Armageddon - Max Hastings [145]
“If we were fighting a reasonable people,” wrote Bradley’s aide Chester Hansen on 6 December 1944, “they would have surrendered a long time ago. But these people are not reasonable. They have nothing to quit for.” He added five days later: “I believe we have committed a smug and profound psychological error in announcing a program for unconditional surrender, since the German is obviously making capital of this in his effort to fan the fanaticism of the German defence . . . Our demands do nothing to persuade him to realise the folly of his fight. They give him nothing to quit for.”
Hansen’s bewilderment about German persistence reflected in part the absence of any profound American hatred towards the enemy. Germany’s defeat was inevitable. No conceivable throw of the dice by Hitler could prevent the Allies from completing the eventual destruction of his empire. The Nazi leaders’ rejection of surrender was readily comprehensible, for only the gallows could await them. But why did the ordinary German soldier, or even his military commanders, fight stubbornly on, when the only consequence must be to add hundreds of thousands more names to the rollcall of the dead, and to ensure the ruin of such areas of the Heimat as had survived Allied bombing? Greater devastation was wreaked in Germany by air attack and ground fighting in 1945 than had occurred in the entire war before December 1944.
Colonel Hansen was surely right that German determination was strengthened by the Allies’ insistence upon unconditional surrender. Some historians have echoed his conviction that the policy was thus mistaken. Yet it seems extraordinary to suppose that Roosevelt or Churchill could have offered negotiable terms to any faction within Germany, military or civilian. We know that Churchill was taken aback by Roosevelt’s unscheduled assertion of the doctrine of unconditional surrender at the Casablanca conference in 1943. The British prime minister would almost certainly have avoided explicit use of those words. His consistent private advocacy of mercy for the German people, once they had been defeated, reflects his greatness of spirit. After May 1945, the Western allies treated the Germans with vastly greater generosity than they themselves had expected while the war was being fought. Had Germany’s generals been granted a window into their nation’s future, many might have perceived early surrender to Eisenhower as a tempting option.
Yet while the war was still being fought it was unthinkable for the Western allies to offer any olive branch. It would have been profoundly damaging to the motivation of ordinary American and British soldiers suddenly to have informed them that the Germans whom they were being asked to die fighting were merely lost souls who had been unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of evil leaders. Any such equivocation by Washington or London would also have provoked a crisis with Moscow. The time for offering mercy could come only when Germany had been militarily abased. It was a serious blunder by Washington to allow leakage of the Morgenthau Plan, calling for the reduction of Germany to a nation of peasant rustics. Stimson, as secretary of war, opposed this folly from the outset. At a meeting in Washington on 5 September to discuss the Plan, he observed wryly: “I’m the man in charge of the department which does the killing in this war, and yet I am the only one who seems to have any mercy for the other side.” It was regrettable that Washington never formally abandoned the Morgenthau absurdity until the Potsdam conference in