History of the Second World War (115 page)

Hitler had stripped his Western Front, and diverted the major part of his remaining forces and resources to hold the line of the Oder against the Russians, in the belief that the Western Allies were incapable of resuming the offensive after the supposedly crippling blow of his Ardennes counter-offensive coupled with V-weapon flying-bomb and rocket bombardment of the Antwerp base. So most of the available equipment coming out from the German factories or repair shops was sent eastward. Yet at that very time the Western Allies were building up overwhelming strength for an assault on the Rhine. In this massive effort the main striking role was assigned to Montgomery, the U.S. Ninth Army being employed under him in addition to his own two, the First Canadian and Second British Armies. This decision was strongly resented by most of the American generals who felt that Eisenhower was yielding to the demands of Montgomery and the British at the expense of their own prospects.

Indignation spurred them to more vigorous efforts on their sectors to show what they could do, and in the event these efforts achieved striking results, as the strength put into them, though smaller than what Montgomery was amassing, much exceeded what the Germans had left to oppose them.

On March 7 the tanks of Patton’s U.S. Third Army broke through the weak German defences in the Eifel (the German end of the rugged Ardennes), and reached the Rhine near Coblenz after a sixty-mile drive in three days. For the moment they were blocked, as the Rhine bridges had been blown up before they arrived. But a little farther north, a small armoured spearhead of the neighbouring U.S. First Army had found a gap and raced through it so quickly that the bridge at Remagen, near Bonn, was reached and brilliantly captured before it could be blown. Reserves were rushed up and secured a vital bridgehead.

When the news reached Bradley, the army group commander, he was quick to grasp the opportunity thus presented of dislocating the enemy’s Rhine line — exultantly exclaiming on the telephone: ‘Hot dog, this will bust him wide open.’ But Eisenhower’s operational staff officer, who was visiting Bradley’s headquarters, dampingly objected: ‘You’re not going anywhere down there at Remagen — it just doesn’t fit into the plan.’ And the next day Bradley received definite orders not to push any big force into this bridgehead.

This restraining order was all the more resented because the U.S. Ninth Army, after reaching the Rhine near Dusseldorf four days earlier, had been stopped by Montgomery from trying to cross the river immediately, as its commander, Simpson, desired and urged. Impatience with such plan-fitting restraints increased day by day, since Montgomery’s grand attack on the Rhine was not timed for delivery until March 24, three weeks later.

So Patton, with Bradley’s fervent approval, swung southward to roll up the German forces west of the Rhine and at the same time seek a good spot for an early crossing. By March 21, Patton had swept the west bank clear of the enemy along a seventy-mile stretch between Coblenz and Mannheim, cutting off the German forces in that sector before they could withdraw to the Rhine. Next night, Patton’s troops crossed the river almost unopposed at Oppenheim, between Mainz and Mannheim.

When the news of this surprise stroke reached Hitler, he called for immediate countermeasures, but was told that no resources remained available, and that the most that could be despatched to help fill the gap was a mere handful of five machines just repaired at a tank depot a hundred miles away. ‘The cupboard was bare’, and the American advance beyond the Rhine became a procession.

By this time Montgomery had completed his elaborate preparations for the grand assault on the Rhine near Wesel, 150 miles downstream. Here he had concentrated twenty-five divisions, after a quarter of a million tons of ammunition and other supplies had been amassed in dumps on the west bank. The thirty-mile stretch of river where he planned to attack was held by only five weak and exhausted German divisions.

On the night of March 23 the attack was launched after a tremendous bombardment by over 3,000 guns, and by successive waves of bombers. The leading infantry, supported by swimming tanks, crossed the river and established bridgeheads on the east, meeting little resistance. After daybreak, two airborne divisions were dropped ahead of them to help in clearing the way, while behind them bridges were being rapidly built for the passage of the reinforcing divisions, tanks and transport. The slightness of the opposition was shown in the fact that the U.S. Ninth Army, which furnished half the assaulting infantry, had barely forty men killed. British losses were also very slight, and stubborn resistance was met only at one point, the riverside village of Rees, where a battalion of German parachutists held out for three days.

By the 28th the bridgehead had been extended to a depth of over twenty miles on a frontage of thirty. But Montgomery, still wary of the German Army’s power of resistance, did not sanction a general advance eastward until he had built up a force of twenty divisions and 1,500 tanks in the bridgehead.

When the advance developed, much the most serious hindrance came from the heaps of rubble created by the excessive bombing efforts of the Allied air forces, which had thereby blocked the routes of advance far more effectively than the enemy could. For the dominant desire of the Germans now, both troops and people, was to see the British and American armies sweep eastward as rapidly as possible to reach Berlin and occupy as much of the country as possible before the Russians overcame the Oder line. Few of them were inclined to assist Hitler’s purpose of obstruction by self-destruction.

On the eve of the Rhine crossing Hitler had issued an order declaring that ‘the battle should be conducted without consideration for our own population’. His regional commissioners were instructed to destroy ‘all industrial plants, all the main electricity works, waterworks, gas works’ together with ‘all food and clothing stores’ in order to create ‘a desert’ in the Allies’ path.

But his own Minister of War Production, Albert Speer, at once protested against this drastic order. To these protests Hitler retorted: ‘If the war is lost, the German nation will also perish. So there is no need to consider what the people require for continued existence.’

Appalled at such callousness, Speer was shaken out of his loyalty to Hitler. He went behind Hitler’s back to the army and industrial chiefs, and persuaded them, without much difficulty, to evade executing Hitler’s decree.

But as the end drew near, Hitler’s illusions continued to grow, and he counted on some miracle to bring salvation almost until the last hour. He liked to read, or have read to him, the chapter from Carlyle’s
History of Frederick the Great,
which related how Frederick was saved at the blackest hour, when his armies were on the verge of collapse, by the death of the Empress of Russia, which led to the break-up of the opposing alliance. Hitler also studied horoscopes which had predicted that disaster in April would be redeemed by a sudden change of fortune, bringing a satisfactory peace by August.

At midnight on April 12, the news reached Hitler that President Roosevelt had died suddenly. Goebbels telephoned him, and said: ‘My Fuhrer, I congratulate you. Fate has laid low your greatest enemy. God has not abandoned us.’ This was the ‘miracle’, it seemed, for which Hitler had been waiting — a repetition of the death of the Empress of Russia at the critical moment of the Seven Years War in the eighteenth century. So Hitler became convinced that what Mr Churchill called the ‘Grand Alliance’ between the Eastern and Western powers would now break up through the clash of their rival interests.

But the hope was not fulfilled and Hitler was driven a fortnight later to take his own life, as Frederick the Great had been about to do, just when his ‘miracle’ had come to save his fortunes and his life.

Early in March Zhukov had enlarged his bridgehead over the Oder, but did not succeed in breaking out. Russian progress on the far flanks continued, and Vienna was entered in the middle of April. Meanwhile the German front in the west had collapsed, and the Allied armies there were driving eastward from the Rhine with little opposition. They reached the Elbe, sixty miles from Berlin, on April 11. Here they halted. On the 16th Zhukov resumed the offensive, in conjunction with Koniev, who forced the crossing of the Neisse.

This time the Russians burst out of their bridgeheads, and within a week were driving into the suburbs of Berlin — where Hitler chose to remain for the final battle. By the 25th the city had been completely isolated by the encircling armies of Zhukov and Koniev, and on the 27th Koniev’s forces joined hands with the Americans on the Elbe. But in Berlin itself desperate street-by-street resistance was put up by the Germans, and was not completely overcome until the war itself ended, after Hitler’s suicide, with Germany’s unconditional surrender.

The War in Europe came to an end officially at midnight on May 8, 1945, but in reality that was merely the final formal recognition of a finish which had taken place piecemeal during the previous week. On May 2 all fighting had ceased on the southern front in Italy, where the surrender document had actually been signed three days earlier still. On May 4 a similar surrender was signed, at Montgomery’s headquarters on Luneberg Heath, by the representatives of the German forces in North-west Europe. On May 7 a further surrender document, covering all the German forces, was signed at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims — a larger ceremonial finish carried out in the presence of Russian as well as American, British, and French representatives.

These formalities of surrender were a quick sequel to the death of Hitler. On April 30, the day after his marriage to the devoted Eva Braun, he had committed suicide along with her in the ruins of the Chancellery at Berlin — when the advancing Russians were reported to be close at hand — and their bodies were hurriedly cremated in the garden in accord with his instructions.

The first of the three official acts of surrender by the German forces was the most significant, for the Italian front armistice was signed while Hitler still lived, and in disregard of his authority. Moreover it was the conclusion to ‘backstairs’ surrender moves which had started on that front nearly two months before — early in March. The enemy leaders in Germany had been too close to Hitler’s dominating presence to venture on such a move, although for a long time past they had been talking privately about its urgent necessity.

Many of them had lost hope after the Western Allies’ landing in Normandy the previous summer. Almost all of them were empty of both hope and will by February 1945, after the repulse of their Western counter-offensive in the Ardennes and the Russian surge forward into eastern Germany. They were kept in the fight mostly by fear — fear of breaking their soldier’s oath of loyalty to Hitler, fear of his wrath, and fear of being hanged by him for disobedience, reinforced by fear of the punishment which the Allies ominously threatened to deal out after victory on terms of ‘unconditional surrender’.

In the months that followed, the war was prolonged almost entirely by Hitler’s relentless determination. It might have been ended more quickly if the Western Allies had been less relentless in their demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ and more aware of its effect on the German mind. A relaxation of that forbidding attitude, and any reasonable assurance about the subsequent treatment of the Germans, would most probably have brought such a swelling stream of surrenders, led by the higher military leaders, that the front would have speedily collapsed, and the Nazi regime with it, so that Hitler would have lost all power to persist in the struggle.

CHAPTER. 39 - THE COLLAPSE OF JAPAN

Two cumulative factors in the defeat of Japan were, in nature and effect, forms of attrition — strangling pressure. One was by sea — or, more precisely, undersea; the other was by air. The former was the first to become of decisive effect.*

* For maps, see pp. 200-1 and 614.

The Japanese empire was basically a sea empire, and even more dependent on oversea supplies than the British empire. Her war-making capacity depended on large seaborne imports of oil, iron ore, bauxite, coking coal, nickel, manganese, aluminium, tin, cobalt, lead, phosphate, graphite and potash, cotton, salt, and rubber. Moreover, for her food supplies she had to import most of her sugar and soya beans, as well as 20 per cent of her wheat and 17 per cent of her rice.

Yet Japan entered the war with a merchant marine totalling barely 6 million gross tons — considerably less than one third of Britain’s at the outset in 1939 (approximately 9,500 ships totalling over 21 million tons). Moreover, Japan, despite the lessons of the war during the two years’ interval and her expansionist plans, had done little to organise shipping protection — no convoy system and no escort carriers. She only made a serious effort to retrieve these omissions after her shipping had been heavily reduced.

The outcome was that Japan’s shipping became an easy target for the American submarines. In the early period of the war in the Pacific the defectiveness of the American torpedoes lessened the effect, but after these defects had been corrected the submarine attack became a massacre. Whereas the Japanese submarines concentrated their attack on warships — and later had to be used for carrying supplies to by-passed island garrisons — the American submarines were largely directed against merchant ships. In 1943 they sank 296, totalling 1,335,000 gross tons, and in 1944 their campaign became still more damaging — in October alone they sank 321,000 tons of shipping. Moreover their effect was the greater through being directed primarily against Japanese tankers. As a result, the main Japanese fleet was kept at Singapore in order to be near to the oil-producing areas, while at home the training of aircraft pilots was restricted by shortage of fuel for adequate practice flights.

The American submarines also inflicted heavy loss on Japanese warships, amounting to nearly a third of those that were sunk. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea they sank two Japanese fleet carriers, the
Taiho
and
Shokaku,
while in the later months of 1944 they sank or permanently disabled three more carriers, as well as nearly forty destroyers.