The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [2]
17 Monte Cassino and Anzio, 1943–1945
18 The Battle of Kursk
19 The Allied Combined Bombing Offensive
20 The Normandy Landings, 1944
21 France and Germany, 1944–1945
22 The Eastern Front, 1943–1945
Poland, 1939
Finland, 1939–1940
Norway, 1940
France and the Low Countries, 1940
The Battle of Britain, 1940
The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1943
Russia and the Eastern Front, 1941–1943
Stalingrad, 1942–1943
The Holocaust
The Far East, 1941–945
The Far East: Burma, 1941–1945
The Far East: Pacific, 1941–1945
The Far East: The Philippines, 1941–1945
North Africa and the Mediterannean, 1939–1943
El Alamein
Sicily and Italy, 1943–1945
Monte Cassino and Anzio, 1943–1944
The Battle of Kursk
The Allied Combined Bombing Offensive
The Normandy Landings, 1944
France and Germany, 1944–1945
The Eastern Front, 1943–1945
Preface
Writing history, A. J. P. Taylor used to say, was like W. C. Fields juggling: it looks easy until you try to do it yourself. The writing of this book has been made much easier for me through the enthusiastic support of friends and fellow historians.
The historian Ian Sayer owns Britain’s largest private archive of hitherto unpublished Second World War material, and he has been fabulously generous with his time, advice and extensive knowledge of the period. It has been a great pleasure getting to know him in the course of researching this book, which I wrote at the same time as Masters and Commanders, since many of the sources and actors overlap.
Visiting the actual sites and scenes of many of the climactic moments of the war has been invaluable, and I would like to thank all those who have made my visits to the following places so enjoyable: the Wehrmacht headquarters at Zossen-Wunsdorf; the Maginot Line; Göring’s former Air Ministry and Goebbels’ former Propaganda Ministry in Berlin; RAF Uxbridge; the estate Hitler gave Guderian in Poland; the Cabinet War Rooms; the U-boat 534 in Birkenhead; the Lancaster bomber Just Jane at East Kirby, Lincolnshire; the site of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin; the Sevastopol diorama and U-boat pens in the Crimea; the Siemens Dynamo Works in Berlin; RAF Coltishall; Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises; the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall; the Maison Blairon in Charleville-Mézières; the former German air-raid shelters on Guernsey; the Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde outside Berlin; the Obersalzberg Documentation Centre at Berchtesgaden; the Wolfschanze at Rastenburg; the Livadia Palace at Yalta; and Stalin’s dacha at Sochi in the Crimea.
I should particularly like to thank Oleg Germanovich Alexandrov of the excellent Three Whales Tours (www.threewhales.ru) for taking me around the Moscow Defence Museum, the Kremlin, the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow and the Museum of the Great Patriotic War; also Svetlana Mishatkina for showing my wife Susan and me around Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) and in particular the Grain Elevator, the Mamayev Kurgan, the Red October, Barrikady and Dzerzhinsky Tractor factories, Crossing 62, Field Marshal Paulus’ headquarters, the Rossoschka Russo-German Cemetery and the Panoramic Museum; also Lieutenant-Colonel Alexandr Anatolyevich Kulikov for taking me round the Museum of Tank Construction at Kubinka, and Colonel Vyacheslav Nikolaevich Budjony for showing us the museum of the Officers’ Club in Kursk and the battlefields of Jakovlevo and Prokhorovka.
I should like to thank the indefatigable Colonel Patrick Mercer MP for taking me on a fascinating tour of the 1944 battlefields south of Rome, and in particular to the Alban Hills, the Allied Landing Museum at Nettuno, the former ‘Factory’ (Aprilia), Campoleone, the Commonwealth Beach Head Cemetery at Anzio, the crossing over the Moletta river where Viscount De L’Isle won his Victoria Cross, the ‘Boot’ wadi off the via Anziate, Monte Lungo, San Pietro Infine, the Gari river crossings, Sant’Angelo in Theodice, the Commonwealth, Polish and German War Cemeteries in