The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [3]
I should once again like to thank Paul Woodadge of Battlebus Tours (www.battlebus.fr) for conducting me on battlefield tours of Omaha Beach, Beuzeville-au-Plain, La Fière, Utah Beach, Les Mézières, Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, Bréville, Angoville-au-Plain, Merville Battery, Strongpoint Hillman, Sword Beach, Pegasus Bridge, Juno Beach, Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Lion-sur-Mer, Gold Beach and Crépon, as well as taking me to the Ryes Commonwealth War Cemetery at Bazenville and the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer.
It was kind of SPC Trent Cryer of Fort Myer, Virginia, to show me around the Pentagon, and in particular for tracking down the pen used by Douglas MacArthur, Admiral Nimitz and the Japanese delegation aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945 to sign the surrender document that ended the war. I would also like to thank Magdalena Rzasa-Michalec for Susan’s and my visit to Auschwitz–Birkenau, which she guided us around with great expertise, and David and Gail Webster for giving us a tour around de Gaulle’s wartime country residence of Rodinghead in Ashridge Park. Richard Zeitlin of the Veterans’ Museum in Madison, Wisconsin has also been most helpful.
The historian Paddy Griffith very kindly organized an advanced wargame of Barbarossa, which lasted almost as long as the operation itself, the lessons of which have greatly helped to inform my views as set out in Chapters 5 and 10. For giving so much of their time, I would like to thank Ned Zuparko (who played Hitler); Max Michael (Brauchitsch); Simon Bracegirdle (Stalin); Tim Cockitt (Zhukov). Thanks too to Martin James, General John Drewienkiewicz and Colonel John Hughes-Wilson for their views and thoughts on that occasion.
I also owe debts of thanks to the late Mrs Joan Bright Astley; Allan Mallinson; Mrs Elizabeth Ward; Bernard Besserglik; Ion Trewin; the late Professor R. V. Jones; St John Brown; John Hughes-Wilson, RUSI; the Guild of Battlefield Guides; Hubert Picarda; Colonel Carlo D’Este; Professor Donald Cameron Watt; Major Jim Turner; Rory Macleod; Miriam Owen; Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup; Daniel Johnson; and Robert Mages, Richard Sommers and David Keough at the USA Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
A number of friends have read various chapters for me, and in some cases the entire book, including Johnnie Ogden, Conrad Black, my father Simon Roberts, Oleg Alexandrov, John Curtis, Antony Selwyn, Ian Sayer, Hugh Lunghi, Eric Petersen, Paul Courtenay, David Denman. Although the errors that have doubtless survived are all my own, I would very much like to thank them, as well as the genius Penguin proofreaders Stephen Ryan and Michael Page.
Without the superb, good-natured professionalism of my publisher Stuart Proffitt, agent Georgina Capel and copy-editor Peter James this book would never have happened.
I would like to thank my wife Susan for accompanying me to many of the places that appear in this book, including Mussolini’s execution spot above the village of Giulino di Mezzegra (the day after we got engaged), Auschwitz–Birkenau, the Kachanaburi death camp on the River Kwai, the battlefields of Kursk and Stalingrad, and other wartime sites in Budapest, Vienna, Cairo, Libya and Morocco.
This book is dedicated to Frank Johnson, in memory of our long walks discussing the issues raised by the war, and especially our visit to the Wolfschanze, Hitler’s headquarters in Poland. I will always regret that we never made the trip to Charles de Gaulle’s grave at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises together. He is hugely missed by all those who knew and loved him.
Whether I use imperial or metric measurements generally depends on my sources: no one, for example, wants to convert into inches well-known German calibers measured in millimetres. And where I