Armageddon - Max Hastings [7]
Army Group H (Colonel-General Kurt Student from November 1944 to January 1945, then Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz) comprised First Parachute Army (Student then General Alfred Schlemm) and Twenty-fifth Army (Günther Blumentritt then from March 1945 Philipp Kleffel)
GERMAN FORCES IN ITALY
Army Group C (Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring to March 1945, then General Heinrich von Vietinghoff)
GERMAN FORCES IN THE EAST
Army Group Centre, which became AG North in January 1945 (General Hans Reinhardt to January 1945, then Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic to March 1945, then Walter Weiss to April 1945)
Army Group Vistula, organized in East Prussia in January 1945 (Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler then Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici)
Army Group North Ukraine, which became AG Centre in January 1945 (General Josef Harpe, then from January 1945 Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner)
Army Group South Ukraine, which became AG Ostmark in April 1945 (General Johannes Friessner until December 1944, then General Otto Wohler, then from April 1945 Rendulic)
Army Group E (Colonel-General Alexander Lohr)
Army Group F, until disbanded in March 1945 (Field-Marshal Maximilian von Weichs)
Army Group Kurland (Rendulic in January 1945, von Vietinghoff to March 1945, then Carl Hilpert)
German forces were organized on roughly similar lines to those of the Allies but there was vastly more movement of corps and divisions between commands and fronts. The Waffen SS was responsible organizationally to Heinrich Himmler rather than to the Wehrmacht, but its formations were placed under the orders of local commanders as operational requirements and the whims of Hitler dictated. In this text, SS officers are described by their military, not SS ranks.
CHAPTER ONE
Time of Hope
ALLIES OF A KIND
THE FIRST OF September 1944 marked the fifth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, outbreak of the Second World War. The struggle had already continued for nine months longer than the earlier conflict, once called the Great War. The 1914–18 conflict cost the lives of a mere nine million people. Its successor would account for at least five times that number, the overwhelming majority of whom died in the Soviet Union or in China (where their passing remained largely unremarked by Westerners, then or since).
The British people somewhat flattered themselves about their own role. France, Britain and the dominion were the only belligerents voluntarily to have entered the conflict against totalitarianism as a matter of principle in support of Polish freedom, rather than as victims of aggression or in hopes of booty. Churchill’s brilliant defiance in 1940 mitigated Hitler’s triumph in western Europe that year. Without his genius, it is likely that Britain would have sued for peace. At no time after June 1940 was there a possibility that British arms could defeat Germany, or even play the principal part in doing so. Yet it was characteristic of British self-indulgence that, when Hitler invaded in Russia in June 1941, some thoughtful people recoiled in disgust from the notion of fighting alongside the bloodstained Soviets, even though their participation opened up the first, perhaps only realistic, prospect of overcoming Hitler.
In Evelyn Waugh’s great novel Sword of Honour, the British officer Guy Crouchback embraces war in 1939 as a crusade against the modern world in arms. His faith is lost, however, when he finds his country allied with the Russians. That was fiction, yet in cool reality the head of the British Army, Sir John Dill, said in 1941 that he considered the Russians “so foul that he hated the idea of any close association with them.” Dill’s successor as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, initially regarded the Soviets with both moral and military contempt. Churchill’s government embarked upon a huge propaganda campaign, to