Armageddon - Max Hastings [0]
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
THE PRINCIPAL COMMANDERS AND THEIR FORCES
ONE: Time of Hope
TWO: The Bridges to Arnhem
THREE: The Frontiers of Germany
FOUR: The Russians at the Vistula
FIVE: Winter Quarters
SIX: Germany Besieged
SEVEN: Hell in the Hürtgen
EIGHT: The Bulge: An American Epic
NINE: Stalin’s Offensive
TEN: Blood and Ice: East Prussia
ELEVEN: Firestorms: War in the Sky
TWELVE: Marching on the Rhine
THIRTEEN: Prisoners of the Reich
FOURTEEN: Collapse in the West
FIFTEEN: “The Earth Will Shake as We Leave the Scene”
SIXTEEN: The Bitter End
ENDNOTES
SOURCES AND REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY MAX HASTINGS
COPYRIGHT
For Penny, who makes it all possible
Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.
—Winston Churchill, 6 February 1945
We were living an existence in which people’s lives had absolutely no value. All that seemed important was to stay alive oneself.
—Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, Red Army
INTRODUCTION
A dictionary defines Armageddon: “The site of the decisive battle on the Day of Judgement; hence, a final contest on a grand scale.” The last campaigns of the Second World War in Europe locked in bloody embrace more than a hundred million people within and without the frontiers of Hitler’s Greater Reich. Their outcome drastically influenced the lives of many more. The Second World War was the most disastrous human experience in history. Its closing months provided an appropriately terrible climax.
Armageddon has its origins in my earlier book Overlord, which described the 1944 D-Day invasion of Europe and the campaign in Normandy. The narrative ended with the American and British breakthrough in August, followed by a triumphant dash across France. Many Allied soldiers believed that the collapse of Hitler’s empire must swiftly follow. I concluded Overlord:
The battles in Holland and along the German border so often seem to belong to a different age from those of Normandy that it is startling to reflect that Arnhem was fought less than a month after Falaise; that within weeks of suffering one of the greatest catastrophes of modern history, the Germans found the strength . . . to prolong the war until May 1945. If this phenomenon reveals the same staggering qualities in Hitler’s armies which had caused the Allies such grief in Normandy, it is also another story.
The early part of this book is that story. The starting point was a desire to satisfy my own curiosity about why the German war did not end in 1944, given the Allies’ overwhelming superiority. It is often asserted that in the west they had to overcome a succession of great rivers and difficult natural features to break into Hitler’s heartland. Yet the Germans’ 1940 blitzkrieg easily surmounted such obstacles. In 1944–45, the Allies were masters of armoured and air forces greater than the Nazis ever possessed.
Most works on the last months of the war address either the Eastern or Western Fronts. This one aspires to view the story as a whole. The Soviets were separated from the Anglo-Americans not only by Hitler’s armies, but by a political, military and moral abyss. I have attempted to explore each side of this, to set in context the battles of Patton and Zhukov, Montgomery and Rokossovsky. I have, however, omitted the Italian campaign. It exercised a significant indirect influence upon the struggle for Germany, absorbing a tenth of the Wehrmacht’s strength in 1944–45, but its inclusion would have overwhelmed my narrative. Beyond archival research, I have met some 170 contemporary witnesses in Russia, Germany, Britain, the United States and Holland. This is the last decade in which it will be possible usefully to conduct such interviews. Many people recall their experiences vividly, but they are growing very old. Those fresh, fit, vital, often brave and handsome young men, whose deeds decided the fate of Europe sixty years ago, are today stooped and frail, the destiny of us all.
It was helpful to me that a generation