Armageddon - Max Hastings [359]
Winston Churchill, to whom more than any other human being the world owed its escape from Nazi domination, broadcast to the British people:
The German war is therefore at an end . . . After gallant France had been struck down we, from this island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia, and later by the overwhelming powers and resources of the United States. Finally almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us. We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing . . .
Flight-Lieutenant Richard Hough was reclining on a heap of kitbags in the belly of a Dakota over the Channel, going home on completing his tour as an RAF Typhoon pilot, when a crewman suddenly pulled open the cockpit door and shouted down the fuselage: “It’s fucking over!” The passengers went mad, hurling kitbags wildly at each other in an orgy of celebration. An RAF “erk,” one of the crew, glanced at the motionless Hough: “Come on, sir, the war’s over. Aren’t you glad?”
“I shut my eyes, swallowed painfully, and lay very still.”
Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov heard the news in the tiny apartment in Leningrad to which he had returned after losing a foot in his T-34 a few months earlier. “I felt a great sadness not to be with my unit,” he said. “I thought of all the things I might have accomplished that I hadn’t. I could have done so much more.” His father had been killed as a supply officer on the Baltic Front in 1944. He himself had lost four crews in action. His family’s home had been destroyed in the siege of Leningrad. “I still felt a terrible anger towards the Germans,” he said.
“It’s over! Europe is at peace!” shouted a signaller at 0200, after picking up a plain-language transmission at the headquarters near Berlin where Yulia Pozdnyakova was serving. She celebrated by drinking some condensed milk, because her corporal would not allow a seventeen-year-old to drink alcohol. “For me, the whole war had been like some terrible fairytale. Now, we laughed and we cried and we wrote letters about how wonderful it was to be alive.”
“We didn’t celebrate the end of the war,” said Private Ron Gladman of the 1st Hampshires. “It was reward enough to have survived.” On 8 May, “three beautiful Red Army reconnaissance men” appeared at the Latvian farm where ten-year-old Gennady Trofimov, together with his mother, grandmother and sister, had spent the last icy, starving months of the war in slavery. The soldiers asked suspiciously: “Who are you?” Every Russian had been conditioned to treat every citizen of the motherland whom he met in German hands as an actual or potential traitor. The Germans in their area had fought to the very last day. The liberated family walked to the local Soviet headquarters and asked how they might get home. An officer said: “Well, mother—you see this horse and cart? You take it, and drive yourselves back to Novgorod.” And so they did, performing a journey of a thousand miles. They returned to find themselves outcasts, the children tormented as “fritzies” because they had lived among the Germans. Not only was Gennady’s father lost, but two uncles were dead. His aunt and her fifteen-year-old daughter had been hanged by the Germans in Latvia in April 1945. They later found one seven-year-old cousin alive in an orphanage, unaware of her own age or identity. The city of Novgorod was a ruin. Yet these indomitable people survived.
Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov was in Rostock with his tank battalion when the radio operators picked up news of the German surrender. He emptied his captured Mauser into the air. Many crews leaped into the tanks, started up and drove the few hundred yards to the sea to fire a triumphant salvo from their guns. Ivanov’s crew carried 100 per cent alcohol diluted with water in one of their external fuel tanks, and broached this stock at once. His friend Kazak dressed himself in a top hat and dress suit, and careered