front. Montgomery was a meticulous planner of operations, Market Garden excepted, but his soldiers rarely displayed the tactical energy to deliver grand coups. They were deeply grateful that their commander did not demand from them the sacrifices required by Soviet battlefield triumphs. This helps to explain the lasting affection in which Monty is held by those whom he led. Conversely, had von Manstein or Zhukov commanded troops burdened by the decencies of the democracies, these formidable commanders might have emerged from the war as apparently pedestrian fellows. Over the course of history, many ruthless generals have been able to forge armies after their own image, in the manner of Genghiz Khan. But by the mid-twentieth century civilized societies imposed upon their military leaders parameters of humanity and respect for life. Thus it was that the least civilized combatants of the Second World War performed the most notable military feats achieved by flesh and blood. It was left to the Western allies to amaze the world by the deeds that could be accomplished through the brilliant application of technology and industrial might.

I remarked in
Overlord
that no military plan is in isolation good or bad. It must be judged according to the capabilities of those available to carry it out. Eisenhower’s armies possessed insufficient mass and combat power to defeat Germany in the autumn of 1944 until months more bombing, shelling and above all Soviet assault had ground down Hitler’s forces to the point of collapse. If Allied soldiers had possessed the energy, commitment and will for sacrifice of either the German or Russian armies, they might have achieved a decisive breakthrough. But American and British soldiers were not panzergrenadiers. Socially and morally, we should be profoundly grateful that it was so. If this view is accepted, then it becomes no more relevant to suggest that the Allies could have won the war in 1944 than to debate how history might have turned out if the ancient Britons had learned to fight like Roman legionaries. To have achieved a swift victory, Eisenhower’s soldiers would have needed to be different people. If American and British soldiers of 1944–45 had matched the military prowess and become imbued with the warrior ethos of Hitler’s armies, it is unlikely that we should today hold the veterans of the Second World War in the just regard that we do. They fought as bravely and as well as any democracy could ask, if the values of civilization were to be retained in their ranks.

Yet the consequence of the Western allies’ measured approach to fighting their war against Germany, coupled with the delusion of many German soldiers that “duty” and “honour” required them to fight to the last, was that eastern Europe became Soviet booty, exchanging the tyranny of Hitler for that of Stalin in 1945. America’s Chiefs of Staff recognized, as Churchill was unwilling to do, that the Soviets could be denied their new empire only by fighting a war with them, which was unthinkable militarily as well as politically. “After the defeat of Japan,” they recorded, “the United States and the Soviet Union will be the only military powers of the first magnitude . . . While the United States can project its military power into many areas overseas, it is nevertheless true that the relative strength and geographic positions of these two powers preclude the military defeat of one . . . by the other, even if that power were allied with the British Empire.”

At one of the first big fashionable weddings in London after peace came, the MP and society diarist “Chips” Channon stood gazing complacently upon the jewelled throng. He observed to Emerald Cunard: “This is what we have been fighting for.” With blinding penetration, Lady Cunard demanded: “What? Are they all Poles?” Long after the din of battle had died elsewhere in Europe, it persisted in Poland. Almost unreported in the West, a guerrilla war continued for many months between the communist regime and the survivors of the “London Poles,” whose only crime was their yearning for freedom. Casualties were substantial, for the anti-communists fought with the despair of men and women who knew that capture meant death. “Bands of Army Krajowa bandits are continuing fighting in many parts of Poland,” Beria reported to Stalin on 17 May 1945, “attacking prisons, militia headquarters, state security departments, banks, businesses and democratic organizations.” He claimed that twenty-eight AK groups, comprising 6,000 men and women, together with 4,000 men of the Ukrainian Patriotic Army were still active in Poland. Beria concluded that it was impossible to use communist Polish troops against the AK, since these were unreliable. Instead, he had committed five NKVD regiments and a motorized infantry battalion. The communist Polish government had also requested the deployment of the two best available infantry divisions for internal security, and Beria proposed to deploy an additional three regiments of NKVD Frontier Guards. All this was designed to complete the “liberation” of the people for whose freedom the Western democracies had gone to war with Hitler in 1939.

One important social and historical consequence of the behaviour of the Red Army in eastern Europe and Germany in 1945 deserves attention here. It caused many German soldiers to feel justified in having prolonged their resistance. They cherished through the balance of their lives a conviction that they had acted rightly and honourably in seeking to preserve their kin from Soviet barbarism. Most forgot to consider why the Soviets acted as they did. They failed to reflect that it was German savagery which provoked Russian savagery, which indeed had obliged Stalin’s tyranny to enter the war at all. They erased from their consciousnesses the memory of Germany’s bloody deeds in the east, which far outstripped anything done in the Reich by the Red Army. Turning reality on its head, many Germans chose to see the ravaging of their own country as a unique phenomenon, and to regard a determination to escape vengeance for their own nation’s crimes as sufficient justification for fighting on under Hitler’s banner. Their logic was not dissimilar from that of the convicted murderer who hopes to be applauded for his courage because he struggles with the hangman to the trapdoor of the gallows. It would have been incomparably harder for Stalin to allow, far less to justify, the Red Army’s barbarism in Germany in 1945 had Germans not resisted to the end. Far from serving their society’s interests by maintaining the struggle, Germany’s soldiers ensured that its eventual fate was very much worse than it might otherwise have been. It could have become rational to defend the east to the last only if the Western allies were meanwhile granted an easy passage into Germany.

Those who fulfil law-abiding and peaceful lives find it hard to grasp what it must be like for men who have committed unspeakable crimes against their fellow humans to return to an after-life in civilization. All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret. That was the case with many American and British soldiers, and some German and Russian ones, after the Second World War. More than a few were traumatized for years by events in which they had participated. Other Germans and Russians, however, including those who must be categorized as war criminals, suffered no guilts or doubts. They developed a mechanism for justifying their actions, and for expunging memories, which has served them well. How else could the mass-killers, so many of whom went unpunished, have continued to go to work, visit the local café, shop at the supermarket, watch television, kiss their children and grandchildren goodnight until death claimed them in their beds? It is necessary for mankind to be capable of forgetting, and for societies to know how to forgive. But it must be a matter for regret that many individuals who bore responsibility for terrible deeds escaped a reckoning.

The Western allies were obliged to conclude the Second World War having freed western Europe from the tyranny of Hitler while acquiescing in the subjection of eastern Europe to that of Stalin. He had got there first. More than any other combatant, the United States chose to focus overwhelmingly upon its military objective, the destruction of Hitler, with limited regard for the political future, save a general commitment to self-determination for all nations. This was intended to be altruistic, but it also proved naive. The British were wrong after the war to seek to blame the United States for the Soviet Union’s seizure of eastern Europe. It is hard to see how this could have been prevented, given the Western allies’ sluggish conduct of the war, for which the British bore at least as much responsibility as the United States. But despite all the efforts of Roosevelt’s apologists to argue that his conduct towards Stalin reflected merely a pragmatic view of strategic realities, the balance of evidence suggests that the U.S. president was indeed slow to perceive the depth of horror and cruelty which Stalin represented. Roosevelt treated Churchill and his fears about eastern Europe with a condescension merited only by American might, not by superior judgement. The president fully recognized Soviet perfidy only in the last weeks of his life, as Moscow systematically breached all its Yalta undertakings to support pluralism in the governance of the “liberated” countries of eastern Europe.

Churchill could have attended Roosevelt’s funeral in April 1945. The logistical difficulties were surmountable, as Roy Jenkins has observed. Yet he chose not to do so. It is difficult not to regard the prime minister’s absence as a reflection of the alienation between himself and the president, which grew grave indeed in the last months of Roosevelt’s life. By 1945, the Russians cared little for British remonstrances, but they respected the power of the Americans. Stalin’s recognition that the United States would do little to frustrate his designs upon eastern Europe confirmed his belief that he possessed freedom of action there.

So much public sentiment was lavished upon the partnership between Britain and the United States during the war years, above all through the rhetoric of Churchill, that it is important to emphasize that affection played no part in the decisions or actions of either ally. At all times, tough negotiation and hard-headed calculation determined American and British behaviour. It remains highly doubtful that the United States would have entered the war against Germany within a useful time frame had not the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and had not Hitler thereafter declared war upon America. By 1945 relations between Britain and America had become profoundly strained. While Britain had bankrupted itself to play its part in the defeat of Hitler, the United States emerged from the war richer than it had ever been. There was deep resentment among Churchill’s people of American wealth and British poverty, matched by American exasperation about Britain’s residual pretensions to influence, and to empire. All those holding power in the United States and its armies recognized that only two powers would count in the post-war world, and Britain would not be one of them. It is against this background that Eisenhower’s great achievement should be measured. He sustained the military partnership between allies who were weary to death of each other, and led them to share in victory with the façade of unity unbroken.