The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

The crowds changed too, with many more uniforms and civilians carrying their gas-masks in cardboard cartons.

The French and British had failed in their obligations shamefully, especially since the Poles in July had already handed over to Britain and France their reconstructions of the German Enigma enciphering machine.

Polish political prisoners were sent to a former cavalry barracks at Owicim, which was renamed Auschwitz.

Many officers were uneasy at what they saw as a loosening of military discipline. ‘We have seen and witnessed wretched scenes in which German soldiers burn and plunder, murder, and loot without thinking about it,’ an artillery battalion commander wrote.

Although Hitler never wavered in his hatred of the Jews, the industrial genocide which began in 1942 had not always been part of his plan.

Hitler’s dismissive attitude towards administration permitted an extraordinary proliferation of competing departments and ministries.

Soldiers thus tended to fight for the honour of their family and local community, not for the emperor as westerners tended to believe.

You can’t breathe for sheer revulsion when you keep finding the bodies of women with bamboo poles thrust up their vaginas. Even old women over 70 are constantly being raped.’

To slow the enemy advance, Chiang Kai-shek gave orders for the Yellow River dikes to be breached, or, in the words of the high command decision, to ‘use water as a substitute for soldiers’. This drowned-earth policy delayed the Japanese by about five months, but the destruction and civilian deaths that it caused over 70,000 square kilometres were horrific. There was no high ground on which people could seek shelter. The official death toll from drowning, starvation and illness reached 800,000, while more than six million people became refugees.

Since Gamelin did not believe in radio communications and possessed none, the orders to prepare to advance into Belgium were passed by telephone.

Hitler at the Felsennest is said to have wept with joy when he heard that the Allies were starting to march into the Belgian trap.

The 3rd Division’s leading column was halted at the border by an uninformed Belgian official demanding a ‘permit to enter Belgium’. A truck simply smashed open the barrier.

Along the route on that hot day, Belgians emerged from cafés to offer mugs of beer to the red-faced marching soldiers, a generous gesture which was not universally welcomed by officers and NCOs.

They smiled and saluted with thumbs up – a gesture which at first shocked the Belgians, to whom it had a very rude significance, but which they soon recognised as a sign of cheerful confidence.

Hitler was amazed that the old Kaiser expected him to play Bismarck. ‘What an idiot!’ he said to his valet, Linge.

If Hitler had had his way the previous autumn the invasion of France would almost certainly have been a disaster.

the President raised with his own advisers the possibility of the British fleet being moved to Canada.

(For security purposes on an open line, it was dictated in Hindustani by General Ismay and taken down by a fellow Indian Army officer in London.)

One of the yachts, the Sundowner, was owned by Commander C. H. Lightoller, who had been the senior surviving officer of the Titanic.

Many, including the King, professed a relief that the French were no longer their allies. Air Chief Marshal Dowding later claimed that, on hearing of the French surrender, he had gone down on his knees and thanked God that no more fighters needed to be risked across the Channel.

Another Pole landed one afternoon in the grounds of a very respectable lawn tennis club. He was signed in as a guest, given a racket, lent some white flannels and invited to take part in a match.

Many more compared the Fascist leader’s declaration of war on a defeated France as the action of a ‘jackal’ trying to snatch part of the prey killed by a lion.

Italy’s weakness was to prove an utter disaster for itself and a grave vulnerability for Germany.

But Hitler, despite his apparently limitless power after the defeat of France in 1940, proved incapable that October of persuading his debtor Franco, his vassal Pétain or his ally Mussolini to support his strategy of a continental bloc against Britain.

For much of the three hours, Franco rambled on about his life and experiences, prompting Hitler to say later that he would prefer to have three or four teeth pulled than go through another conversation with the Spanish dictator.

Franco’s government was worried about provoking Britain. Spain’s survival depended on imports, partly from Britain, but above all on grain and oil from the United States.

That still did not stop Franco from considering his own ‘parallel war’, which consisted of invading Britain’s traditional ally, Portugal. Fortunately, it was a project which never came close to fruition.

The Italian prisoners were most upset. Nobody had bothered to tell them that their government had declared war.

Their haul included a fat Italian general in a Lancia staff car accompanied by a ‘lady friend’, who was heavily pregnant and not his wife. This caused a scandal in Italy. More importantly for the British, the general had with him all the plans showing the defences of Bardia.

Any idea of a ‘parallel war’ was at an end. Mussolini was no longer Hitler’s ally, but his subordinate.

O’Connor’s troops had won a stunning victory. At a cost of 624 casualties, they had captured 38,300 prisoners, 237 guns and seventy-three tanks.

Five days later, Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel landed in Tripoli, followed by the advance elements of what was to be known as the Afrika Korps.

Bizarrely, both sides drew very different lessons from the outcome of the airborne operation. Hitler was determined never to attempt a major drop again, while the Allies were encouraged to develop their own paratroop formations, with very mixed results later in the war.

The British, and above all Churchill, appeared to be incapable by character of matching the German army’s talent for ruthless prioritization.

But on their return in 1945 from German imprisonment their incredible courage did not save them from being sent to the Gulag. Stalin had ordered that surrender constituted treason to the Motherland.

Marshal Ion Antonescu, had assured Hitler ten days before: ‘Of course I’ll be there from the start. When it’s a question of action against the Slavs, you can always count on Romania.’

The young physicist Andrei Sakharov was later greeted by an aunt in a bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe raid on Moscow. ‘For the first time in years,’ she said, ‘I feel like a Russian again!’

On the Soviet side, Beria’s NKVD massacred the inmates of its prisons near the front so that they would not be saved by the German advance. Nearly 10,000 Polish prisoners were murdered.

Those from Alpine regions were the most depressed by the flatness of what seemed like an infinite ocean of land.

headquarters decided that it did not want to occupy the city. Instead the Germans would bombard it and seal it off to let the population starve and die of disease.

Even if Leningrad surrendered, Hitler had no intention of occupying the city and even less of feeding its inhabitants. He wanted both of them completely erased from the earth.

Most soldiers were convinced by Hitler’s claim that the Jews had started the war.

As for the Jews, he wrote: ‘I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere.’ At that stage, Himmler considered genocide – ‘the Bolshevik method of physical extermination’ – to be ‘un-German and impossible’.

The German army would provision the Einsatzgruppen, and would liaise with them through the senior intelligence officer at each army headquarters. Thus at army command and senior staff level nobody could plead ignorance about their activities.

Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando,’ Bach-Zelewski said to him, ‘how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!’

I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it,’ he declared in a broadcast on 22 June 1941, following news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

The joint document known as the Atlantic Charter, which they signed on 12 August, promised self-determination to a liberated world, with the implicit exception of the British Empire, and no doubt the Soviet Union.

Soviet Lend–Lease took time to get under way, much to the President’s exasperation, but its scale and scope would play a major part in the eventual Soviet victory (a fact which most Russian historians are still loath to acknowledge).

German tanks chased Red Army soldiers, trying to crush them under their tracks. It became a form of sport.

The sorry state of British defences was well known in Tokyo. The 3,000 Japanese civilians then resident in Malaya had been passing back detailed intelligence through their consulate-general in Singapore.