Inferno Read online

  My story emphasises bottom-up views and experiences, the voices of little people rather than big ones; I have written extensively elsewhere about the warlords of 1939–45. Contemporary diaries and letters record what people did or what was done to them, but often tell us little about what they thought; the latter is more interesting, but more elusive. The obvious explanation is that most warriors are young and immature: they experience extremes of excitement, terror or hardship, but only a small minority have the emotional energy for reflection, because they are absorbed in their immediate physical surroundings, needs and desires.

  It was fundamental that only a tiny number of national leaders and commanders knew much about anything beyond their immediate line of sight. Civilians existed in a fog of propaganda and uncertainty, scarcely less dense in Britain and the United States than in Germany or Russia. Frontline combatants assessed the success or failure of their side chiefly through counting casualties and noticing whether they were moving forwards or backwards. These were, however, sometimes inadequate indicators: Pfc. Eric Diller’s battalion was cut off from the main American army for seventeen days during the Leyte campaign in the Philippines, but he realised the seriousness of his unit’s predicament only when this was explained to him by his company commander after the war.

  Even those with privileged access to secrets were confined to their own fragments of knowledge in a vast jigsaw puzzle. For instance, Roy Jenkins, who later became a British statesman, decrypted German signals at Bletchley Park. He and his colleagues knew the importance and urgency of the work they were doing, but, contrary to the impression given in sensational films about Bletchley, they were told nothing about the significance or impact of their contributions. Such constraints were greater, unsurprisingly, on the other side of the hill: in January 1942 Hitler became convinced that too many people in Berlin knew too much. He decreed that even officials of the Abwehr should receive only such information as was necessary for their own work. They were forbidden to monitor enemy broadcasts, a considerable handicap for an intelligence service.

  I am fascinated by the complex interplay of loyalties and sympathies around the world. In Britain and America, confidence that our parents and grandparents were fighting “the good war” is so deeply ingrained that we often forget that people in many countries adopted more equivocal attitudes: colonial subjects, and above all India’s 400 million, saw little merit in the defeat of the Axis if they continued to endure British suzerainty. Many Frenchmen fought vigorously against the Allies. In Yugoslavia, rival factions were far more strongly committed to waging civil war against one another than to advancing the interests of either the Allies or the Axis. Large numbers of Stalin’s subjects embraced the opportunity offered by German occupation to take up arms against a hated Moscow regime. None of this implies doubt that the Allied cause deserved to triumph, but it should emphasise the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt did not have all the best tunes.

  It may be useful to explain how this book was written. I began by rereading Gerhard Weinburg’s A World at Arms and Total War by Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, probably the two best single-volume histories of the war. I then composed a skeleton narrative, setting the most important events in sequence, and laid upon it the flesh of anecdotage and my own reflections. When I had completed a draft, I revisited some other outstanding recent accounts of the conflict: Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray’s A War to Be Won and Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat. I then reviewed my own comments and conclusions in the light of theirs.

  Wherever possible, I have favoured relatively obscure anecdotage at the expense of justly celebrated personal recollections—omitting, for instance, the likes of Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy and George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here. Dr. Lyuba Vinogradovna, who has researched my Russian material for the past decade, for this work once again identified and translated personal narratives, diaries and letters. Serena Sissons has translated thousands of words from Italian memoirs and diaries, because Mussolini’s people seem to me inadequately represented in most Anglo-Saxon narratives. I have explored unpublished Polish accounts in the Imperial War Museum archive and London’s Sikorski Institute. I am once again indebted to Dr. Tami Biddle of the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for insights and documents derived from her own researches, which she has generously shared with me. Various friends, notable among them Professor Sir Michael Howard, Dr. Williamson Murray and Don Berry, have been kind enough to read my draft manuscript and make invaluable corrections, suggestions and comments. The doyen of British naval historians, Professor Nicholas Rodger of All Souls College, Oxford, read the chapter on the British experience at sea, much to the advantage of my final text. That outstanding American chronicler of the Pacific War, Richard Frank, has corrected some of my most egregious mistakes about the Eastern war. None of these, of course, bears any responsibility for my judgements and errors.

  Any writer’s highest aspiration, more than sixty-five years after the war’s ending, is to offer a personal view rather than a comprehensive account of this greatest and most terrible of all human experiences, which never fails to inspire humility in its modern students, prompted by gratitude that we have been spared anything comparable. In 1920, when Colonel Charles à Court Repington, military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, published a best-selling account of the recent conflict, it was considered sinister and tasteless that he chose as his title The First World War, for it presumed another. To call this book The Last World War would be to tempt providence, but it is at least certain that never again will millions of armed men clash on European battlefields such as those of 1939–45. The conflicts of the future will be quite different, and it may not be rashly optimistic to suggest that they will be less terrible.

  Max Hastings

  Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Kamogi, Kenya

  April 2011

  1 Throughout this book, the word “casualties” is used in its technical military sense, meaning men killed, missing, wounded or taken prisoner. In most ground actions in most theatres, approximately three men were wounded for each one killed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  POLAND BETRAYED

  WHILE ADOLF HITLER was determined to wage war, it was no more inevitable that his 1939 invasion of Poland precipitated global conflict than that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did so in 1914. Britain and France lacked both the will and the means to take effective action towards fulfilment of security guarantees they had given earlier to the Poles. Their declarations of war on Germany were gestures which even some staunch anti-Nazis thought foolish, because of their futility. For every eventual belligerent save the Poles themselves, the struggle began slowly: only in its third year did global death and destruction attain the vastness sustained thereafter until 1945. Even Hitler’s Reich was at first ill-equipped to generate the intensity of violence demanded by a death grapple between the most powerful nations on earth.

  During the summer of 1939 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the old American South, enjoyed a surge of popularity in Poland. “Somehow, I considered it prophetic,” wrote one of its Polish readers, Rula Langer. Few of her compatriots doubted that a conflict with Germany was imminent, because Hitler had made plain his commitment to conquest. Poland’s fiercely nationalistic people responded to the Nazi threat with the same spirit as the doomed young men of the Confederacy in 1861. “Like most of us, I believed in happy endings,” a young fighter pilot recalled. “We wanted to fight, it excited us, and we wanted it to happen fast. We didn’t believe that something bad could really happen.” When Jan Karski, an artillery lieutenant, received his mobilisation order on 24 August, his sister warned him against burdening himself with too many clothes. “You aren’t going to Siberia,” she said. “We’ll have you on our hands again within a month.”

  The Poles paraded their propensity for fantasy. There was an exuberance in the café and ba
r chatter of Warsaw, a city whose baroque beauties and twenty-five theatres caused citizens to proclaim it “the Paris of eastern Europe.” A New York Times reporter wrote from the Polish capital: “To hear people talk, one might think that Poland, not Germany, was the great industrial colossus.” Mussolini’s foreign minister, his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, warned the Polish ambassador in Rome that if his country resisted Hitler’s territorial demands, it would find itself fighting alone, and “would quickly be turned into a heap of ruins.” The ambassador did not dissent, but asserted vaguely that “some eventual success … might give Poland greater strength.” In Britain, Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers denounced as provocative Warsaw’s defiance in the face of Hitler’s threats.

  The Polish nation of 30 million, including almost 1 million ethnic Germans, 5 million Ukrainians and 3 million Jews, had held borders established by the Treaty of Versailles for only twenty years. Between 1919 and 1921, Poland fought the Bolsheviks to assert its independence from longstanding Russian hegemony. By 1939 the country was ruled by a military junta, though the historian Norman Davies has argued, “If there was hardship and injustice in Poland, there was no mass starvation or mass killing as in Russia, no resort to the bestial methods of Fascism or Stalinism.” The ugliest manifestation of Polish nationalism was anti-Semitism, exemplified by quotas for Jewish university entry.

  In the eyes of both Berlin and Moscow, the Polish state owed its existence only to Allied force majeure in 1919, and had no legitimacy. In a secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed on 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed on Poland’s partition and dissolution. Though the Poles viewed Russia as their historic enemy, they were oblivious of immediate Soviet designs on them, and were bent instead upon frustrating those of Germany. They knew the ill-equipped Polish army could not defeat the Wehrmacht; all their hopes were pinned upon an Anglo-French offensive in the west, which would divide Germany’s forces. “In view of Poland’s hopeless military situation,” wrote its London ambassador, Count Edward Raczyński, “my main anxiety has been to ensure that we should not become involved in war with Germany without receiving immediate help from our allies.”

  In March 1939, the British and French governments gave guarantees, formalised in subsequent treaties, that in the event of German aggression against Poland, they would fight. If the worst happened, France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler’s Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. Britain pledged an immediate bomber offensive against Germany. Both powers’ assurances reflected cynicism, for neither had the smallest intention of fulfilling them: the guarantees were designed to deter Hitler, rather than to provide credible military assistance to Poland. They were gestures without substance, yet the Poles chose to believe them.

  If Stalin was not Hitler’s cobelligerent, Moscow’s deal with Berlin made him the cobeneficiary of Nazi aggression. From 23 August onwards, the world saw Germany and the Soviet Union acting in concert, twin faces of totalitarianism. Because of the manner in which the global struggle ended in 1945, with Russia in the Allied camp, some historians have accepted the postwar Soviet Union’s classification of itself as a neutral power until 1941. This is mistaken. Though Stalin feared Hitler and expected eventually to have to fight him, in 1939 he made a historic decision to acquiesce in German aggression, in return for Nazi support for Moscow’s own programme of territorial aggrandisement. Whatever excuses the Soviet leader later offered, and although his armies never fought in partnership with the Wehrmacht, the Nazi-Soviet Pact established a collaboration which persisted until Hitler revealed his true purposes in Operation Barbarossa.

  The Moscow nonaggression agreement, together with the subsequent 28 September Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, committed the world’s two principal tyrants to endorse each other’s ambitions and forswear mutual hostilities in favour of aggrandisement elsewhere. Stalin indulged Hitler’s expansionist policies in the west, and gave Germany important material aid—oil, corn and mineral products. The Nazis, however insincerely, conceded a free hand in the east to the Soviets, whose objectives included eastern Finland and the Baltic states in addition to a large share of Poland’s carcass.

  Hitler intended the Second World War to start on 26 August, only three days after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed. On the twenty-fifth, however, while ordering mobilisation to continue, he postponed the invasion of Poland: he was shocked to discover both that Mussolini was unwilling immediately to fight beside him, and that diplomatic communications suggested Britain and France were serious about honouring their guarantees to Warsaw. Three million men, 400,000 horses and 200,000 vehicles, and 5,000 trains advanced towards the Polish frontier while a last flurry of futile exchanges took place between Berlin, London and Paris. At last, on 30 August, Hitler gave the attack order. At 8:00 the following evening, the curtain rose on the first, appropriately sordid, act of the conflict. Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks of the German Sicherheitsdienst (security service) led a party dressed in Polish uniforms, and including a dozen convicted criminals dismissively code-named “Konserwen”—“tin cans”—in a mock assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. Shots were fired; Polish patriotic slogans were broadcast across the airwaves; then the “attackers” withdrew. SS machine gunners killed the “tin cans,” whose bloodstained corpses were arranged for display to foreign correspondents as evidence of Polish aggression.

  At 2:00 a.m. on 1 September, the Wehrmacht’s 1st Mounted Regiment was among scores roused in its bivouacs by a bugle call—some German units as well as many Polish ones rode horses to battle. The squadrons saddled, mounted, and began to move towards their start line alongside clattering columns of armour, trucks and guns. The order was given: “Muzzle caps off! Load! Safety catches on!” At 4:40 a.m., the big guns of the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, anchored in Danzig harbour for a “goodwill visit,” opened fire on the Polish fort at Westerplatte. An hour later, German soldiers tore down crossing poles on the western frontier, opening the way for leading elements of the invasion force to pour forward into Poland. One of its commanders, Gen. Heinz Guderian, soon found himself passing his family’s ancestral estate at Chelmno, where he had been born when it formed part of pre-Versailles Germany. Among his soldiers, a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, Wilhelm Pruller, expressed the euphoria that suffused the army: “It’s a wonderful feeling now, to be a German … We’ve crossed the border. Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles! The German Wehrmacht is marching! If we look back, or in front of us, or left or right, everywhere the motorised Wehrmacht!”

  The Western Allies, heartened by knowledge that Poland boasted the fourth largest army in Europe, anticipated a struggle lasting some months. The defenders deployed 1.3 million men against 1.5 million Germans, with thirty-seven divisions on each side. But the Wehrmacht was far better equipped, having 3,600 armoured vehicles against 750 Polish, 1,929 modern planes against 900 obsolete ones. The Polish army had been progressively deploying since March, but had held back from full mobilisation in response to Anglo-French pleas to avoid provoking Hitler. Thus, on 1 September, the defenders were surprised. A Polish diplomat wrote of his people’s attitude: “They were united in the will to resist, but without any clear idea about the kind of resistance to be offered, apart from a lot of loose talk about volunteering as ‘human torpedoes.’ ”

  Ephrahim Blaichman, a sixteen-year-old Jew living in Kamionka, was among thousands of local inhabitants summoned into the town square to be addressed by the mayor: “We sang a Polish hymn declaring that Poland was not yet lost, and another promising that no German would spit in our faces.” Piotr Tarczynkski, a twenty-six-year-old factory clerk, had been ill for some weeks before he was mobilised. But when he informed the commanding officer of his artillery battery that he was ailing, the colonel responded with a brisk patriotic speech, “and told me he was sure that once I found myself in the saddle I would feel much better.” Equipment was so short t
hat the regiment could not issue Tarczynkski with a personal weapon; he did, however, receive a regulation charger, a big horse named Wojak—“Warrior.”

  An air force instructor, Witold Urbanowitz, was conducting a mock dogfight with a pupil in the sky over Dęblin when he was bewildered to see holes appearing in his plane’s wings. Landing hastily, he was met by a fellow officer who ran across the field to meet him, exclaiming, “You’re alive, Witold? You’re not hit?” Urbanowitz demanded, “What the hell’s going on?” His comrade said, “You should go to church and light a candle. You were just attacked by a Messerschmitt!” The nakedness of Poland’s defences was everywhere apparent. Fighter pilot Franciszek Kornicki was scrambled twice on 1 and 2 September. On the first occasion he pursued a German plane which easily outpaced him. On the second, when his guns jammed he tried to clear them, roll and renew his attack. As the plane banked steeply, the harness buckles holding him in his open cockpit came undone; he fell into the sky, and found himself making an embarrassed parachute descent.

  At 5:00 p.m. near the village of Krojanty, Polish Uhlan cavalrymen received an order to counterattack, to cover the retreat of neighbouring infantry. As they formed line and drew sabres, the adjutant, Captain Godlewski, suggested that they should advance on foot. “Young man,” the regimental commander, Colonel Mastalerz, responded testily, “I’m quite aware what it is like to carry out an impossible order.” Bent low over the necks of their horses, 250 men charged across an open field. German infantrymen fled from their path, but beyond them stood armoured cars, whose machine guns ravaged the Uhlans. Scores of horses crashed to the earth, while others raced away riderless. Within minutes half the attackers were dead, including Colonel Mastalerz. The survivors fell back in confusion, flotsam of an earlier age.