Armageddon - Max Hastings [376]
Yet the consequence of the Western allies’ measured approach to fighting their war against Germany, coupled with the delusion of many German soldiers that “duty” and “honour” required them to fight to the last, was that eastern Europe became Soviet booty, exchanging the tyranny of Hitler for that of Stalin in 1945. America’s Chiefs of Staff recognized, as Churchill was unwilling to do, that the Soviets could be denied their new empire only by fighting a war with them, which was unthinkable militarily as well as politically. “After the defeat of Japan,” they recorded, “the United States and the Soviet Union will be the only military powers of the first magnitude . . . While the United States can project its military power into many areas overseas, it is nevertheless true that the relative strength and geographic positions of these two powers preclude the military defeat of one . . . by the other, even if that power were allied with the British Empire.”
At one of the first big fashionable weddings in London after peace came, the MP and society diarist “Chips” Channon stood gazing complacently upon the jewelled throng. He observed to Emerald Cunard: “This is what we have been fighting for.” With blinding penetration, Lady Cunard demanded: “What? Are they all Poles?” Long after the din of battle had died elsewhere in Europe, it persisted in Poland. Almost unreported in the West, a guerrilla war continued for many months between the communist regime and the survivors of the “London Poles,” whose only crime was their yearning for freedom. Casualties were substantial, for the anti-communists fought with the despair of men and women who knew that capture meant death. “Bands of Army Krajowa bandits are continuing fighting in many parts of Poland,” Beria reported to Stalin on 17 May 1945, “attacking prisons, militia headquarters, state security departments, banks, businesses and democratic organizations.” He claimed that twenty-eight AK groups, comprising 6,000 men and women, together with 4,000 men of the Ukrainian Patriotic Army were still active in Poland. Beria concluded that it was impossible to use communist Polish troops against the AK, since these were unreliable. Instead, he had committed five NKVD regiments and a motorized infantry battalion. The communist Polish government had also requested the deployment of the two best available infantry divisions for internal security, and Beria proposed to deploy an additional three regiments of NKVD Frontier Guards. All this was designed to complete the “liberation” of the people for whose freedom the Western democracies had gone to war with Hitler in 1939.
One important social and historical consequence of the behaviour of the Red Army in eastern Europe and Germany in 1945 deserves attention here. It caused many German soldiers to feel justified in having prolonged their resistance. They cherished through the balance of their lives a conviction that they had acted rightly and honourably in seeking to preserve their kin from Soviet barbarism. Most forgot to consider why the Soviets acted as they did. They failed to reflect that it was German savagery which provoked Russian savagery, which indeed had obliged Stalin’s tyranny to enter the war at all. They erased from their consciousnesses the memory of Germany’s bloody deeds in the east, which far outstripped anything done in the Reich by the Red Army. Turning reality on its head, many Germans chose to see the ravaging of their own country as a unique phenomenon, and to regard a determination to escape vengeance for their own nation’s crimes as sufficient justification for fighting on under Hitler’s banner. Their logic was not dissimilar from that of the convicted murderer who hopes to be applauded for his courage because he struggles with the hangman to the trapdoor of the gallows. It would have been incomparably harder for Stalin to allow, far less to justify, the Red Army’s barbarism in Germany in 1945 had