All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [94]
In brilliant sunshine, German troops in shirtsleeves rode their tanks and trucks in triumphant dusty columns across hundreds of miles of plains, swamps, forests. ‘We were following Napoleon’s invasion route,’ Major General Hans von Griffenberg wrote later, ‘but we did not think that the lessons of the 1812 campaign applied to us. We were fighting with modern means of transport and communication – we thought that the vastness of Russia could be overcome by rail and motor engine, telegraph wire and radio. We had absolute faith in the infallibility of Blitzkrieg.’ A panzer gunner wrote to his father, a World War I veteran, in August 1941: ‘The pitiful hordes on the other side are nothing but felons who are driven by alcohol and the threat of pistols at their heads … a bunch of arseholes … Having encountered these Bolshevik hordes and seen how they live has made a lasting impression on me. Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these sub-humans, who’ve been whipped into frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.’ An artillery battery commander wrote on 8 July: ‘We launch wonderful attacks. There’s only one country one’s got to love because it is so marvellously beautiful – Germany. What in the world could compare with it?’ This officer was killed soon afterwards, but his enthusiasm no doubt cheered his final days.
The advancing armies streamed through towns and cities reduced to flaming desolation either by German guns or by the retreating Soviets. Thousands of casualties overwhelmed Russian field hospitals, arriving in trucks or carts, ‘some even crawling on their hands and knees, covered in blood’, in the words of medical orderly Vera Yukina. ‘We dressed their wounds, and surgeons removed shell fragments and bullets – and with little anaesthetic remaining, the operating theatre resounded to men’s groans, cries and calls for help.’ After the first five days of war, 5,000 casualties were crammed into one Tarnopol hospital intended for two hundred. Along the length of the front, stricken soldiers for whom there were no beds lay in rows on bare earth outside medical tents. Columns of prisoners tramped in bewildered thousands towards improvised cages, their numbers astounding their captors – and the audience in the Kremlin private cinema, when Stalin and his acolytes viewed captured German newsreels. A twenty-one-year-old translator, Zarubina Zoya, wrote: ‘When the commentator announced the number of Soviet troops killed or captured there was an audible gasp in the room, and one army commander close to me gripped the seat in front of him, rigid with shock. Stalin sat in stunned silence. I will always remember what appeared next on the screen – a close-up of our soldiers’ faces. They were just young kids, and they looked so helpless, so utterly lost.’
The world watched the unfolding drama with fascination and profoundly confused sentiments. In America, arch-isolationist Charles Lindbergh proclaimed: ‘I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with Britain, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the Godlessness and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.’ Warwickshire housewife Clara Milburn found herself prey to bewilderment, writing on 22 June: ‘So now Russia will get a bit of what she gave Finland – and perhaps a lot more. Mr Churchill broadcast tonight and said we must stand by Russia. I suppose we must, as she is now against the enemy of mankind. But I wish we need not when I think of her ways, which are not our ways.’ On 1 July a Bucharest streetcar driver, seeing Mihail Sebastian with a newspaper in his hand, asked about the German