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By Root 915 0

smuts and the sickly-sweet smell of fuel. He made a sign for the Germans to come out into the open. They moved slowly. At first there were ten; then there were 30 or 40. In the hush of the moment, he felt a great elation; if ordered, he could have driven through the smoking village and right on to the enemy’s divisional headquarters. Nothing could have stopped him; he couldn’t be harmed. Then the infantry came swarming into the village, dodging the mortar shells which the enemy had started dropping now. In the confusion, the Germans began to bring out their wounded, blinded and burned, roughly bandaged beneath their charred uniforms. Some of them looked at the Crocodile. What were they thinking? He went back to refuel, and remembered his letters. One was from his mother. It said: “We are proud of you.”

Total casualties in the British 21st Army Group for February and March were 5,180 men killed, 21,170 wounded and 2,850 missing. Such numbers did not indicate fighting of great intensity, by the standards of the European war. Yet they represented the equivalent of thirty-five or forty infantry battalions lost to the British order of battle. The overwhelming preponderance of Americans was still increasing. On 15 December 1944, there were 3.24 million men in Eisenhower’s armies, including 1,965,601 U.S. troops in Europe, 810,584 British, 293,411 French and 116,411 Canadians. On 4 February 1945, overall Allied strength had risen to 3.38 million. By the end of March, there were four million uniformed men under Eisenhower’s command, of whom 2,550,037 were American and 866,575 British. In these final weeks of the war, at last the divide between the manpower commitment of the Western allies and that of the Soviets was narrowing. Churchill feared that the world would soon forget the scale of Britain’s sacrifice. He told the Cabinet Office: “Get me the best figures available of the losses sustained by the English in this war . . . Another calculation which might be made would refer to the loss of cockneys. Would it perhaps be true to say the citizens of London, military and civil, have lost more than the whole of the British Empire?”

The prime minister received in response statistics of relative mortality among the Western allied nations in the Second World War: by April 1945, one in 165 Englishmen had died, one in 130 Londoners, one in 385 Australians, one in 385 Canadians, one in 175 New Zealanders and one in 775 Americans. The Western allies possessed no idea of how many Russians had been killed, and no one in Moscow was likely to tell them. The dying was not over yet, but at last the men of the Allied armies were beginning to dare to hope that they might live. By April 1945, Captain David Fraser spoke for millions of his comrades when he observed: “The sense that, with luck, one might be able to see the end became a dominant emotion.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Prisoners of the Reich

THOSE INVOLVED in the cataclysmic struggle for Germany fell into three categories. First, there were perhaps twenty-five million active participants, who fought in the uniforms of one army or another. These men were subject to orders and vulnerable to the brutal fortunes of the battlefield, yet they were protagonists in determining the fate of Europe. Then there were the onlookers—the civilian inhabitants of Germany. Wilfully or no, they had brought a terrible evil upon the world. Yet now they found themselves supine, impotent, mesmerized, as catastrophe descended. The third group were victims—prisoners of many nations held in thrall by Hitler and his minions, powerless to influence their own fates save by the act of survival. This, for most, was challenge enough. It is hard to bridge the cultural abyss between the mannered, comfortable, fatly fed, impeccably uniformed ethos of Eisenhower’s headquarters, from which the liberation of Europe was being directed, and the conditions of animal subjection in which Hitler’s prisoners in their millions waited for Eisenhower’s soldiers to come. Until the very end, the Nazis continued to inflict suffering