Inferno - Max Hastings [397]
Hamlin described indiscriminate shooting, rapes committed by French colonial troops and the killing of an American sergeant by a French patrol. “The hotel in Mettlach was systematically sacked and contents shipped by truck back into France … 5 April Luitwin-on-Boch reported that French soldiers had discovered the art objects and curios stored in the basement of the ceramic museum of Villeroy & Boch, and were destroying them.” To compound the chaos, liberated Russian prisoners rampaged freely and American soldiers were reported killing fish with grenades in the Hausbacher Brook. By contrast the local inhabitants were entirely submissive, according to Hamlin. Though such scenes were widespread throughout Germany, in the Western Allied zone order was progressively restored during the weeks that followed. In the Russian zone, it was not. Institutionalised pillage, rape and murder persisted long after Germany’s military defeat had been acknowledged. The ending of the war in the west signalled a deliverance for the soldiers of America and Britain, but the miseries of Europe and many millions of its inhabitants were much slower to abate.
1 The destruction of Dresden occupies such a prominent place in the popular legend of the war that it is striking to notice that the latest research suggests that 25,000 victims died there on 13–14 February, rather than the hundreds of thousands once supposed. This does not influence the controversy about whether the bombing was necessary, but it indicates that it caused far fewer deaths than the 1943 bombing of Hamburg or the 1945 Tokyo firestorm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JAPAN PROSTRATE
IN THE SPRING OF 1945, Indian and British forces led by Gen. Bill Slim conducted a brilliantly successful campaign to recapture Burma. This was irrelevant to the outcome of the war—as both Slim and Churchill anticipated from the outset—because the U.S. Navy had already established a stranglehold on Japan in the Pacific. But it did something to restore the battered confidence and fallen prestige of the British Empire, and laid bare Japan’s vulnerability. Churchill had sought to avoid a thousand-mile overland advance through some of the worst terrain in the world, preferring an amphibious assault on Rangoon from the south. But the Americans insisted on an attack through northern Burma, to fulfil the only strategic purpose they valued in the region—reopening the overland route to China.
Slim’s army, dominated by Indian troops and including three divisions recruited from Britain’s African colonies, was much stronger than that of the Japanese—530,000 men to 400,000—and supported by powerful armoured and air forces. Its chief problem was to supply an advance across mountainous and densely vegetated country almost bereft of roads. Air dropping, made possible by a large commitment of U.S. planes, became a critical factor in the campaign. At first, Slim planned to fight a battle on the Shwebo plain, west of the Irrawaddy, where his tanks and fighter-bombers could best be exploited. But a new Japanese commander, Lt. Gen. Hyotaro Kimura, decided against making a strong stand there, and instead opted for hitting the British as they crossed the river. When Ultra conveyed Kimura’s intentions to Slim, he changed his own plan. He pushed some troops forward towards an Irrawaddy crossing point north of Mandalay, which the Japanese were expecting, but made his main effort much farther south, to cut off the enemy’s retreat by striking against Meiktila, in their rear. Meanwhile, another British corps occupied the attention of the Japanese in the Arakan coastal region.
The success of these operations was made possible first by the Allies’ strength, and second by absolute command of the air, which denied the Japanese opportunities for reconnaissance; from beginning to end of the campaign, Kimura was befogged about British movements and intentions. Slim’s forces, advancing from Assam, in India, began to cross the Chindwin River, where so many tragic scenes