The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

LeMay, who was later the model for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove

the fast torpedo boat PT 109, commanded by Lieutenant

John F. Kennedy, was run down by a Japanese destroyer. Kennedy managed to get the survivors ashore on to a nearby island. Thanks to an Australian coast-watcher, they were rescued six days later.

One officer said of these incredibly tough and ingenious gangs that they ‘smelled like goats, lived like dogs and worked like horses’.

Patton’s worst fears were realized. A single machine gun began firing when the C-47s appeared, and then everyone joined in, even tank gunners with their turret-mounted .50s. His men simply could not stop themselves. They continued firing at the paratroopers coming down and even after they hit the ground or the water. It was one of the worst examples of ‘friendly fire’ on the Allied side in the war, with twenty-three planes destroyed, thirty-seven badly damaged and over 400 casualties. Eisenhower, when he eventually found out, was furious and blamed Patton.

‘Benito e finito’. Italian Fascism collapsed in a matter of hours, disappearing like a stage-set to make way for a new production.

Hitler told his intelligence services to find out where Mussolini was being held, using any means including bribery and clairvoyants.

He booted him in the rear, shouting: ‘You hear me, you gutless bastard. You’re going back to the front!’

A British reporter, who happened to be present, heard him say immediately afterwards: ‘There’s no such thing as shellshock. It’s an invention of the Jews!’

General Jodl of the OKW recognized the mad logic in which they were trapped by the Nazi mantra of ‘final victory’. ‘That we will win, because we must win,’ he noted soon afterwards, ‘means that world history has lost all sense.’ Since there was now no hope of negotiating from strength, the implication was all too clear. Germany would fight on until its total destruction.

The capture of Kiev confirmed reports of the massacre at Babi Yar. The Germans had tried to conceal the crime by burning and removing bodies, but there were too many for them.

They then introduced the malaria-carrying breed of mosquito, which could survive in brackish water. The German authorities also confiscated stocks of quinine, so that the disease spread. The inhabitants not only found their land and homes wrecked, but more than 55,000 contracted malaria the following year. It was a clear case of biological warfare.

Kappler’s hunt for Jews had been less successful, with just 1,259 rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. The majority had been hidden by Italians, including by the Catholic Church, even though the Pope had not spoken out against the persecution.

Troops from the 24th Division guarding Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger’s I Corps headquarters in Hollandia at the western end of New Guinea even began a night battle among themselves, firing machine guns and hurling grenades when no Japanese were near.

The Japanese did not attack Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces based on Yenan to the west, which had done little for some time except kill collaborators. The Japanese were interested only in crushing the Nationalists.

Hitler, in his world of illusion, convinced himself that the V-1 flying bombs which he had just started to launch against London would bring Britain to its knees, and that the new jet fighters would soon destroy the Allied air forces. Rommel, who knew that this was fantasy, urged him to bring the war to an end.

‘A partisan, a small man,’ wrote Grossman, ‘has killed two Germans with a stake. He had pleaded with the guards of the column to give him these Germans. He had convinced himself that they were the ones who had killed his daughter Olya, and his sons, his two boys. He broke all their bones, and smashed their skulls, and while he was beating them, he was crying and shouting: “Here you are – for Olya! Here you are – for Kolya!”

A terrible paradox emerged from the campaign. In an attempt to reduce their own casualties, commanders from western democracies were likely to kill more civilians by their excessive use of high explosive.

The Poles had no illusions in either direction, trapped as they were between the two pitiless totalitarian systems which fed off each other. Another Home Army poet wrote: ‘We await you red plague / to deliver us from the black death.’

Japanese officers and soldiers resorted to cannibalism and not just of enemy corpses. Human flesh was regarded as a necessary food source, and ‘hunting parties’ went forth to obtain it. In New Guinea they killed, butchered and ate local people and slave labourers, as well as a number of Australian and American prisoners of war,

‘And how many divisions does the Pope have?’ Stalin broke in.

Giorgio Perlasca, who was in fact an Italian anti-Fascist. Perlasca assembled 5,000 Jews in safe houses under Spanish protection, while Franco’s government in Madrid had no idea of what was being done in its name.

This rather underlined the German army joke since Normandy that ‘if it’s British, we duck; if it’s American everybody ducks; and if it’s the Luftwaffe nobody ducks’.

The Greek Civil War, with all its cruelties on both sides, would continue in one form or another until 1949. But Churchill’s obstinate intervention at least saved the country from the fate of its northern neighbours which suffered more than four decades of Communist tyranny.

Sándor Márai

Every commander knew that speed was essential to give the Germans no chance to recover. A colonel commanding a Guards tank brigade refused to wait for bridging equipment to come up. Guessing that the river was not deep at the spot, he simply ordered his tanks to smash the ice with gunfire and drive across the river bed, a truly terrifying experience for the drivers.

Had it not been for the American trucks provided under Lend–Lease, the Red Army would never have made it to Berlin before the Americans.

young women and girls taken from the Soviet Union for forced labour were also suffering from gang-rape. Having longed for liberation, they were shattered to find themselves so abused by men they had thought of as comrades and brothers.

‘Conscription comes to the Chinese peasant like famine and flood, only more regularly.’

The 334 Superfortresses carpet-bombed Tokyo, sparing neither residential nor industrial zones. More than a quarter of a million buildings went up in flames spread by strong winds. Houses made of wood and paper caught fire in seconds. Altogether 83,000 people died and another 41,000 were severely injured, a far greater toll than when the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki five months later.

The US Navy liaison officer aboard remarked: ‘When a kamikaze hits a US carrier, it’s six months’ repair at Pearl. In a Limey carrier it’s a case of “Sweepers, man your brooms.”

Even more astonishing was the fact that Spanner and his associates never faced trial, because the processing of corpses was not a legal crime.

Our soldiers who didn’t speak a word of German quickly learned to say: “Wieviel ist die Uhr?” and the unsuspecting German civilian took out his pocket watch and the watch immediately moved to the pocket of the warrior-victor.’

There were growing numbers of deserters, but the threat of the ‘flying courts martial’ issuing summary sentences, and the SS and Feldgendarmerie hanging any they caught, certainly had an effect. As a senior Red Army officer observed: ‘Morale is low, but discipline is strong.’

Ever since the Teheran conference at the end of 1943 when Stalin, supported by Roosevelt, had defined Allied strategy in the west, Europe was bound to be divided in Stalin’s favour. The western Allies were finding that they could liberate half of Europe only at the cost of re-enslaving the other half.

Stalin replied to Eisenhower’s message. He told him that his plan ‘completely coincided’ with that of the Red Army and that ‘Berlin has lost its former strategic importance.’ The Soviet Union would deploy only secondary forces against it, while its main effort would be made to the south to join up with American forces, probably in the second half of May. ‘However, this plan may undergo certain alterations, depending on circumstances.’ It was the greatest April Fool in modern history.

The senior officer present ordered a strong detachment of troops to march into the adjacent town of Bergen, to bring back the whole population at bayonet point. As they were to put to work moving corpses to mass graves, these German civilians all professed shock and protested their ignorance, to the angry disbelief of British officers.

drop food supplies in the worst-affected areas, including Rotterdam and The Hague. In Operation Manna, 3,000 sorties by RAF bombers parachuted in more than 6,000 tons. For countless people close to death, it came only just in time.

Even Jewish women were not safe. Red Army soldiers had little idea of the Nazis’ racial persecution, which had been concealed by Soviet propaganda during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and then because Stalin did not want the Jews to be seen as a special category of victim. As a result, the reaction was simply one of ‘Frau ist Frau’. The Jewish women and girls still held in the Schulstrasse transit camp in Wedding were raped after the SS guards vanished.

Altogether on German territory some two million women and girls are thought to have been raped.

Members of the German Communist Party, the KPD, who emerged to greet their liberators, were in many cases shaken to find themselves arrested as ‘spies’.

In 1938 the biological warfare establishment Unit 731 had been set up outside Harbin in Manchukuo, under the auspices of the Kwantung Army. This huge complex, presided over by General Ishii Shir, eventually employed a core staff of 3,000 scientists and doctors from universities and medical schools in Japan, and a total of 20,000 personnel in the subsidiary establishments. They prepared weapons to spread black plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera, and tested them on more than 3,000 Chinese prisoners.

On the basis that approximately a quarter of Okinawa’s civilians had died in the fighting there, a similar scale of civilian casualties on the home islands would have exceeded many times over the numbers killed by the atomic bombs.

victims of cannibalism included Papuan soldiers, Australians, Americans and Indian prisoners of war who had refused to join the Indian National Army. At the end of the war, their Japanese captors had kept the Indians alive so that they could butcher them to eat one at a time.

The Second World War, with its global ramifications, was the greatest man-made disaster in history. The statistics of the dead – whether sixty or seventy million – are far beyond our comprehension.

First there were the latent civil wars across Europe and Asia which broke out in 1945. Then there was the Cold War with Stalin’s treatment of Poland and central Europe. Mixed in with the Cold War were the anti-colonial conflicts in south-east Asia and Africa. And we can never forget that the sequence of struggle in the Middle East began with mass Jewish immigration into Palestine, following the liberation of the camps.

Very few may have shared the extraordinary experience of the young Korean Yang Kyoungjong, who was forced to serve in the Imperial Japanese Army, the Red Army and the Wehrmacht.