Armageddon - Max Hastings [321]
A British tank officer glimpsed some tiny figures beside a wood half a mile away, from which a German half-track had just emerged. He fired a few rounds of high explosive from his gun, then followed up with a long burst of Besa machine-gun fire. Trees caught fire. He saw survivors start to move towards the tanks, hands held high. “To my horror, they were civilians,” wrote William Steel-Brownlie, “followed by a horse and cart on which were piled all kinds of household goods. They were children, a boy and a girl, holding hands and running as hard as they could over the rough ploughed earth. They came right up to the tank, looked up at me, and the small boy said in English: ‘You have killed my father.’ There was nothing I could say.”
On 14 April, the Canadians at last secured the Dutch town of Arnhem, which had caused such bitter grief to the Allies six months earlier. But First Canadian Army was still making slow headway against the German opposition among the bleakly familiar rivers and canals of Holland. Montgomery, pushing north-eastwards to cut off Denmark from the Russians, was suddenly urged by SHAEF to hasten. On 8 April, the British XII Corps got into a fight around Lüneburg which persisted for four days. Ritchie’s men finally reached the Elbe on 19 April, and Hamburg only on the 23rd. They gazed in awe at the vast port city, reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. After a series of bitter actions, XXX Corps finally secured Bremen on the 26th. Eisenhower offered no congratulations to 21st Army Group. He believed, surely rightly, that the British did not try very hard in this last phase of the campaign. “In Germany it was a swan—a slow swan,” said Lieutenant Roy Dixon. “Nobody wanted to get killed at the last minute, so nobody wanted to take any unnecessary risks.” Bill Deedes said: “War is a very fatiguing experience. It works relentlessly upon the nervous system. By the end, we were all incredibly tired. In Hanover, I found that I no longer had the energy to discipline my soldiers for getting drunk.”
On the evening of 14 April, the British approached the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Guards hung out white sheets from their towers in surrender. Belsen’s prisoners saw, and rejoiced as they watched the night sky lit by artillery fire. Viktor Mamontov, the eighteen-year-old from Leningrad who had survived two years in some of the most terrible camps in Germany, believed himself to be dying. He was now among those who stumbled out of the barracks in ecstasy. The guards on the watchtowers opened fire on the prisoners. Mamontov fell, hit in the leg. When he saw the Germans fire again and again upon wounded men who moved, he lay motionless. He remained where he had been hit hour after hour: “Until the very last moment, I thought I would die.” At last next morning the British tanks came. For hours, the prisoners had to tend each other, until medical teams arrived. Those who could still walk smashed open the food store. Mamontov contracted typhus, and spent the next six months in hospital. He lost all his hair, and weighed just eighty-seven pounds. He was disgusted that the British executed only seven of Belsen’s German staff.
America’s legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow contrasted the healthy, well-fed Germans he saw ploughing the nearby fields with the human skeletons of Buchenwald liberated by the U.S. Third Army. He described the heaped corpses, the paralysis of the near-dead. “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it,” said the great reporter. “For most of it I have no words.” R. W. Thompson of the Sunday Times wrote from Belsen: “When you gaze upon the human body distorted beyond recognition, and come to the point where there is literally no difference between the living and the dead, you are beyond shocking because you are beyond normal standards.” At Dachau, in an outburst of spontaneous rage the American liberators summarily executed