Inferno - Max Hastings [345]
By 22 July the Luftwaffe paratrooper Martin Poppel lay in hospital, recovering from wounds inflicted in Normandy and increasingly fearful for the future of his nation’s cause. “How did the poor buggers at the front and the exhausted civilian population at home deserve to be so badly led? We have many anxious questions about the future and our prospects in this long war. Even the most confident among us have doubts.” Another soldier wrote to his wife on 12 August: “My darling Irmi, it doesn’t look too good—that would be saying too much—but you know the cheerfulness with which I go about life … Man is a creature of habit. The roar of gunfire and explosion of bombs, which at first are hard on the nerves, lose their terrors after two or three days … The last three days we have had the most wonderful summer weather—sun, warmth and blue skies—so utterly at odds with everything else we see around us. Oh well, it will turn out all right in the end. Just have as much faith in my luck as I do and everything will look brighter, a thousand kisses to you, my darling Irmi and the children, your Ferd.”
A comrade wrote likewise to his family on 10 August: “My darling wife and darling children … the rumble of gunfire comes ever closer. When I hear it my thoughts wander back to you, my dearest, and the question of whether I shall ever see you again rises before me. The battle could reach me any time now. What will be my fate? … Last night I was with you in my dreams. Ah, how beautiful it was! Can you imagine, my darling, how it feels to wake from such an idyll to the thunder of guns? I carry your image in my heart. It is such a heavy feeling. I should like to fly home to you my dearest! What will be my fate? How good it was to be allowed a few wonderful days with you in Fallingbostel, my dear loyal wife!” Both the letters quoted above were found by an American soldier on their authors’ corpses.
THROUGH THOSE SUMMER MONTHS, the British and American peoples thought of little else save their armies’ struggle in Normandy. But in Berlin, Hitler confronted an even graver threat: less than three weeks after the landings in France, in the east the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, which became the greatest offensive of the war and the last to be launched from Russian soil. Hitler’s refusal to allow a strategic retreat during the spring left his forces defending a 1,400-mile front, with few reserves. Two-thirds of the entire German army was still deployed against the Russians, but this was not enough to meet an assault by 2.4 million men and more than 5,000 tanks, deploying twice the firepower committed to the Soviets’ 1943 assaults.
Stalin said in a speech to his people on May Day 1944: “If we are to deliver our country and those of our allies from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast and deliver the final blow to him in his own lair.” The Russian word for “lair” is berloga. Thus, armoured crews painted on their tanks not “On to Berlin!” but “On to berloga!” On 22 June three Soviet fronts under Zhukov’s command struck at the 700,000 men of Army Group Centre. Simultaneously, a partisan offensive in the German rear almost severed Field Marshal Ernest Busch’s lines of communication. The Russians concentrated 400 guns a mile for their preliminary bombardment, along a front of 350 miles. They had total air superiority, thanks in large measure to the Western Allies’ destruction of the Luftwaffe over Germany.
When Zhukov’s infantry and tanks stormed forward into the palls of smoke and dust shrouding the defenders’ positions, German phone lines were dead, command links broken. Busch