Armageddon - Max Hastings [243]
It would be mistaken to suppose that air-raid shelters represented havens of security. Many thousands of people asphyxiated in their subterranean gloom. Amid the fires created by a heavy attack, intense heat killed. Sometimes burst boilers or water mains drowned or cooked underground fugitives. During every attack, scenes of terror were played out among those seeking sanctuary. Twelve-year-old Vilda Geertz, in Hamburg, like many children treated the first raids as a game. But, as the attacks intensified, she saw the naked panic in the streets when alerts sounded, the tearful adults, people fighting each other to get through the doors into the shelters. Once inside, when the bombs began to fall, the whole world seemed to shake. Almost everyone suffered in some degree from claustrophobia. “I came to live in a fantasy world, in my books, because reality was so terrible.”
Frau Husle of Cologne wrote to her husband, a corporal in Model’s army, “The streetcars don’t run, the Neumarkt looks as if it had been ploughed. We have no water or electricity and very little gas. Candlelight may be romantic at Christmas, or if two people are together, but when I am so lonely it makes me very unhappy. My nerves are completely finished. One day you will see me again, but it is better not to think about it. If my hair has turned white it won’t matter—or will it???” Early in the air war, the authorities urged city-dwellers to send a trunk of clothes and possessions to some friend or relation in a less vulnerable area. That way, if their house was destroyed, they could retain some of the bare necessities of life. When Joyce Kuhns fled westward from Breslau with her three small children in January 1945, after many adventures she arrived at last on the doorstep of a friend in Halle. With the help of the caretaker, she gratefully dragged from the cellar a trunk of clothes she had sent there months before. Next night there was an air raid. When she and her children returned from the shelter, the house and the trunk had disappeared. Only the body of the caretaker remained.
When Allied aircrews saw black puffs of flak pockmarking the sky around them, they felt fear and often animosity towards the gunners beneath. Yet most of the crews of those hated flak guns were teenagers, too young to have been allowed to fly. Hans Moser was the sixteen-year-old son of a government official from Nuremberg, manning a 105mm gun named Bertha at a synthetic-oil plant in Upper Silesia. Between attacks, he and his comrades were expected to continue with homework, and even to attend some school classes in the battery huts. The teenage gunners were supposed to receive an allowance of a pint of milk a day to build their strength, though this never reached them. Moser, who was nicknamed “Moses,” walked to church every Sunday with a friend named Georg, who intended himself for the priesthood after the war. They sat in the pews among a congregation of sturdy local peasants. “We were so young that we didn’t think very deeply about things,” said Moser. “We simply accepted that this was how life was.”
In their chilly barracks after hours, girls played no part in their thoughts. They talked about schoolwork, played chess and read Karl May Western novels. They slept a lot and nursed their hunger, because they were at an age when boys are always hungry. Most of the time, their greatest enemy was boredom. Perhaps every three weeks, there was a raid. As they stood to their guns, there was a long, tense period of expectation. The smoke generators masking the oil plant began to pour forth steep columns of oily fumes, designed to confuse the enemy’s bomb-aimers. The unit doctor told the boys sternly that they should try to empty their bowels before an attack, because it would thus be easier to treat them if their intestines were pierced by shrapnel. When a raid began, as the gunners sweated to load and