Inferno - Max Hastings [376]
The last phase of the Italian campaign, in the spring of 1945, was by far the best conducted, because the Allies belatedly appointed good generals. Lucian Truscott succeeded Clark at U.S. Fifth Army in December 1944, and Richard McCreery took over the British Eighth Army from Oliver Leese. Both men displayed an imagination their predecessors conspicuously lacked, especially in avoiding frontal attacks. The push across the Po Valley, admittedly against much-depleted German forces, was a fine military achievement, albeit too late to have much influence on the war’s endgame.
But there were some men fighting in Italy who had special reasons for questioning the campaign’s value. The Yalta conference in early February made it plain that, following victory, a communist government would rule Poland, and that the east of the country would become Russian soil. On 13 February the Polish corps commander in Italy, Gen. Władysław Anders, sent a letter to his British commander-in-chief, reflecting on the sacrifices that his men had made since 1942: “We left along our path, which we regarded as our battle route to Poland, thousands of graves of our comrades in arms. The soldiers of II Polish Corps, therefore, feel this latest decision of the Three-Power Conference to be the gravest injustice … This soldier now asks me what is the object of his struggle? Today I am unable to answer this question.” Anders seriously considered withdrawing his corps from the Allied line, until dissuaded by McCreery. The Poles clung to vestigial hopes that their fighting contribution to the Allied cause might yet make possible some modification of the Yalta terms in their favour. But the reality, of course, was that each of the conquering nations would arbitrate the future of the countries it occupied in the fashion that it deemed appropriate. Stalin’s soldiers were already in Poland, for which Britain and France had gone to war, while the Western armies were far away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE FALL OF THE THIRD REICH
1. Budapest: In the Eye of the Storm
AT THE END of October 1944, Heinrich Himmler delivered an apocalyptic speech in East Prussia, setting the stage for the final defence of the Reich: “Our enemies must know that every kilometre they seek to advance into our country will cost them rivers of blood. They will step onto a field of human mines consisting of fanatical uncompromising fighters; every block of city flats, village, farmstead, forest will be defended by men, boys and old men and, if need be, by women and girls.” On the Eastern Front during the months that followed, his vision was largely fulfilled: 1.2 million German troops and around a quarter of a million civilians died during the futile struggle to check the Russian onslaught. So too did many people whose governments had rashly allied themselves with the Third Reich in its years of European dominance or who had volunteered to serve the Nazi cause. One-third of all German losses in the east took place in the last months of the war, when their sacrifice could serve no purpose save that of fulfilling the Nazi leadership’s commitment to self-immolation.
Among those who found themselves in the path of the Soviet juggernaut were the 9 million people of Hungary, who found an ironic black humour in reminding one another that their nation had been defeated in every war in which it had participated for 500 years. Now they faced the consequences of espousing the losing