Armageddon - Max Hastings [393]
“The oldest boys”: Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier (Sphere: 1977), pp. 475–6.
“Any further losses would”: BA, RH2/329.
“Waltraut Ptack was only thirteen”: AI Waltraut Ptack.
“Twenty-year-old Eleonore”: AI Eleonore Burgsdorff.
“You must go—quickly”: AI Lise-Lotte Kussner.
“The first shattering reports”: Von Stemann MS, op. cit., p. 192.
“In the last days of January”: Volmar, op. cit., p. 191.
“Twenty-year-old Elfride”: AI Elfride Kowitz.
“The highway along the Frisches Haff”: RSA, Stalin files.
“would be home in time”: Von Lehndorff, op. cit., pp. 32–3.
“I tramped through the powdery”: Ibid., p. 20.
“Among the very few people”: AI Michael Wieck.
“But, by a dreadful irony”: Christopher Dobson, John Miller and Ronald Payne, The Cruellest Night (Hodder & Stoughton: 1979), passim.
“Now that the evacuation”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.83.
“The Königsberg battle was very”: AI Anatoly Osminov.
“Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev of the 297th”: AI Alexandr Sergeev.
“The further side of the pond”: Von Lehndorff, op. cit., p. 49.
“The reasons for the fall of Königsberg”: BA, RH2/336.
“Beria reported that there were 32,573”: RSA, 9401 om.2 g.95 237a.
“Dr. Karl Ludwig Mahlo”: AI Karl Ludwig Mahlo.
“We were in tearing spirits”: AI Abram Skuratovsky.
“Corporal Anatoly Osminov’s unit”: AI Anatoly Osminov.
“We stood close together”: Von Lehndorff, op. cit., p. 59.
“Through the siege of Königsberg”: AI Michael Wieck.
“The bulk of those who fled”: AI Helmut Schmidt.
“It was our holocaust”: AI a survivor of East Prussia, whose name I think it is tactful to leave anonymous.
“You have, of course, read”: Djilas, op. cit., p. 435.
“In his generous instincts”: Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Doubleday: 1948), pp. 473–4.
“Private Vitold Kubashevsky, for instance”: AI Vitold Kubashevsky.
“All of us knew very well”: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, vol. i (Har-per & Row [paperback]: 1974), p. 21.
“Speed, frenzy and savagery”: Erickson, op. cit., pp. 466–7.
“We were forced to leave a land”: Documents on the Expulsions of the German People East of the Oder-Neisse Rivers, Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims, 1953.
“At his post on the shore”: AI Vitold Kubashevsky.
“I do not suppose that at any moment”: Quoted Gilbert, op. cit., p. 1182.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: FIRESTORMS: WAR IN THE SKY
“Meanwhile—still during the night”: Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, Bomber Command War Diaries (Viking: 1985), pp. 601–3.
“The bombing of Germany”: Statistics for fatal casualties from bombing vary immensely, because so much documentation was lost in the last months of the war: reputable recent authorities offer estimates which range between a low of 305,000 and a high of 700,000. It is unlikely that this issue will ever be conclusively resolved.
“During the armies’ advance”: Weigley, op. cit., p. 668.
“The gross claims of our airmen”: Hansen Diary, op. cit.
“During the past few weeks”: Quoted Tedder, op. cit., p. 613.
“a considerable commander”: Anthony Montague-Brown, Long Sunset (Cassell: 1995), p. 201.
“We should never allow”: Eaker to Spaatz quoted Wesley Frank Craven and James Lee Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II (University of Chicago Press: 7 vols. 1948–58), vol. iii, p. 733.
“after September 1944, no one”: Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (Yale University Press: 1987), pp. 221, 250.
“Richard Overy, among others”: See Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press: 1994), Why the Allies Won (Cape: 1995), passim. Overy’s analysis has caused me to modify some of the views I adopted in my earlier book Bomber Command about the scale of damage inflicted on the German war economy by bombing between 1942 and 1944.
“[it] actually works in our favour”: David Irving, Hitler’s War (Viking: 1977), pp. 574–5.
“I felt that again our efforts”: Tedder, op. cit., p. 607.
“In bright sunlight, even with”: Carl Fyler, Staying Alive (J. H. Johnson: 1995).
“Each time I close”: Knoke, op. cit., p. 164.
“Returning from bombing oil refineries”: Arthur M. Miller, unpublished