The South African
Published on the Website of the South African Military History Society in the interest of research into military history
Lieutentant Coert Grobbelaar van den Berg 1939.
VIOLENCE, to an extent and of an intensity, unparalleled
in recorded history, ravaged the world during these years.
It resulted in devastation and destruction of incalculable proportions.
It brought death, swift or lingering, to fifty million men, women
and children and floods of tears of sorrow.
It left a gaping gash in man's body physical
and all but destroyed his soul.
Incidental quotations in this story, where the Sources are not mentioned, are taken from the text of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, or from extracts in this book taken from other Sources. I found the information in this book most valuable and have used much of it in this story. It is a book variously acclaimed as ... a magnificent work ... a book in which revelations stud the pages ... monumental ... a book fascinating and terrifying. It is well indexed and richly provided with references to the sources from which the author obtained his information. Other sources from which I obtained information, are mentioned in the body of the story.
Coert Grobbelaar van den Berg Pietermaritzburg 1973
I would have liked to mention the names of some of the men who shared these experiences. Then I decided to mention no names, rather than mention some of them.
Some of these men live unpretentious lives, making no claim to great importance. They pursue their occupations where no footlights cast their glare.
Others occupy some of the highest positions in the political, judicial, academic, industrial and commercial fields. The accumulation of years has forced some of them off-stage, leaving them to watch the world go by and pondering its future.
Others, alas, have answered the "sunset call".
In those far-off days these men established amongst themselves a bond of understanding and solidarity which sustained them during those dark days when the Allied forces were mostly on the defensive and, at times, suffering heavy losses. By the time the tide had turned in favour of the Allies, these men were prisoners of war. Then, too, this bond enabled them to face long periods of adversity of an entirely different nature.
"this bond enabled them to face long periods of adversity ... "
- prisoners of war - Weinsberg, Oflag V A, May 18, 1944
Down the years millions of soldiers have remained nameless in the annals of history. They were remembered for the short space of a lifetime by those who knew them. They asked for no further recognition. So let it be with these men.
CHAPTERS
In the year 1939, I entered into an agreement for better or worse; for richer for poorer. This was halfway through my lifespan to date when we are all encouraged to plant a tree in '73. Bachelorhood had been getting me down for some time. Now there came a woman in my life without whose constant companionship, I had firmly decided, life would be exceedingly empty.
The staff of Stanger High School, 1939
A few years before there had been on the staff of the school where I was teaching, a young teacher. She was haughty, aloof and standoffish towards me and I let her be. Time went by until we found ourselves playing golf together. She was keen on hockey and so was I. We were both playing regularly in the local mixed hockey teams which reached quite a high standard. Not one of us could ever get a ball past this woman at fullback. This fact became known outside local circles and she was invited to take part in preliminary trials to select a Natal Women's Hockey side to tour Rhodesia. On several occasions I took her to these trials in my derelict motorcar. She was selected for the Natal side.
Catherine Daphne Hackland -
"she was haughty, aloof and standoffish"
By this time I had discovered that apart from the interest we shared in these, more or less, unimportant activities, there was much besides which could lead to a strong bond between us.
While she was away on this tour I suffered from emotional turbulence and mental dis-equilibrium. I did not hesitate to tell her about it when she came back. I asked her if she did not see plainly before her eyes the man she should consider marrying. Her response was such that I took it to mean that she did and that was it. Of the many pacts and alliances that are to be mentioned in this story, this is the only one, which still stands.
"Of the many pacts and alliances ...
this is the only one, which still stands."
Wedding day, July 8, 1939
Why was it pre-destined that a corporal from World War I, Adolf Hitler, should cross the path of so many millions and why at this particular time in our lives? When we were married on July 8, 1939, minor flashes had already come from the dark war clouds, which had spread over parts of Europe. They were now spreading their ill-boding shadows wider and wider. The world was waiting for and dreading more flashes which were sure to emanate from them and to send their resultant roars, rumbling across the whole world.
On September 1, the igniting flash came. The roar reached Great Britain by September 3, and its rumblings were heard in South Africa on the 5th of that month. We were at war with the Rome-Berlin Axis powers. On the same day, the United States of America pretended that she had heard neither roar nor rumble.
She would wait for something more alarming before intervening. She declared her neutrality.
We had bought our furniture and fittings with all the care and interest, which this process inevitably engenders, in every young couple. We installed it all in a home quite adequate for our purposes. Yes, visions of comfortable home life in the offing but clouded by uncertainty.
An inexplicable attitude descended upon this land, which had just declared war. There was a reluctance to believe that a SECOND world war had started when there were still so many who remembered the FIRST one, the war which was to have ended all wars. There appeared to be a complete disregard of what had been happening in Europe for some years before we became involved. The events, which were to shake everybody into a full realisation of what the world was to experience, still lay hidden in the future. For the present the slogan was "business as usual". What had been happening in Europe thus far, had not come very close to us as it had not come close to many others. Perhaps what had happened, could have been avoided. Matters would soon settle down and develop no further. In any case, there were a million Allied troops ready to hang their washing on the Siegfried Line and France was secure behind the formidable fortifications of the Maginot Line. In Britain, this became known as a "phoney war". A picture to belie all this was soon to be painted.
At this stage we should take a close look at an extraordinary man on whom the eyes of the world were to become focussed for a long time.
Some years after World War I, Adolf Hitler had laid his soul bare to the world in Mein Kampf, the first volume of which he wrote in the fortress of Landsberg. The story of how he came to be in this fortress will be told in due course. For the present we are more concerned with some of the views of this man whose experiences in his early youth had such a profound effect on the history of the world.
When I read Mein Kampf for the first time before the war, I must admit that it frightened me. To me it seemed inconceivable that this man did not mean what he said. Whatever one might have thought of the reasoning and arguments he employed to arrive at certain conclusions, these conclusions were stated with a conviction, which I could only regard as inflexibly firm. One had every reason to fear the consequences should he ever be placed in a position to translate words into action. At the beginning of 1944 when I was a prisoner of war in Germany, I read it again. A warrant officer (feldwebel) lent me his copy. He operated in the camp as some sort of liaison agent between the prisoners and the detaining power, our hosts. I wondered why he almost begged me to read it again. At that stage the signposts on the road along which Hitler was taking Germany showed clearly that he was not leading his people to the glorious future Mein Kampf had promised them. I had a feeling that this feldwebel had by then discarded any illusions he might have had. He was not a happy German. I read this book again recently when it was an historic document and no longer a blueprint of things to come.
Hitler's father, after much chopping and changing of jobs, was a custom's officer on the border between Germany and Austria. He died when Adolf was thirteen years old. He had often quarrelled with his son, as he wanted him to prepare himself to join the civil service. Adolf bluntly refused to listen to his father. At the realschule he neglected the subjects he disliked. As it happened, circumstances assisted him to escape being a civil servant. He was forced to leave school for a year because of a chest complaint and his mother was advised not to let him prepare for a career, which would necessitate his working in an office.
Upon his recovery he left the realschule to attend the academy where a different choice of subjects was offered. He was happy doing the things he liked. Then his mother died. "This", says Hitler, "put a brutal end to all my fine projects ... The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other I would have to earn my own bread ... With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my heart I left for Vienna ... I was determined to become something but certainly not a civil servant."
He learned that he had failed to pass the entrance examination to the Academy of Arts, which he wrote shortly before his mother's death. He was told that the School of Architecture would be a better approach for him. His abilities lay more in that direction.
"I was forced," Hitler writes, "bitterly to rue my former conduct in neglecting and despising certain subjects in the realschule. Before taking up Courses at the School of Architecture in the Academy, it was necessary to attend the Technical Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this school was a leaving certificate from the middle school and this I simply did not have."
He had to spend five years in Vienna. "Five years", he says, "in which, first as a casual labourer and then as a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread." Hunger, misery and deprivation were his constant companions during these years. The manual labourers in Vienna like himself, "lived in surroundings of appalling misery ... I shudder even today when I think of the woeful dens in which people dwelt, the night shelters and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth and wickedness."
He tried desperately to understand the conditions around him. He deprived himself of many of the necessities of life in order to buy books dealing with attempts that had been made and were being made to shape the political, economic and social affairs of people and nations. He loathed Hapsburg Austria. "It was an empire," he says, "which had a population of 52 million with all the perilous charm of a state made up of multiple nationalities." Above all there were ten million Germans who were denied the opportunity of joining their Fatherland. The "gigantic city of Vienna", seemed to him to be "the incarnation of mongrel depravity". About his reading habits, he says, "From early youth I endeavoured to read books in the right way and I was fortunate in having a good memory and intelligence to assist me." It is quite clear that he read widely but one-sidedly.
"Vienna", he writes, "was a hard school for me but it taught me the most profound lessons of my life. I was scarcely more that a boy when I came to live there and when I left it, I had grown to be a man of a grave and pensive nature ... in Vienna, I developed a faculty for analysing political questions in particular. A weltanschauung and a definite outlook on the world took shape in my mind. These became the granite basis of my conduct at the time. Since then I have extended that foundation only very little and I have changed nothing in it."
Furthermore, "during that period my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for the existence of the German people. These two were Marxism and Judaism."
Having made this discovery there was hardly a term of abuse, which he did not hurl at the Jews.
Everything that he saw around him was dominated and manipulated by these "vermin ... rabble ... pests ... liars ... murderers". All forms of government, all political parties, all state and private enterprises, all institutions, including schools and other places of learning, all labour organisations and trade unions, all news media and propaganda were in their hands. He despised the "idiots" and "imbeciles" more particularly amongst those who claimed to be German, who allowed themselves to be used as tools to do the destructive work of the Jews because they were too obtuse and stupid to realise wnat despicable roles they were being made to play.
In the fortress of Landsberg he also had time to reflect on his two happier years in Munich where he stayed after he left Vienna. He was at Munich at the outbreak of Warld War I in 1914. This event pleased him so much that he fell on his knees in gratitude because a war was necessary before Germans would be able to occupy their rightful place in the sun. He joined the army and spent four years on the Western Front. As a dispatch rider he was awarded both the second and first class Iron Crosses. He was wounded in the early stages of the war but returned to the Front as soon as possible. Towards the end of the war he nearly lost his eyesight as a result of a gas attack in the trenches. He was recovering in a military hospital when the news of the collapse of Germany in 1918, was announced. Hitler wept bitterly. He could not believe that all the sacrifices of the German soldiers have been in vain.
"Although the misfortunes of the Fatherland," Hitler remarks, "may have stimulated thousands and thousands to ponder over the inner causes of the collapse, that could not lead to such a thorough knowledge and deep insight as a man may develop who has fought a hard struggle for many years so that he might be master of his own fate." Here in the Fortress he could now draw on his past experiences his observations, and his faculty for analysing political questions, his thorough knowledge and deep insight; his definite outlook on the world to provide all the answers for the collapse of Germany and to indicate the road that had to be followed in the future.
Jews manipulated the strikes and revolutions in 1918, preventing the Germans from gaining the victory, which was in sight. They stabbed Germany in the back. They imposed the Treaty of Versailles on Germany. They thrust the hated democratic parliamentary concoction, the Weimar Republican Constitution on Germany. They favoured the contamination of Aryan by non-Aryan blood which "the hereditary sin in this world and it brings disaster to every nation that commits it".
He was to keep up this vituperation against the Jews all through his life until a few hours before his death when he gave his last piece of advice to his successors - who fortunately never succeeded him - in these words: "Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the racial laws to the limit and to mercilessly resist the poisons of all nations, international Jewry."
"There is only one answer', he writes in Mein Kampf, "A revolutionary conception of the world and human existence." This revolutionary movement will achieve decisive success when the new weltanschauung has been taught to a whole peopIe or subsequently forced upon them, if necessary, and when the central organisation, the movement itself is in the hands of those few men who are absolutely indispensable to form the nerve-centre of the coming state. "
What had been neglected to be done about the Treaty of Versailles was to be done now. "Each point of that treaty," Hitler asserts, "could have been engraved on the hearts and minds of the German people and burned into them until 60 million men and women would find their souls aflame with a feeling of rage and shame, and a torrent of fire would burst forth as from a furnace and one common will would be forged from it like a sword of steel. Then the people would join in a common cry: To arms again."
It is a little difficult to trace the processes of heat transmission in this fiery, molten metaphor and this kind of language which might have induced some people to believe in hot air and vapourings only, coming from this man. The message, nevertheless comes over loud and clear: To hell with the Treaty of Versailles.
"The right to territory", says Hitler, "may become a duty when a great nation seems destined to go under unless its territory is extended. And this is particularly true when the nation in question ... is the German mother of all the life which has given shape to the modern world." Lebensraum for the German people can only be obtained when "the portion which has more or less retained its sovereign independence can resort to the use of force for the purpose of reconquering those territories which had once belonged to the common Fatherland."
As for the antagonistic press, "the scream of the 12-inch shrapnel is more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers". Truly there was much to be done according to Hitler, for "think of those hundreds of thousands who set out with their hearts full of faith in their Fatherland that never returned; ought not their graves to open so that the spirits of those heroes, bespattered with mud and blood would come home and take vengeance on those who had so despicably betrayed the greatest sacrifice which a human being can make for his country? Then "for a thousand years to come, nobody will dare speak of heroism without recalling the German Army of the World War. And then from the dim past will emerge the immortal vision of those solid ranks of steel helmets that never flinched and never faltered."
After the war Hitler could not, like thousands of others, make up his mind what to undertake. In 1920 he was finally demobilised and he decided to go into politics. With non-existent means at their disposal, a small group of members of the German Workers' Party met every Wednesday in one of the cafes of Munich. They arranged small public meetings but few attended. Hitler had joined this Party as its seventh member. At the beginning of 1920, he put forward the idea of holding their first mass meeting. His suggestions were opposed. The other members advised caution. This was not a word, which fitted easily into Hitler's vocabulary. Their advice infuriated him. He himself undertook to make all the arrangements and to do the necessary publicising. The meeting was held on February 24, 1920 in the chief hall of the Hofbrau Haus on the Platz in Munich.
At the appointed time, Hitler mentions in Mein Kampf, "the great hall was packed to overflowing". Hitler started to speak "amidst a hailstorm of interruptions". He went on. "After half-an-hour the applause began to drown the interruptions." Hitler was explaining the 25 theses, which constituted the programme of the new party. To the name German Workers' Party, had been prefixed the words National Socialist. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party was launched at this first mass meeting. (The word "Nazi" is derived from the German pronunciation of the first two syllables in the word "Nationaaf', approximating "Nahtzi".) Hitler reports, "When the last point was reached, I had a hall full of people before me, united by a new conviction, a new faith and a new will ... I knew that a movement was now set afoot among the German people which would never pass into oblivion."
The success of this meeting was of the utmost importance in shaping Hitler's approaches to the masses, which he succeeded so undeniably to influence. He had proved to himself for the first time that he had the ability to capture and hold the attention of a large audience and even to sway opponents to his way of thinking. He exploited his undoubted ability in this direction by addressing numerous meetings. "Such audiences," he writes, "brought me the advantage that I slowly became a platform orator at mass meetings and gave me practice in the pathos and gesture required in large halls that held thousands of people." On some such occasions he even managed to persuade his audiences that the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, which the Germans imposed on Russia on March 3, 1918, towards the end of World War I, was a mild one in comparison with the Treaty of Versailles. Only a Hitler could justify Russia being deprived, according to Shirer, of "56 000 000 inhabitants, or 32% of her whole population; a third of her railway mileage, 73% of her total iron ore, 89% of her total coal production; and more than 5 000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover, Russia was obliged to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks."
His audiences began to see in Hitler the courageous and fearless fighter for German existence. Did his Programme of Principles not emphasise that common welfare and gain would be placed before individual welfare and gain - the catch phrase, Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz?
It is one thing for a people secure, or even reasonably secure, in their way of life to reject the voice of a revolutionary; it is another thing for a people who consider themselves woefully deprived of hope for the future to reject such a voice. The people of Germany found themselves in a trough of despondency. It was a period of low ebb and depression all round. There were in the region of six million unemployed Germans and even amongst those who were employed there was discontent and visions of a dismal future. It was in Adolf Hitler's revolutionary approach that the people began to see their salvation. They needed someone who spoke as forcibly and with such obvious conviction about righting the wrongs, which Germany had suffered and continued to suffer.
At his meetings Hitler welcomed opponents but they were not to prevent him from putting his message across. His Storm Troops - Sturmabteilungen (SA) - were always there to deal violently with elements that tried to break up his meetings. These Storm Troops were but the first of the organisations, which he created to assist him in dealing ruthlessly with opponents. They wore brown shirts and were recognised by their swastika badges.
He later formed his Protection Units - Schutzstaffel (SS). These men received more specialised training that the SA, who were merely required to be brawny and tough for their particular tasks. The SS wore black tunics. The initials SS lent themselves to being reproduced in print and on the lapels of uniforms in the form of two flashes of lightning.This symbolised the lightning attention, the lightning obedience, the lightning action demanded of these troops. During the war their battle dress changed colour to a dark green but the characteristic symbol remained on their lapels.
The Secret State Police - Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) - had to beformed to uncover any intrigue, which might be brewing against Hitler. "It was at first", says Shirer, "little more than a personal instrument of terror employed by Hermann Goering to arrest and murder opponents of the regime. It was only in April 1934 ... that the Gestapo began to expand as an arm of the SS." Heinrich Himmler was in charge. With the assistance of Reinhard Heydrich who was head of the Security Branch of the SS - Sicherheitsdienst (SD) - the trio SS, Gestapo, SD was to become a "scourge with power of life and death over every German",
The Party, which Hitler had joined in 1920, chose him as its Chairman in August 1921. In place of decision by majority vote of the committee, the principle of absolute responsibility of the Chairman was adopted. He had insisted on that. Rarely from that day onwards did he flinch from taking decisions for which he assumed full responsibility.
"The art of leadership," wrote Hitler, "as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary ... The more the militant energies of the people are directed toward one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category ... The single adversary was always that bacillus which is the solvent of human society, the Jew ... here, there and everywhere."
Hitler fully appreciated the value of flags, banners, badges and insignia to create colour, atmosphere and solidarity at mass meetings. These were at times attended by over a hundred thousand cheering supporters. These were the occasions, which stimulated Hitler to reach heights of oratory, which stirred the Germans to a frenzied display of emotions almost foreign to their nature. In addition, the power of the radio brought his speeches and the sounds of cheering multitudes to millions of others. One can well understand Hitler's belief in, the power of the spoken word and his jubilation when he first discovered that he was a master at using it. Perhaps it is true to say that Hitler might have failed to become Der Führer but for this gift, which gave him such a tremendous advantage over his political rivals. He could blow on smouldering patriotic cinders like no one else could until they glowed red-hot and burst into devouring flames.
About the Nazi flag which usually hung in profusion from all vantage points at mass meetings, he had this to say: "It incorporated those revered colours expressive of our homage to the glorious past which once brought so much honour to the German nation; but this symbol was also an eloquent expression of the will behind the movement. We National Socialists regarded our flag as being the embodiment of our Party Programme: the red expressed the social thought underlying the movement; white, the national thought and the swastika signified the mission allotted to us - the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind and at the same time the triumph of the ideal of creative work which is in itself and always will be anti-Semitic."
There can be no doubt about it that Hitler had himself in mind when he wrote: ... "When the abilities of theorist and leader and organiser are united in the one person then we have the rarest phenomenon on this earth."
Many people have tried to evaluate this man's character and makeup. Robert Ardrey, in his book The Social Contract, to which I shall return at a later stage, describes Hitler as an example of what is encountered throughout the animal kingdom, more especially amongst primates. He is an example in man of an undoubted alpha, just like Winston Churchill, "the dazzling gift to wartime Britain", is another example of an undoubted alpha. "The omega" he says, "commands the attention of only his or her inmates. The true alpha holds the attention of the entire group and through giant magnetism accomplishes as a normal event what would otherwise be a miracle." Although Ardrey describes the alpha in these terms, he makes no attempt to explain the alpha-phenomenon. He says, "We may recognise him, follow him, applaud him, put him to the most useful of purposes. But while many have attempted to describe him, few have been the observers brash enough to explain him." He continues, "So many variables enter the determination of alpha-ness that one faces an equation beyond solution. Strength, intelligence, maleness, courage, health, indefinable persistence, ambition, confidence - all are involved ... luck probably of high significance. But the most remarkable quality ... is political acumen."
We will never know how many Germans would have chosen from time to time to call a halt to Hitler's dark ambitions. He built up an organisation so powerfully ruthless towards his opponents who may have had alpha-ambitions and he showed so much concern for true Germans who bowed to him and who hailed him as their alpha that it will perhaps remain forever that inexplicable phenomenon of followers being irresistibly drawn by a giant magnetism.
During the two years while Hitler was Chairman of the new Party, from August 1921 to November 1923, the Party had grown considerably and Hitler was full of confidence. In November of the year 1923 he staged what was to become known as the Beer Hall Putsch. It failed and as a result he was held captive and on February 28 of the following year, the People's Court in Munich sentenced him to five years imprisonment. He only served about eight months and was then released. He was imprisoned in the fortress of Landsberg where he had time to reflect on his experiences and to write the first volume of 'Mein Kampf. There was at the time when the Putsch was attempted, a movement afoot in Bavaria to secede from the German Republic. Hitler, of course had no respect for the Weimar Republican Democracy that had been imposed on Germany but any attempt to dismember Germany still further after the war was more than Hitler could tolerate. He also saw an opportunity for a shortcut to greater power than he had had, if he could gain control over this part of Germany. He had been trying to persuade the three key men in Bavaria to assist him in resisting such a move. They were Gustav von Kahr, the State Commissioner, General Otto von Lossow, Commander of the Reichwehr - the army in Bavaria, and Colonel Hans von Seisser, the Head of the State Police. They were decidedly uncooperative. Hitler was a nonentity and an upstart.
Some businessmen in Munich had quite innocemly arranged for a meeting to be held in the Burgerbraukeller, a large beer hall to discuss business matters. Hitler received news that Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were to attend this meeting. He suspected that Kahr would make use of this opportunity to announce the secession. He decided that the SA would surround the hall and he would take over the meeting.
While Kahr was speaking that night, Hitler entered the hall and dramatically fired a shot at the ceiling. He told them that the hall was surrounded by SA troops. No one was to leave the hall and unless they were quiet a machine gun would be used on them. He informed his audience that reinforcements were marching to the hall and that the Bavarian army and the police were on his side. There was, of course, not a shred of truth in this concocted story.
He ordered the trio, Kahr, Lossow and Seisser to accompany him to a small room off the stage. There he parleyed with the three men but he found them most obstinate. He had to adopt other methods. He locked them in and entered the main hall. He told the audience that the three leaders had agreed to his forming a new government and that General Erich Ludendorff of Western and Eastern Front fame would command the new national army to be formed. The three men heard loud applause in the hall and wondered what it was all about.
Hitler had arranged for Ludendorff to be brought into the hall at this dramatic moment. Ludendorff did not really know what was happening but he was also opposed to the secession move. He would cooperate. Hitler asked Ludendorff to speak to the three locked-up men and confirm what he had just told the audience. Ludendorff succeeded to the point of making the three men believe the story. They agreed to each one of them making a short statement in the hall confirming what Hitler had said.
This having been accomplished the people were allowed to leave the hall. Hitler had another engagement and left Ludendorff with the three men to arrange the take-over to which they had agreed. They, however, made excuses that they had urgent matters that needed attention first. A meeting could be arranged later to suit Ludendorff's convenience. When Hitler returned to the hall only Ludendorff was there.
In the meantime, the SA under Ernst Roehm's command had occupied the War Ministry building. As soon as Kahr left the hall, he recovered from the stunning blow that Hitler had dealt him. He issued notices that their statements had been forced from them at pistol point. They were meaningless. He alerted the army and the police.
Hitler's plan had backfired and he was not at all sure what to do. Ludendorff advised him that they should stage a demonstration march to the War Ministry the following morning with a view to negotiations. Roehm and his SA were now encircled by the Bavarian army. Ludendorff was sure that the ex-soldiers would, out of consideration for him, not interfere with the march. Hitler agreed reluctantly. He had always disliked following other people's advice but he had no alternative plan.
The next morning the march started with Ludendorff, Hitler and Goering heading the column, with Hess close by. When they were about to enter the square in front of the War Ministry, a police detachment blocked their way. Shouts came to let them proceed as Ludendorff was amongst them. These policemen were not ex-soldiers and the name Ludendorff struck no chord. A shot rang out and the police opened fire. Sixteen of Hitler's followers were killed instantly. Later, two more died of wounds. Hitler fell and dislocated his shoulder. The others fled in confusion. Ludendorff alone kept marching to the War Ministry where he was arrested. Hitler and some of his followers were rounded up and imprisoned until the trial in February 1924. Goering and Hess had managed to escape over the border, Roehm was also arrested.
The trial lasted for 24 days. The proceedings were reported by journalists far and wide. Hitler defended himself so vigorously and so tellingly that he enhanced his image amongst his followers and certainly caused his sentence to be much lighter than could have been expected. Hitler was sentenced to imprisonment for five years. He served less than a year and was released.
The Central Authorities in Berlin, no doubt, saw no great crime in Hitler's attempt to stop secession. Shirer remarks: "Hitler had transformed defeat into triumph ... impressed the German people with his eloquence and the fervour of his nationalism and emblazoned his name on the front pages of the world." Ludendorff was acquitted at the trial.
Every year on November 8, the Beer Hall Putsch was commemorated in Munich and Hitler was there to pay tribute to the eighteen martyrs who died to further the Party cause.
The Volkischer Beobachter that the Party had acquired earlier as their mouthpiece had stopped appearing after Hitler was arrested. On February 26, 1925 it reappeared carrying an editorial by Hitler announcing "A New Beginning".
Hitler devoted quite a few pages in Mein Kampf to explaining why nobody should take on the leadership of a party before his thirtieth year. He was now 36 years old and considered himself more than ripe for leadership. He started to gather up the reins of the Party that had almost become defunct during his absence .. Hitler learned important lessons from the Beer Hall Putsch. He was later to admit that it was an amateurish attempt in the extreme. He should not have allowed Ludendorff to deal with those three men. He should have dealt with them in his own way. Moreover, it placed him in a position where he had to act on Ludendorff's advice. Never again would he allow control to slip out of his hands in this way. Never again would he allow a situation to develop in which he would be forced to accept advice from others. But it was a blessing in disguise. he thought. If the Putsch had succeeded, success would have been of short duration because the Party would at that stage not have survived the onslaughts against it. It had not been adequately established. He also realised that he would not get control by acting against the army. He would have to get their cooperation in future, at least until he was firmly entrenched in power.
Largely because of his experiences in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler had decided to make use of the channels provided by the democracy of the Weimar Republican Constitution. He would build up his party until it could command a majority vote in the Reichstag. Then he would smash the whole system from within. It took him longer than he expected but along this path he gained valuable experience in political manoeuvrings in which he would eventually out-bid all his political opponents.
By 1932 his Party was still very much in the doldrums but none of the numerous other parties in Germany could obtain an over-all majority either. The result was that President Hindenburg had to request various leaders from time to time to try by means of coalitions and agreements with other parties to form some sort of stable government. No one achieved much success.
"As the strife-ridden year of 1932 approached its end," Shirer writes, "Berlin was full of cabals and of cabals within cabals ... Soon the webs of intrigue became so enmeshed that by the New Year 1933, none of the cabalists was sure who was double-crossing whom."
Amidst this confusion, Hindenburg eventually called on Hitler on January 30, 1933, to become Chancellor. Frans von Papen was Vice chancellor and eight of the eleven Cabinet posts were filled by conservative Nationalists from amongst Papen's followers. They thought they had "lassoed the Nazis to their own end". He, on the other hand, knew their weaknesses as well as he knew the weaknesses of his other political opponents and of the existing institutions and organisations that had nearly all ground to a halt owing to the ineptitude or unwillingness of the German people to make the Democratic Weimar Republic function adequately.
Hitler wasted no time in his position of Chancellor to out-do his opponents. The Nazi party in coalition with Papen's Nationalists had 247 seats out of the 583 in the Reichstag thus still lacking an over-all majority. Hitler paid no attention to Papen's suggestion that they should collaborate with yet another party to obtain the required majority. He had no wish to compromlse with other malcontents. He was not going to take advice. He had something far more favourable in mind for his Party. He would impress the President with his pleas to dissolve the Reichstag and to hold another election. The existing situation offered no solution. He was sure another election would lead to greater stability. He knew, he would then unlike in 1932 have the resources of the state at his disposal to fight the election. Hindenburg agreed. He was weary of it all and weak with age. The date for the election was fixed for March 5, 1933. The election campaign was on.
Very conveniently, the Reichstag fire broke out on February 27. Nothing could have given a better start to the Nazi campaign. It provided all the ammunltlon necessary to fire at the Communists who were accused of this devilish plot.
There appears to be little doubt today that leading Nazis had master-minded the whole incident but remained so far in the background that all accusations could only rest on conjecture: but it served their purpose to the hilt. The day after the fire had broken out, Hitler was ready with his plan. He persuaded the President to sign a decree "for the Protection of the People and the State". This decree suspended the "seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties". Germany was soon to learn what terrible power this innocent-sounding decree had placed in the hands of Hitler. The SA went on the rampage, not only against the Communists but also against everyone suspected of anti-Nazi activities. After all it was officially decreed that they could lay no claim to civil or individual liberties. Fear gripped the people. What was to happen to them should they dare not to vote Nazi? Was there any guarantee of a secret ballot?
On March 5, 44% of the electorate voted for the Nazi Party - a greater percentage by far than for any other single party. Hitler had 288 members in the Reichstag. With the support of 52 Nationalists from Papen's party, he commanded an overall majority of 16. This was most unsatisfactory. It fell far short of a two-thirds majority. Hitler had decided that he was going to establish his dictatorship by consent of parliament, and then there would be no comeback, no Beer Hall fiasco. He needed a two-thirds majority for this.
The next step was already clear in Hitler's mind. He had a draft bill all ready to present to the Reichstag at its first meeting. If passed, it would become the "Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich". What could be more innocent sounding?
But first, the ceremonial opening of the Reichstag had to take place. The Reichstag building had been burned down and Paul Joseph Goebbels and Hitler had arranged for this ceremony to take place in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, a place hallowed by memories of the "old greatness" of Germany. The amount of humility that Hitler displayed on that memorable day towards the old President was to pay handsome dividends. There, in the presence of a splendid array of uniformed field marshals, generals, admirals and Junker highbrows, Hitler "stepped down, bowed low to Hindenburg and gripped his hand. There in the flashing lights of camera bulbs and amid the clicking of film cameras which Goebbels had placed along with microphones at strategic spots, was recorded for the nation and the world to see and to hear described the solemn handclasp of the German Field Marshal and the Austrian Corporal". Hitler assured the President that the "union between the symbols of the old greatness and the new strength has been celebrated. We pay you our homage".
And the result? Two days later Hitler's bill became law. The so-called Enabling Act was passed by a vast majority. The Social Democrats voted against it. They alone, as a Party had remained disenchanted by the superb actor at the ceremonial opening of the Reichstag. Their leader, Otto Wells told the Reichstag, "We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the principles of humanity and justice ... No Enabling Act can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible". Hitler jumped up and shouted: "You come late, but yet you come: you are no longer needed ... The star of Germany will rise and yours will sink. Your death knell has sounded ... I do not want your votes. Germany will be free, but not through you!".
The house burst into "the Horst Wessel song, which would soon take its place alongside 'Deutschland uber Alles' as one of the two national anthems:
This Enabling Act meant in short, that the Reichstag was prepared to allow the Cabinet to rule the country for a period of four years without interference from the elected members. It was as if "they had voted themselves a four-year holiday". It was the Cabinet's responsibility to run the affairs of Germany. It gave Hitler a free hand in domestic and foreign affairs. He soon demolished the federal parliaments and established the complete unification of Germany much more effectively than he could possibly have done by means of his amateurish attempt ten years before. Papen was still vice chancellor but his power was nought for Hitler filled his Cabinet with his own loyal and fanatic supporters.
On July 14, 1933 a law was passed which stated: "The National Socialist German Workers' Party constitutes the only political party in Germany".
The outcome of the March election still rankled in Hitler's mind. Only 44% of the electorate had supported him. He would now do something which would have such a popular appeal that the whole nation would rally round him. The hated Treaty of Versailles would provide the excuse for taking his first step into the field of foreign affairs.
On October 14, 1933 Hitler announced Germany's withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations because Germany was denied equality of rights by the other powers in that league. He decided that he would let the people say what they thought of the action. A plebiscite was to be held on November 12, in conjunction with an election for the new one-party state.
On the eve of the election, on November 11, the anniversary date of the 1918 Armistice, the "venerable Hindenburg" said in a broadcast to the nation: "Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your solidarity with the government. Support with me the Reich Chancellor and the principle of equal rights and of peace with honour and show the world that we have recovered and with the help of God will maintain German unity".
And the result? Some 96% of the registered voters cast their votes and 95% of these approved Germany's withdrawal from Geneva. The vote for the singleparty state was 92%. Even if one granted that fear of not voting, or of voting the wrong way, might have influenced the electorate appreciably, the people, nevertheless, gave Hitler the support for which he was angling - a resounding victory.
And so the year 1933 sped to its end. Shirer gives this brief account of the events of this remarkable year: "Hitler could look back on a year of achievement, unparalleled in German history. Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and de-federalised the Reich, wiped out the labour unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and coordinated under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people. For all these accomplishments and for his resolute action in foreign affairs which took Germany out of the concert of nations at Geneva, and proclaimed German insistence on being treated as an equal among the great powers, he was backed, as the autumn plebiscite and election had shown, by the overwhelming majority of the German people."
Despite his successes, the year 1934 was to prove far from plain sailing for Hitler. Ernst Roehm had stood by Hitler since the early days when his brownshirted Storm Troops ensured that Hitler's meetings would not be broken up. By the year 1934 his "rough and ready" followers had increased in number to two and a half million. Roehm had lately been worrying and annoying Hitler with requests that the SA should be given a far higher status in Germany than hitherto. They should actually perform the functions of the Wehrmacht. Hitler was emphatic that his requests were utter nonsense. He would never agree to undermine the Wehrmacht and its powerful officer-corps until much more had been accomplished with their cooperation.
Hitler, nevertheless, on New Year's Day, 1934, appointed Roehm to his Cabinet and wrote to him: "I feel compelled to thank you ... for the imperishable services which you have rendered to the National Socialist movement and the German people and to assure you how very grateful I am that I am able to call such men as you my friends and fellow combatants". Still, this did not mean that Hitler had climbed down. He had reason not to climb down. Roehm was persistent in his demands despite, or because of, Hitler's friendly letter. In February he presented a memorandum to the Cabinet in which he proposed the same nonsensical arrangements implying that he should be Minister of Defence. When the contents of this memorandum became known it had the exact effect which Hitler knew it would have. It caused an outcry in the Wehrmacht. "No more revolting idea could be imagined by the officer-corps. Its senior members not only rejected the proposal but also appealed to Hindenburg to support them. The whole tradition of the military caste would be destroyed if the rough-neck Roehm and his brawling brownshirts should get control of the army." Hitler was in complete agreement. How could anybody be so stupid? Hindenburg was in his eighty-seventh year and the question of his successor had not been settled. Rumours were already rife that the officer class was bringing pressure to bear on Hindenburg for the restoration of the Hohenzollerns in Germany after his death. Hitler had made a good impression on the military caste and on the President at the ceremonial opening of the Reichstag. He could not afford to have the image of collaboration with the army and the navy, which he had established, destroyed by Roehm. He was therefore quick to assure the army and navy chiefs that nothing would come of Roehm's proposals. It was quite clear that Roehm's days were numbered. "After fourteen stormy years the two friends ... had come to a parting of the ways."
Goering and Himmler, who each detested Roehm for his own reasons, would soon provide Hitler with "secret" information about plots and conspiracies on the part of the SA to overthrow Hitler's regime. Although it was always known that many of the leaders of the SA were "sexual perverts and convicted murderers", Hitler was soon to declare, "for their corrupt morals alone these men deserved to die".
This was the signal for Hitler, Goering and Himmler to plan a campaign of terror and murder that became known as the "blood purge" of June 30, 1934. Hitler ordered Roehm to be arrested and to be brought to the Stadelheim prison in Munich, the same prison in which he had served time, ten years before, for the part he played in the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler gave orders that a pistol be left with Roehm in his cell. He would know what to do with it. Roehm refused to use it whereupon two men entered his cell and shot him at point-blank range.
In Berlin Goering and Himmler had 150 leaders of the SA shot against a wall by firing squads. But this was not all. Nobody would ever know how many people died in this blood purge. Germany had a taste of Hitler's methods of dealing with his opponents once he wielded sufficient power.
Hitler had done what was required of him by the President. He had stopped the rot in no uncertain manner. Hindenburg thanked him for his "determined and gallant personal intervention ... which rescued the German people from great danger".
The president died on August 2, 1934. Within hours it was announced that Adolf Hitler had taken over the powers of the Head of the State and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The title of President was abolished. Hitler would be known as Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor. His dictatorship had become complete.
All officers and men of the armed forces had to swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler, not to anything as vague as "The State". Hitler was 45 years old. He was ready to do what Mein Kampf said he would do and what he had explained "in a hundred speeches which had gone unnoticed or unheeded or been ridiculed - by almost everyone - within and especially without the Third Reich".
The time had come for him to consolidate what had been achieved thus far and to intensify the Nazification of Germany in the churches, the schools, the youth movements, the cultural life of the people, the press, the radio and the cinemas, the labour unions, the courts of justice and in the art of Jew-baiting.
He had set his foot firmly on the road towards proving the truth of Lord Acton's crisp saying: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Almost exactly one year after we were married, our home life ended abruptly in common with that of so many others, very often with far greater disrupting results. Our furniture was stored in Durban. When would it ever be used again? The future was one great uncertainty. I was in the army and my wife went back to her father's home. She was awaiting the arrival of our first child who was born on October 25, 1940, six years before her younger sister was to come on the scene. I managed to get leave from the army for a few days after this important event in our lives.
Again I cursed the point in time when Hitler interfered in our lives; again I tried hard to count our blessings in comparison with people whose lives were cruelly shattered in thousands of homes in numerous places. I went back to the army.
What I knew about modern warfare when I joined the army was dangerous but that was of no consequence. What was of immense consequence was that those who ought to have known did not appear to know either. What purpose was bush cart upon bush cart to serve in a modern war? Why those obsolete machine guns that we had to dismantle and assemble? Why those outdated popguns that were supposed to fire armour-piercing bullets? Why leaking tin cans in which to transport precious fuel? Why did we have to parade like ragamuffins in civilian clothes for quite a time before uniforms of some kind arrived?
It was easy to become highly indignant about conditions in the army. But was any Western country prepared for war? Did those countries apart from Germany and Italy, make any serious attempt to introduce compulsory military training? Who gave thought, once again, to spending millions upon millions on getting armed to the teeth? Few could stomach the thought of a repetition of what they had experienced, when in the forces which opposed each other, a staggering total of seven million men died; when more than twenty-one million were wounded; when more than seven million became prisoners of war or whose whereabouts could not be traced; when troops fought, over the bodies of the dead and the dying; when untold misery was suffered in slush and mud in the trenches which were the homes of millions; when fighting had to be resumed over the same terrain, when putrefaction of the corpses had already set in, because the task of movlng the dead had ceased to be possible; when the amputated limbs of the wounded were piled high at casualty clearing stations or in hospitals; when all this was untranslatable In terms of individual suffering; untranslatable in terms of sorrow of the bereaved; untranslatable in terms of waste of human lives when the flower of the nations died.
What is there in the makeup of a man who himself had witnessed and experienced all this for four long years and was now prepared to have it all over again and to subject his people to it once more? To Hitler this was no puzzling question. Germany was not beaten. When victory was in sight, she was betrayed and stabbed in the back. Scores had to be adjusted. "Never in the history of human conflict", to borrow a phrase from Churchill, was there for Hitler a price too high to pay to gain that victory out of which Germany had previously been cheated.
South Africa was also not prepared for war. She had merely followed suit. She too did not relish the thought of a repetition of a Delville Wood if it could be avoided. At Piet Retief we carted damp soil in wheelbarrows into the bungalows which were being built. We stamped the soil down to form a hard surface and slept on it on paliasses stuffed with straw. In the mornings we had breakfast at trestle tables from which the frost could be scraped in handfuls. There were water taps out in the open where ablution activities could take place. Fine! This was good initiation stuff for soft recruits who needed much toughening up before they would even start to look like soldiers. However, when more men started to report to the medical tent in the mornings than to the sergeant major on parade, then it might possibly be that something was being overdone. It did dawn on somebody at last. Two large marquee tents arrived in which the worst of the 'flu patients could be treated under reasonably satisfactory conditions.
Brothers-in-law - Ken Hackland, August 1940, above, Alan Hackland 1941, below
At first I was ill adjusted to some of the irritations, which we experienced. There were corporals from the permanent force who bawled and shouted at us and who thought that swearing at us was a sign of he-man-ship. They were obviously too raw to deal with the situation they had to face. The so-called lecture periods in between parades and other chores were pathetic affairs. Those who had to lecture to us carried little military manuals with them from which they had gleaned something about elementaries for rookies - a little about hygiene, a little about camouflage, about musketry, about badges of rank, about saluting and so on.
We did hear from the hygiene expert that one was to use three sheets from a toilet roll; one for up, one for down and one for polish! Of course, we charged and stabbed gaping holes in effigies of soldiers who could not resist. We gave our bayonets a twist to make the stab all the more deadly. I was impressed by the organisation, which is basic in an army. Theoretically, no hitches can occur in the operational field. Communications flow from the dizzy heights down through armies, to corps, to divisions, to brigades, to battalions, to companies, to platoons, to the loneliest section post where the flag is kept flying. Communications do not work so well in reverse when that section post has to convey something up the line.
We soon appreciated that we were all in an army organisation, which would have to make super-human efforts if we were ever to play anything like a significant role in the task to which it had committed itself.
More Piet Retief photos
To make matters worse, there was no united war effort in this land. The people were split disastrously into two camps. People joined or did not join the army in accordance with the dictates of their own convictions. There was no conscription to fight outside the borders of South Africa. It was a volunteer army and volunteers wore red tabs on their shoulder straps. The opposition in parliament would have nothing to do with the war efforts of the Imperialist, Jan Smuts. Afrikaans-speaking families, particularly, were once again divided in their loyalties.
My mother had a photograph of one of my brothers, as ardent a member of the Ossewabrandwag as ever there was. This photo hung in a prominent place for all to see when they entered the house. He had a luxurious beard. In his hand he held a pipe on the bowl of which an Anglo-Boer War prisoner in Ceylon or Bermuda had carved the coat of arms of the South African Republic. It was a treasured possession from bygone days. Next to this photograph, my mother had one of me dressed in a khaki uniform. The orange tab on my shoulder would have stood out like a red rag to a bull if it had been in colour. My mother must have hung these photographs the way she did with a heavy heart to indicate to visitors that they had entered a house divided against itself.
My parents were married a few years after my father returned from the Anglo-Boer War. He had heeded the call of General Smuts when he made his raid into the Cape Colony to stir people to become freedom fighters to assist the republics in the north. My father joined the commandos of Commandant Scheepers. He was captured a few days before the war ended and so escaped being tried or possibly shot as a rebel as others were. He was a follower of Jan Smuts. But those were different times and other days. That was the Jan Smuts who could write The Century of Injustice to boost the Boer cause. Since then, believed his opponents, he had strayed and was now completely lost to the Afrikaner cause, together with all those Afrikaners who joined his volunteer army.
In a way I could not understand why it was so very right to have fought injustices committed at other times in this place and so very wrong to fight injustices committed at this time in other places. Yet, it seems to be so that the misfortunes suffered by people not of one's own kith and kin affect one but little.
Some of those who were opposed to South Africa's war effort were openly pro-Nazi. They were proud of it and proclaimed it openly. They were admirers of Hitler. Whereas early Nazi victories saddened one section of the population and caused them to grit their teeth all the more in the face of the great odds which confronted them, this section could in no way forbear to cheer for their hearts were filled with joy and ecstasy. These people were astonishingly well acquainted with the contents of Hitler's speeches, more particularly his periodic peace speeches with which he seldom failed to impress those who were not unduly concerned about his logic or veracity. It was not Germany that perpetuated the war. Those nations who had persistently refused to accept his protection or his peace proposals must bear the responsibility for escalating the war.
There were those who denied emphatically that they were pro-Nazi or approved of all Hitler's methods, although they admitted to having sympathy with Germany over the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles. It was an easy way out to say it was the old, old story of peace treaties at which the seeds of subsequent wars were sown. It became particularly fashionable to deny being pro-Nazi, after Hitler's brutal attack on Holland, on May 10, 1940. It came nearer to kith and kin. They were first and foremost pro-South Africa. They could not see how interference in the affairs of faraway Europe could benefit South Africa in any way. It could only lead to involvement far beyond what was immediately apparent. Millions of people in France and even in Britain had similar fears about getting involved in affairs beyond the Rhine.
Others argued that there were no immediate dangers. Millions in the United States thought so too. How else could the US have declared her neutrality on the very day that the Smuts government thought it fit to declare war?
Below it all there simmered an awareness of nationhood. It received a new impetus in the remarkable year 1938, during the Centenary celebrations of the Great Trek. This fervour could not be dissipated by being channelled into participation in a war unrelated to the sentiments of the people. It was our membership of the British Commonwealth of Nations that involved us in the moral obligation to help Great Britain to pull her chestnuts out of the fire. Thoughts of a free and independent South African Republic were foremost in the minds of many people. To this end they would use their energies. Anybody who has any doubt about the nature of this deep-seated desire for a republic would have their doubts expelled by reading a book entitled Die Republiek van Suid-Afrika, edited by F.A. van Jaarsveld and G.D. Scholtz.
Such were some of the thoughts, emotions and sentiments of a large section of the population throughout the period during which others were heavily involved in a world-wide attempt to stop a tide of violence which threatened to engulf the world at the dictates of a man of evil genius.
We were supposed to have horses at Piet Retief. They never arrived and we were trained along infantry lines. After some months the fodder arrived but the horses went to Ladysmith. We loaded the fodder on a train and also went to Ladysmith. No one regretted leaving Piet Retief. Conditions were much more pleasant at Ladysmith. We lived in decent bungalows. There was even a YMCA in the camp. Horses were a nuisance although the unruly ones provided quite a bit of fun. It soon became apparent that nothing would come of a mounted unit in that day and age, although horses were to bear a considerable burden even in the highly mechanised German army, when Russia was attacked.
Gradually the men were drafted into various other branches of the army and the training programme at Ladysmith changed in character.
At this stage I was instructed to report to Robert's Heights, since translated into Voortrekker Hoogte. (Far better, it was thought, to be reminded of an epic historic event than of a Bntish Lord who had no right to have been here in the first place.) At the Heights I learned that I was to attend an Information Officer's Course. I had no idea what it was all about. I had reached the exalted rank of lance corporal at Ladysmith. At the course I found a rather intellectual-looking group of people. There were some senior non-commissioned officers and non-descripts like myself. There were lieutenants, a sprinkling of captains, a major or two and at least one colonel. They were from all walks of life. There were lawyers, schoolmasters, and university lecturers in a great variety of subjects, extension officers and others. They were rather an interesting group.
We were to prove our ability, or lack of it, to give talks to audiences on a great variety of topics amongst which were included all the -isms under the sun, like imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, communism, socialism, nazism, fascism and for good measure, Catholicism, Protestantism and Mohammedanism.
Most people giving talks on these subjects, seemed to me to know their subject matter very well and were, to my mind, talking sense and saying provocative things which did not fail to lead to stimulating discussions. We were dealing with policies and ideologies, forces that were shaping the world around us and from which one could hardly escape. Could they be evaluated objectively and impassionately? What paths were there to follow in a world, which had once more gone crazy in the pursuit of -isms old and brand new? Who could label the correct road to take?
In our discussions of these controversial topics, which tended to produce more questions than answers, I inevitably thought of the dilemma, which faced Omar Khayyam when he wrote:
Neither the Doctor (Science) nor the Saint (Religion) could tell him what he wanted to know about the forces that shaped the destinies of man. For us it was a difficult time to know in which direction the world was drifting.
It seemed to me that all the -isms produce leaders who make sure that their followers receive regular transfusions of life-giving hot blood obtained from the blood bank of fanaticism. Not having subjected myself to blood transfusions of this nature, I lacked fervour when approached by those who were enthusiastically engaged in furthering the cause of one or other of the -isms. Every one of them produced their crops of torturing, stake-burnings, beheadings and hounding as well as their martyrs whose sacrifices had to be avenged, thus setting the whole machinery almost in perpetual motion. The one inevitable outcome of the fanaticism inherent in these, often irreconcilable, ideologies and beliefs, is WAR. Was it inevitable that we would have to live with this - always?
I became more perplexed than ever. Was it not too late now to ponder over these things? We were at war over these issues. Nations were lining up in opposing camps for the purpose of smashing into each other with ever-increasing fury. People can find no explanation for such senselessness. What is more disturbing is that history reveals all too often that most military campaigns are characterised by violent quarrels and disagreements amongst those who plan them at the highest levels. The outcome is blundering and confusion at crucial stages, leaving the ordinary soldier to pay the price, often with his life.
No wonder the ordinary soldier wants to know as much as possible "about it and about" before he gets immersed in a sea of struggle, for once in it he has no option but to be taken with the tide in its ebb and flow. It is inevitable that it will not remain indefinitely and unreservedly true of soldiers that:
They would most assuredly want to reason why and make reply. A more rationally calculated approach towards the need for doing and dying could no longer be ignored.
It seemed to me that this was what the course was about that I was instructed to attend. It stemmed from a realisation that volunteer soldiers above all had every reason to probe deeper into the causes of armed conflict as opposed to negotiation, than had been customary in the past. Moreover, ordinary people, not indoctrinated and conditioned were getting extremely tired of sentiments of the nature expressed in
and in
and in many others equally unacceptable to rational beings. Sentiments of this nature would stir them not, however much they stirred people in bygone days.
Why then were we at war?
A story is told of an Arab chieftain whose forces had occupied the city of Alexandria in the days when the Islamic faith was spreading in the Middle East. The soldiers wanted to know from their commander what they had to do with the books in the Alexandria library. He is supposed to have replied that if those books supported the Koran, then they were superfluous. It they contradicted the Koran, then they were dangerous: "Burn the Books".
At this course we tried hard not to fall victims to an attitude of mind that we abhorred in others - to see one point of view only. But we had been at war for more than a year. The issues involved had been discussed ad nauseam. The world was dealing with a blinkered individual who, too, had literally and figuratively ordered the burning of books superfluous or contradictory to Mein Kampf. By 1940 over six million copies of this book had been sold, mostly in Germany. It was almost expected of people to present copies of the book to people getting married, having birthdays, doing well at school and on other occasions: a home without a copy was suspect. One point of view had to prevail and implicit in that point of view was the need for violence. As always, violence could only be stopped by counter-violence. To such a sorry pass the world had come once more.
Great guilt must surely rest on any regime, anywhere, which sets out to condition and indoctrinate Its people, especially the young, into wearing blinkers that make them see only what they are told to look at.
Greater still is the guilt when such a people is propagandised by every means to the extent that they will, without question, march into war with buoyancy in their steps and joy in their hearts, with the object of denying to, and grabbing from, others, what they demand for themselves as an inviolable right.
I found the course interesting, stimulating and enlightening. I certainly benefited from it more than I would have from pulverising a parade ground still further under my boots, boots, boots. I could do that quite well and the ability to do that would soon be of little consequence.
We were told that we would be seconded to various battalions and regiments. The NCOs amongst us who qualified, would hold the rank of lieutenant. We were to be integrated into these units and share whatever fate was to befall them. We were to stimulate discussion amongst the men concerning what it was all about that they were being called upon to do and if necessary, to die for.
At the end of the course I was seconded to one of the battalions that constituted the Sixth Brigade of the Second South African Division.
About this time there were rumours that the Second Division was ready to go "up North". If this were so, my wife and I would have to give final thought to the conditions under which I was to leave her with our young baby. When I talked to my wife recently about it, I was astounded to discover how time had blurred for both of us the details of those far-off days. Perhaps we were rather stunned when, what we had been expecting, suddenly became a reality.
A suggestion that my wife should act as principal of a small primary school in the country, had its advantages in that she would be independent. On the other hand, it would be a tough undertaking. She would have to live in a house by herself, isolated from the rest of the community with no telephone and no transport. Not an attractive alternative. My own qualms were considerable, but in the end our furniture was sent from Durban and I assisted with the settling in. My wife was to attempt it. I left to report to my unit stationed outside Pietermaritzburg.
Some little while afterwards General Smuts came to address a large gathering at the camp, including relatives of the men. We were to have embarkation leave. The old warhorse told the gathering something to the effect that some of us would come back; some of us would come back, maimed; some of us would not come back. A woman fainted behind me. For myself I, did not have to be told that. Mine was already a calculated approach that had taken all that into account. Whatever patriotic embers I had smouldering in my soul could not be fanned into a devouring flame other than by a conviction within myself.
We entrained for Durban in the veld outside Oribi. From Durban I made a dash for a taxi to obtain a friend's car to go and see my wife and daughter. When I arrived there, she had left for Durban, having heard of our impending departure Back I went to Durban. I found her where I expected she might be. What hurrying and scurrying.
We embarked the next day, on June 10, 1941. Our daughter was seven months old. My wife went back to her school where she stayed until it proved impossible to continue. Her father aIso pressed her to come home. We parted, facing a future full of grave possibilities and unpredictable duration - the very things wars have always brought about, and much rawer deals were being experienced elsewhere. What could one's contribution count towards bringing this business to an end as soon as possible?
Perhaps it is not a very soldierly thing to say, but I was not experiencing the youthful exuberance and enthusiasm that popular notions pretend to be true, or believe to be true of soldiers under such circumstances. I was a little older than youthful. I had a career in which I was interested. I did not revel in release from boredom. I did not strain at the leash to leave my home, to come to grips with the enemy, to experience Action, Movement, Adventure, Excitement, with capital letters. I was not particularly glad to be off to see the stuff that wars are made of _ hunger, thirst, fatigue, exhaustion; off to see wounds and blood and muck; off to witness destruction and mutilation; off to see death being meted out to comrades; off, perchance to die in agony or otherwise, but nevertheless, gloriously, for a good cause.
Tradition has it that there is something about a soldier that is fine, fine, fine. Of course there is. Not so much because of what soldiers have to do, for in the nature of things they essentially have to kill, the more the better, but because of what they have to endure - on both sides. That is why a spirit of comradeship and of fellow-feeling, even compassion, can at times be extended to reach across firing lines into enemy territory. That is why soldiers of opposing forces are sometimes less capable of perpetual hatred than politicians in opposite camps. There is something about soldiers that is exceedingly fine when they can do these things:
And something immeasurably fine about those horses too. So, strike up the band:
Thrilling! Splendid! Magnificent! At last we are marching into war. Primitive, but necessary. A "thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong", drums, war cries, they all have the same effect. They rouse, they stir, they unify. They pour adrenalin into the blood. They make you act beyond normal capacities. They dope you. They make you see red and once you see red, you do heroic things.
It is all part of the bloodiest game man has played ever since he left the trees to walk on his hind legs, setting his hands free to make weapons with which to kill in order to live, to defend his territory, to attack his adversaries.
The experiences that befall soldiers in times of war can be traced in war records of one kind or another by someone interested in doing sucn things. Minor successes are often depicted as glorious victories and dismal defeats as orderly withdrawals. What happens to mothers, wives and sweehearts who are left behind, is only recorded in the minds of those to whom they are dear. There are no stirring marching songs in which we wish them luck as we wave them goodbye. They often have the harder row to hoe.
The Mauretania was steaming up the north coast, crowded out with thousands of soldiers. She had been stripped of everything luxurious. She was a troopship. Nearby there were two other passenger liners, the Île de France and the Nieu Amsterdam, equally crowded with soldiers. Towards the evening I stood on the deck with hundreds of others gazing at the South African coastline. I had the impression that they were all rather subdued as I was My mind was dwelling on what was probably happening where my wife and daughter were. They had probably arrived home by now. Had my wife prepared supper? Had the baby already been fed and bathed and was she sleeping soundly by now? What thoughts were crowding in on my wife's mind? I hoped she was so exhausted that she would be fast asleep.
Someone touched my arm. "What rubbish people talk", he said. I agreed, but I could only guess what he had in mind. As far as I remember there was no great revelry by night, as we steamed further north. The next morning I was aware of the cruiser HMS Cornwall, roaming far and wide, first nearby and then towards the distant horizon. She was our escort ship and watchdog of the seas.
A cynical philosopher once said something to the effect that he wished mankind had but one neck so that he could conveniently cut its head off. I, also, looked for a single neck that held the heads of all warmongers, war profiteers and militarists who blundered into massacre after massacre with sickening regularity. I would cut it off with one fell swoop.
I soon became engrossed in a number of maps, pamphlets and books about the progress of the war and about the geography and the economic, social and political conditions of the land of the Pharaohs to which we were going under strange circumstances. Perhaps there were agreements or non-agreements about aggression or non-aggression. We were to operate on Egyptian soil apparently without that country having committed herself to either supporting or opposing us. I did not try to unravel it. It became stiflingly hot as we approached the equator and moved into summer conditions in the northern hemisphere. We drank gallons of liquid refreshments. Crowded conditions did not improve matters.
After what must have been a record non-stop run from Durban, we arrived at Port Tewfik at the southern end of the Suez Canal on June 20, having covered the distance in less than ten full days. These liners were too big to enter the harbour so we disembarked into barges. The transport officers, who had arranged for us to board a train, were there, flicking and swishing their fly-switches and almost immediately we became aware of the one menace, which stayed with us every day of our lives in North Africa. Egypt got rid of its ten plagues of Biblical times but she inherited ten others. The most dreadful plague produced millions of flies and the other nine produced the other millions that were about.
We disembarked in record time and sooner than I thought possible we boarded a train. We took only essential equipment with us. Heavier equipment was not so soon in coming. We waited for months for it to catch up with us somewhere in the desert.
On leaving Port Tewfik and looking at the escarpment, it appeared to me as if everything was drifting on a haze that blurred outlines and details as if seen through a veil suspended in the sky. Distant objects appeared eerie and unreal. One's eyes had to adjust to looking through a new medium. It was difficult to judge distances. These conditions often fascinated me in the desert. Apart from the eerie mirages caused by the haze, it could at times refract the rays of the sun to produce fantastic nuances of colour, often dominated by reddish tints. Did the Red Sea obtain its name from this phenomenon?
I believe troop trains and goods trains carrying war equipment were operated by a New Zealand unit. This was one of the queer situations in which foreigners took command of certain facilities in Egypt. There were no tickets to be collected from troops on our train. There were no conductors or ticket examiners. This meant that all sorts of Egyptians tried to board the train at halts and stations some clinging to the side of coaches like weaverbirds to their nests. Those in charge of the train expected the troops to deal with the situation themselves as best they could. These fellows were up to no good. They were determined to exploit visitors to their country - unwelcome visitors at that. One such fellow arranged to dispose of a bottle of whisky to one of our men for a few Egyptian pounds. When the anticipated celebration or drowning of sorrows was due to start, a bottle of urine was thrown out of the window. They had been "had" on arrival. On a much later occasion when some of us were in Alexandria, we bought from a shoeshine boy a packet of "feelthy" pictures. By the time we had discovered that he had sold us a packet of blank cards, he had scurried off and away like a dirty cockroach. Served us right, some would say.
Life in the desert: "I was photographed in sheik's attire ... "
We passed through the outskirts of Cairo and were on our way to Alexandria. It was getting dark. Slowly the train drew to a halt at no particular place that we could see. The reason for stopping soon became obvious. We had an unobscured view of an air-raid on Alexandria. It was a magnificent fireworks display if that were all it was. Our train was not the target. Apart from a few splinters and exploding anti-aircraft shells whizzing down, nothing untoward came our way. Numerous flares were descending slowly from the heavens. On later occasions we were to experience at close quarters how vividly and starkly these flares lit up the area over which they descended. One felt positively naked to the gaze of whoever was up there lighting up the target area. Searchlights swung their beams from numerous vantage points, trying to pinpoint the aircraft overhead. Anti-aircraft guns blazed away amidst the thuds and roars of exploding bombs, which set fire to something or other, lighting up the largest area and night sky still further. Tracer bullets and Verey lights added colour to the scene.
We had an un-obscured view of an air raid on Alexandria
Then, all was silent. The all-clear sirens had sounded. It seems silly trying to describe an air-raid but this one impressed me for the simple reason that it was the first that I had witnessed. How lacking in war experience we were.
Thousands upon thousands had witnessed air-raids on numerous occasions in different parts of the world to a much more intensive and murderous degree. I felt a complete novice. It did bring home to us that we were nearing a war zone and that we were far from home where everything was mercifully much quieter.
A desert well
The train moved on. We arrived at a transit camp at Amaria in the early hours of the next morning. I remember very little about Amaria except that there were some palm trees and some mud huts and flies, of course. They always came in droves with the dawn, more particularly near villages. We also discovered that it would serve no purpose whatsoever trying to obtain meat in these areas from so-called butcher shops operating from mud huts into which the sun streamed. It was impossible to recognise the meat of which no portion was visible because of the flies that had settled on it and were buzzing around attempting to creep into one's nose, mouth and ears. On a later occasion I discovered that the sweetest figs on earth grew in these parts.
On the same day, June 21, 1941, we were transported in troop carriers to Mareopolis, not far from Alexandria, just outside the delta area on the edge of which cultivated vegetation ceases to exist and the desert takes over. There was nothing but space at Mareopolis and we had to spread our tents, vehicles and equipment in direct proportion to the unlimited space available. Gone were the days when tents were pitched cheek-by-jowl and vehicles were parked in orderly rows in restricted areas. There was to be little chance of a bomb striking a cluster of either men or vehicles.
In addition, tents were erected in pits from two to three feet deep with slit trenches nearby. Vehicles too, were to be protected from possible bomb damage by our having to dig pits with sloping sides into which vehicles could be driven with their engines below ground level. It was possible to dig with comparative ease at Mareopolis because of the depth of soil under which the ancient city of Mareopolis was buried. At Mareopolis we certainly did dig and it was hot. We stayed here for a whole month, digging and training and getting acclimatised. We were extremely fit otherwise we might have contracted diseases other than "gyppo-guts" from which everybody, however fit, seems to suffer after setting foot in Egypt. This might be an eleventh plague.
Mareopolis - "tents were erected in pits two to three feet deep ... "
From time to time we watched German reconnaissance planes sitting, as it were, high up in the sky taking photographs of the fresh activities in new areas down below. One night flares started to descend upon us and lit everything there was to.see on this bleak plain. The bombs started to fall and we soon appreciated the precautions that were taken against such eventualities. The most formidable weapons we had to deal with the situation were a few Vickers machine guns. The enemy was left to waste their bombs "on the desert air" as desert flowers do with their "sweetness". More such raids were to follow but bombing in the Western Desert from a high level, never did yield satisfactory returns to airmen in the way of casualties inflicted.
We were unaccustomed to the long twilight evenings, which, in South Africa, are quite unknown. It did not get dark after the evening meal. There was an endless supply of scorpions in this area. The men amused themselves by arranging combats between pairs of these aggressive creatures. They usually both came to a sticky end. they were unwelcome guests in our bedding rolls and the more of them fought to death, the better.
Some big marquee tents were erected at Mareopolis. We learned that the NAAFI had moved in. The Navy, Army and Air Force Insritute was responsible for those most welcome facilities, which were provided wherever Allied troops assembled. We could buy beer, cigarettes, sweets and other commodities to supplement army rations.
They were ideal places for gossiping, for exchanging news and views and for getting together generally. For these purposes the long twilight hours were most welcome.
During these evenings, one also had time to reflect on days gone by. There was much about the Western Desert that reminded me of the arid, but fascinating Great Karroo where I spent my boyhood years. The Karroo is a place where the wide-open plains
it is a place where they stretch
It is a place where only occasionally a cloud would come to
For the same reason one seldom sees a rainbow
It is a place where an old man might say to his grandson,
It is a place
It was on June 22, 1941, the day after we arrived at Mareopolis that I was once more forcibly reminded of the controversies raging over this damn war. It was announced that Hitler was at war with Russia. It caused more than a slight ripple of uneasiness in the minds of many men. There could be much sense in the Western Powers fighting the two menaces, nazism and communism. Now the position had changed completely. Are we not now willy-nilly allied with strange bedfellows? I recalled discussions that we had back home, not only with anti-war elements but also with others who were puzzled by the unholy alliance between Hitler and Stalin. Nobody believed it would last. What was to happen if they turned on each other? Would that not be the time for the Allies to withdraw, come to terms with Germany and let these two eat each other up? Someone suggested that Churchill and Roosevelt, the latter not directly involved yet, would rue the day, should they collaborate with Stalin. I did not accept nor reject that he had clairvoyant vision. I had read enough about communism to be as disturbed about it as I had been by Mein Kampf. If that issue, and perhaps a hundred others of which we were at that time still blissfully ignorant, were to crop up, they would have to be faced as and when they presented themselves.
Could we withdraw now, if such a thing were possible, and turn a blind eye to Hitler's daylight robbery of other people's property and liberty and rat on those who fell victims to Germany's common cry: To arms again? Could we rat on those who fell "bespattered with mud and blood", who had succumbed to the "power of the triumphant sword" and the "scream of the 12-inch shrapnel"?
Could we now stand aside and watch the rotund demon, Violence, holding his full belly and rocking with derisive laughter? Could we think no more of it that Hitler had entered into a non-aggression pact with none other than the bolshevists, the communists, the marxists, the Russian Jews, all of them worse than dirt in his eyes, so as to leave him free to destroy the nations of the West with whom he claimed he desired nothing else but lasting peace?
I was not alarmed at these issues being raised. They were being raised in England to a small extent. They had been raised in France to her detriment. All the issues involved once more became topics of lively discussion.
Unfortunately, the reports of massacres and brutalities that occurred in Germany and in Nazi-occupied territories had at this stage not been as thoroughly exposed and authenticated, as they were to be. It was still possible for those who felt that way to dismiss much of it as Allied propaganda.
I became more and more convinced that not much was known, or had sunk in or was remembered, about what had happened in Europe. Being blessed or cursed with the inability to dispel Mein Kampf from my mind, I was convinced that Hitler had by no means completed what he had set out to achieve.
Before this story moves forward into the Western Desert, this is perhaps the place to glance at the events in Europe that centred round the activities of this man who, when eighteen years old, was not allowed admission to the School of Architecture in Vienna, way back in 1907. What a pity he was not admitted. He might have kept himself busy all his life, drafting architectural plans instead of political structures. Perhaps too, he might have died peacefully at a ripe old age instead of by his own hand at the age of fifty-six. Germany would have been saved the antics of a man bent on destroying Germany because in spite of his ability to analyse political questions in particular, according to his own testimony, he was unable to curtail the hatred that devoured his soul.
It is almost impossible to find one's way through the tangle of agreements, alliances and pacts into which European countries entered with one another after World War I. All of them became nervous, suspicious, unsettled, insecure and fearful. It had become clear that all wars had by no means ended.
These agreements reflected the moods of the nations, attempting desperately to establish some sort of stability and security for this power-block against that power-block, this sphere of influence against that sphere of influence. Agreements were entered into for various periods of time - five years, ten years, twenty years, and even for the purpose of establishing "constant and perpetual peace". They lasted until one of the signatories to the agreement waxed antagonistic and belligerent, resulting in new alliances against new enemies. Ministers and diplomats rushed backwards and forwards on missions, openly or secretly, each pitting his political acumen or chicanery against that of the others. Constant uneasiness and restlessness everywhere.
The greatest of all alliances, the League of Nations was born. It got up on its wobbly legs. It stumbled. It fell. it fell disastrously, because its mother, the United States, having conceived it, borne it, given birth to it, did not like its looks after the obstetricians had handled it, disowned it and left it in the care of numerous foster parents.
Under the wing of the League, a series of agreements, known as the Locarno Treaties, came into being at the end of 1925. They were to provide for the mutual security of the Western European nations. Germany participated in these agreements when she became a signatory to the League in 1926. Hitler was an unknown quantity apart from his Beer Hall attempt and his performance during his trial.
In the meantime he had been going from strength to strength. He was soon to enter into the spectacle of making and breaking pacts before he could hope to obtain lebensraum for Germany in Europe. He had the uncanny capacity for wating sometimes, as well as the capacity for striking at other times when advised to be cautious. The latter occurred frequentl. Austria would in due course be one of his victims as one could well imagine, remembering what he thought of that country when he lived in Vienna for those five miserable years of his life. But he first had to prevent Poland from interfering when that day dawned.
In January 1934, after all his successes in establishing himself as Chancellor and a otentially dangerous dictator, he astonished the Western Powers and even the Germans themselves, by announcing that a ten-year non-aggression pact had been signed by Germany and Poland. Yes, with the Poles of all people. Foreign powers had reason to be pleased with him. He was proving what he had said in May the previous year, in one of his many peace speeches that he was in full agreement with President Roosevelt's call to all nations for disarmament and peace. He had no intention of attacking anybody. He was merely seeking security for Germany. He said so many reasonable things that it caused a sigh of relief all round and it consolidated his position in Germany in preparation for the day when President Hindenburg would call on him to combine the functions of President and Chancellor in himself, which we had seen happen on August 2, 1934.
His speech in May the previous year had centred round equal treatment of Germany with other countries of the League of Nations. At the Disarmament Conference of the League in Geneva, in October 1933, the Allied powers had not seen their way clear to decrease their military strength within eight years to that of Germany, as imposed on her by the Treaty of Versailles. They could not allow Germany to bring her strength up to theirs, of course, because one does not encourage armament at an assembly that has disarmament in mind. This was not equal treatment. Hitler was intolerant of such manoeuvrings.
On October 14, 1933, Hitler announced Germany's withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. We have already noted the outcome of the plebiscite and the election held after this event and the overwhelming support that Hitler received from the German nation for his actions.
Some members of the League felt a little shame-faced at their treatment of Germany at the conference so soon after his peace speech. Now, shortly after the league had refused equal armament status for Germany, Hitler had announced the above-mentioned non-aggression pact with Poland to prove his peaceful intentions. He was at the beginning of his successful series of manoeuvres in which he succeeded in throwing the minds of the Western Powers into confusion as regards the attitude they should adopt towards him.
The scene was now set. He had stated openly that he was only seeking security for Germany and that he desired peace as much as anybody else. He now only had to prove that Germany's security was being threatened to justify whatever steps he might take. Hitler contended that the League was responsible for keeping Germany a relatively unarmed nation in comparison with the others, thus making her an easy target for would-be aggressors.
Germany, of course, had already, with impunity, re-armed herself far beyond the limits imposed upon her by the Treaty of Versailles. But, as Shirer remarks in his book:
"Part of the genius of this one-time Austrian waif, was that for a long time he knew the mettle of his foreign adversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had sized up that of his opponents at home. In this crisis (withdrawal from the League) as in those greater ones which were to follow in rapid succession up to 1939, the victorious allied nations took no action, being too divided; too torpid; too blind to grasp the nature of the direction of what was building up beyond the Rhine."
Hitler was ready to start on new ventures. Why should there be a demilitarised zone in the Rhineland? This was preventing Germany from safeguarding her borders purely for internal security purposes. Could he find an excuse for occupying the Rhineland, which would be a violation of the Locarno Agreements? Oh, yes, he could. He had learnt that France and Russia had signed a mutual assistance pact in Paris and in Moscow. It had not been ratified by the French government in accordance with the provisions of the Locarno Agreement. He had to act before the French government did ratify it. He decided to act. On March 7, 1936, German troops entered the demilitarised zone. The French government had beaten Hitler by a few days by ratifying the agreement but it was inconveniently late for Hitler to alter his plans.
The occupation of the Rhineland zone by a ridiculously small German force when France had scores of divisions at her disposal to stop it, but did nothing, was proof to Hitler that there was no great objection to Germany making herself a little more secure. France's non-intervention gravely disturbed her allies in Eastern Europe. What would France be able to do to assist countries with which she had mutual assistance pacts - Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia? Germany would militarise this zone, making France less secure if she should attempt to lend assistance elsewhere. France would now have three dictators on her borders - Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. Hitler was not perturbed about what the Western Powers would think of his action. Did he not know their mettle? He had introduced compulsory military training in Germany in March the previous year in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. He had expected that the reaction to that step would be feeble. It was.
Some reaction did come from Britain, France and Italy, all of them naval powers. They condemned Hitler's action. This happened on April 11, 1935, at a meeting at Stresa. Once more these three powers emphasised their guarantee of Austria's independence and re-affirmed their adherence to the Locarno Agreements.
Britain had already toyed with the idea of allowing Germany a little more scope in re-armament to pacify Hitler's perpetual outbursts against the Treaty of Versailles. Already in February 1935, Britain and France had actually made an approach to Hitler with a view to having Germany re-admitted to the League of Nations and giving her more freedom to strengthen her navy and army. It was no use pretending that they did not know that Germany had been re-arming herself all along. Their approach also included a proposal that Germany might join them in an Eastern Locarno Pact with Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. This would ensure the same security for these countries that the Western European countries had under the Locarno Agreements. France became uncertain about the re-armament part of the approach. This attitude on the part of France provided Britain with an excuse to enter bilaterally into an Anglo-German agreement, that allowed Germany limited freedom to expand her navy. Hitler was pleased. His shipyards were not yet ready to expand his navy even to this limited extent. As far as the army was concerned, he was going to expand it in any case. The proposal about the Eastern Locarno agreement was complete nonsense. It would interfere with his lebensraum plans of long standing in those areas. He made no reply to that.
The Anglo-German agreement, about which Britain did not consult her Stresa partners, infuriated Mussolini. It indicated to him that Britain had no intention of adhering to the covenant of the League of Nations. Then why should he? On October 3, 1935, he invaded the kingdom of Abyssinia. He was planning to establish his Italian East African Empire. The Stresa front against Hitler had collapsed. Italy's involvement in her new venture made her guarantee of Austrian independence a complete farce.
Austria was forced to woo Hitler with a view to an agreement similar to that into which he had entered with Poland. No trouble. On June 11, 1936, an Austro-German Agreement was signed between Franz von Papen who was now German Minister in Vienna, and Dr Kurt van Schuschnigg the Austrian Chancellor who succeeded Dolfuss, who was murdered by the Nazis.
What impression did visitors gain of Germany when they flocked to the Olympic Games in Berlin in August 1936, after Der Führer had accomplished all that had been mentioned so far?
"No previous games", Shirer writes, "had seen such a spectacular organisation nor such a lavish display of entertainment. Goering, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling parties for the foreign visitors ... The visitors, especially those from England and America, were greatly impressed by what they saw; apparently a happy, healthy, friendly people united under Hitler - a far different picture, they said, than they had got from reading the newspaper dispatches from Berlin," "Even a man", he says, "as perspicacious as Lloyd George who had led England to victory over Germany in 1918, could visit Hitler at Obersalzberg in 1936 and go away enchanted with the Fuhrer and praise him publicly as 'a great man' who had the vision and the will to solve a modern nation's social problems, above all, unemployment, a sore which still festered in England ... "
Hitler had taken giant strides on the road towards confounding the Western Powers as to the attitude they should adopt towards Germany in the crises, which were to follow. Those who were responsible for the newspaper dispatches from Berlin knew better. They had been there for far longer than those who flitted unhindered in and out of Germany as tourists and visitors, from whom Germany incidentally benefited greatly, Shirer himself recalls that he was severely attacked in the German press and on radio and threatened with expulsion for having written a dispatch saying that some of the anti-Semitic signs had been hauled down from the shops, hotels, beer-gardens and places of public entertainment for the duration of the Games. The persecution of the Jews and the two Christian churches had been temporarily halted and the country put on its best behaviour.
But then, Hitler had confused not only outsiders, but many a German as well. He was their saviour. The Protestant pastor, Martin Niemöller, a U-boat commander in World War I, had published his autobiography From U-Boat to Pulpit in 1933, the year in which Hindenburg had elevated Hitler to the position of Chancellor. To Niemöller, the years under the Weimar Republic had been "years of darkness". The triumph of the Nazis under Hitler had brought about the 'national revival' for which he himself had fought so long. His book became a best seller in Germany.
Four years later the position had changed radically for Niemöller. On July 1, 1937, he was arrested and imprisoned in Berlin for using his pulpit, amongst other things, to object to the treatment meted out to Jews under the Nazi regime. Had he not read Mein Kampf? Did he not know of the plight of the Jews under the "national revival" with which he was so impressed? After eight months in prison, he was tried and sentenced to seven months imprisonment, which he had already served awaiting trial and he could nave been released, but by then normal court procedures had ceased to exist. He was seized by the Gestapo. He spent seven years in concentration camps, first at Sachsenhausen and then at Dachau where he was fortunate to be liberated by the Allies in 1945, having survived among the living dead.
The Olympic Games started almost a year after Mussolini's attack on Abyssinia. Britain and France had imposed sanctions against Italy. This drove Mussolini straight into the arms of Hitler. After the Games in October 1936, the Rome-Berlin Axis came into being - the axis round which the nations could find security in a "New Order" for Europe. They could dispense with Locarno Agreements. He now made another peace speech. Until the League of Nations was prepared to recognise the full equality of all nations, the Treaty of Versailles was not dead. Once it was dead, he would participate fully in a system of collective security. The nucleus was already there in the "New Order" for Europe.
The various pacts and treaties that the high contracting parties had collectively and severally undertaken to honour, fell, and were to continue falling by the wayside.
Mussolini's mind was not at ease about Hitler's attitude towards Austria in spite of the Austro-German agreement. Perhaps he remembered Mein Kampf. He knew Hitler would not rest until Austria was part of Germany, and Italy had guaranteed Austria's independence. He feared that if Hitler moved against Austria it would spark off a conflagration for which he, and probably not even Germany, would be prepared. Hitler invited this "doubting Thomas" to come and observe a display of Germany's military power. Mussolini was duly impressed. Another nation was impressed by Germany's military power or rather the lack of power of France and England. King Leopold III declared Belgium's strict neutrality. He had no wish to antagonise Hitler by his being allied to France and Britain.
Hitler was growing impatient. He had instructed his military chiefs to complete the plans he had laid before them. What was the delay? He decided to confer with his top commanders and to watch their reactions carefully. Those who had doubts about Germany's readiness were, amongst others, Field Marshal von Blomberg, Minister of War and Commander in Chief of the combined Armed Forces, Colonel-General Baron von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the Army and Baron von Neurath, his Foreign Minister. One by one these men were dismissed from their posts soon after.
On February 4, 1938, Hitler created the High Command of the Armed Forces - the army, navy and air - Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht - OKW, with himself as Supreme Commander. What excuse could Das Oberkommando have for violating the Austro-German agreement of July 1936? Hitler had repeatedly assured the outside world and particularly Mussolini, that he had no annexation - anschluss - of Austria in mind.
There had been for a long time a strong pro-German and Nazi movement in Austria. They had received encouragement and support from Germany. The disturbances they caused in Austria became more and more violent. There were threats to assassinate Schuschnigg as they had his predecessor, Dolfuss. Of course, Schuschnigg had to take counter-measures. Papen, Hitler's special ambassador in Vienna, informed Hitler that unless drastic steps were taken against Schuschnigg, the pro-German movement in Austria would be suppressed. Here was the excuse. Germans in Austria were politically separated from the Reich - the spectre of Versailles. They were being persecuted and punished for striving to obtain political and spiritual freedom. If they were prevented from obtaining it by their own efforts, Germany would assist them. Schuschnigg could get no promise of support from Mussolini who had guaranteed Austrian independence. Mussolini had, in fact, already informed Hitler that he was no longer prepared to assist Austria. He was too well informed about the hardships, which the Germans had to endure in Austria. Schuschnigg's offer to hold a plebiscite in Austria was rejected. In desperation and in order to prevent bloodshed, Schuschnigg resigned in favour of Seyss-Inquart whom the Germans favoured. President Wilhelm Miklas of Austria stubbornly refused to have him as Chancellor.
On the morning of March 12, 1938, German troops were streaming into Austria, meeting hardly any resistance. The Austro-German agreement of less than two years' standing was no more. To a protest from Britain, Hitler's reply was that Austro-German relations were the concern of the German people, not of the British government. The occupation had taken place as a result of an urgent request by the new Austrian government in which Seyss-Inquart had replaced Schuschnigg. Schuschnigg was soon to join Pastor Niemöller and many others in concentration camps.
Seven million jubilant Germans found their spiritual home in the Third Reich. The world pondered deeply over this incident and came to the conclusion that "this could hardly have been avoided. It did not warrant interference from outside. Hitler had annexed Austria without the willing cooperation of his "never ready" military chiefs.
What about the three million Germans in Sudetenland that formed part of the new state of Czechoslovakia? Although this territory was never part of modern Germany, these Germans were strongly pro-Nazi. Why should they be lumped together in a conglomerate state of many inassimilable nationalities, created by the Treaty of Versailles? Like Austria in the days when Hitler had to endure Vienna for five long years, it had all the "perilous charm" of a multi-racial state. Now, under the leadership of Konrad Henlein the Germans were prepared to cause trouble to provide an excuse for interference by Hitler. Bogus telegrams and secret messages to Hitler for deliverance could easily be arranged.
Rumours about the possibility of interference by Hitler had reached the outside world. It appeared that Russia, Britain and France were prepared to take a firmer stand than hitherto. Encouraged by this possibility, President Benes of Czechoslovakia, ordered partial mobilisation in his country. Benes intended resisting Hitler. News of this mobilisation reached Hitler's ears. It was proof that Benes anticipated what Hitler had in mind but had in no way made known. How dare Benes read his mind and jump the gun? He, therefore, informed Benes and announced publicly that he had no intention of invading that country. Rumours about German troops assembling on his border were completely false. They were on routine manoeuvres. In London, Paris and Moscow, Hitler's assurance was welcomed. They did not believe that Hitler would repeat his Austrian performance, knowing that foreign powers would come to the assistance of Benes. They were satisfied that no crisis had developed. No cause for alarm.
Hitler had no intention of altering his plans to attack Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938. His generals had already been informed about the move. Some of them raised serious objections, notably General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Army General Staff. It would be madness to attack Czechoslovakia in view of the possibility of Russia, France, Britain and even perhaps Italy, coming to her aid. Beck contended that Hitler had to be informed in no uncertain terms what his generals thought. When General Walther von Brauchitsch, Commander in Chief, after much hesitation, showed Hitler a memorandum drawn up by Beck, Hitler's wrath descended upon Beck's head. He summoned his officers, excluding Beck and those he suspected would try to interfere with his plans. He told his officers that force would be used against Benes and no one was to dare oppose him. Beck resigned, hoping that the others who had agreed with him would follow suit but no one did.
Hitler accepted Beck's resignation. He was forbidden to spread any news that there had been differences between Hitler and some of his officers. Officers like ordinary soldiers must obey orders and that was that. He could not fathom how the very idea could have originated that a German officer could question the Army High Command.
Those officers, especially Beck, who were opposed to Hitler's plans, tried frantically, on the quiet to find out whether France and Britain would really come to the aid of Benes. If so, it would strengthen their case against Hitler's plans. Plans were beginning to originate to remove Hitler from the scene. It looked, however, as if no firm guarantee could be obtained that Benes would be assisted. There was much wavering. It would bring about a new World War.
After Hitler's assurances that he would not attack Czechoslovakia, the British Prime Minister, Chamberlain, wanted to make doubly sure that Hitler meant what he said. He actually made trebly sure. He paid no less than three visits to Hitler. His meetings with Hitler took place at Berchtesgaden on September 16, 1938, at Codesberg on the 22nd 23rd and at Munich on September 29 and 30.
In view of the fierce criticism which Chamberlain's visits to Hitler, sparked off, mainly when people had hindsight of these events, it is as well to recall at this stage what Churchill had to say when he paid tribute to his memory in the House of Commons on November 12, 1940.
"It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart - the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace even at great peril and certainly in utter disdain of popularity or clamour."
But let us return to 1938 and Czechoslovakia. An amazing change of front had taken place. Instead of Britain and France taking a firm decision to assist Benes, the onus was placed on him to decide whether he would insist on Czechoslovakia remaining intact or not. If he did, he could be the cause of the conflagration that would follow. Was he prepared to take that responsibility on his shoulders?
Hitler and Mussolini had conferred with each other before the final meeting in Munich, but not with Daladier of France and Chamberlain. They were outmanoeuvred from the start. Hitler would not allow the representatives of Czechoslovakia to attend the meeting although they were there. France and Britain were in full agreement with Hitler that Russia would not be invited to attend although Russia had allied herself with Czechoslovakia at the same time that France and Russia had signed their agreement of solidarity. Thus, these four powers decided the fate of Czechoslovakia in the absence of the nation directly involved and in the absence of one of her chief allies. The Czechoslovakia as it was known ceased to exist on September 30, 1938, to be replaced by a "New Order" to be established there.
It fell to the lot of the representatives of Britain and France to convey to those from Czechoslovakia that the Munich agreement had been signed. It provided for the German army to enter Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938. Benes was not to resist the occupation of Sudetenland by means of peaceful penetration that would be completed by October 15. These were the exact dates on which Hitler had decided long before.
An "International Commission" consisting of the representatives from Czechoslovakia, the victim, and the four powers thaI had dictated these terms, was to deal with all outstanding matters. When this commission had done its work, Poland got away with a slice and Hungary with an even bigger slice of Czechoslovakia. Sudetenland, of course, went to Germany and with it the formidable defensive fortifications on the mountainous border. It opened the way to the Danube and the Black Sea; anything could happen to what remained of Czechoslovakia.
There was considerable rejoicing amongst some elements of the population of Great Britain and particularly of France. War with Germany had once more been averted. Three million more jubilant Germans had been brought into the Fatherland. It was something that would have had to happen in due course. There was really very little cause for intervention while Germany was settling her domestic affairs.
Dr Emil Hacha became President of the dismembered rump that was the new state. He was old and far from well. Some months went by. Konrad Henlein the Nazi leader in Sudetenland made sure that Hitler would obtain the necessary evidence that there was turmoil, unrest and disorder in Hacha's territory, which he could not control. If Dr Hacha could not, Hitler would ensure stability in his territory. Hitler summoned this sickly old man to meet him. He had a physician at his disposal should Dr Hacha need attention. Dr Hacha came. He collapsed under the pressure to which he was subjected to put his domain under German protection. He was revived by the physician and induced to put portions of his domain under German protection.
On March 15, 1939, Hitler made his triumphant march into Prague. Events had to move fast. Hitler had some more fixed dates on which things had been planned to happen. One of the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles was the severing of East Prussia from Germany by means of the Polish Corridor, which gave Poland access to the sea. In addition, the Memel district of East Prussia had been given to Lithuania. There were Germans there who were denied the right to belong to the Fatherland.
Within ten days of Hitler's march into Prague, the German navy was ready to start the bombardment of Memel unless Lithuania agreed to German occupation of Memelland. Caught completely unprepared, Lithuania agreed and Hitler could once more stage a triumphant march, this time into Memel. Of course, the attack was planned as a result of disturbances by Germans in Memelland. This forced the Lithuanian authorities to remind Britain and France of their obligations under the Memel Statute in case these disturbances led to unforeseen consequences. The Memel Germans had appealed to Hitler for protection, which they had now received.
Germany wanted to construct a railway line and a main highway through the Polish Corridor to link Germany with East Prussia. The city of Danzig, Hitler maintained, had always been German and would have to be returned to Germany. If that happened, Hitler would be able to claim that the Treaty of Versailles had been blown sky high, kicked to hell, just about, excepting for dealing with the nations that had imposed it on Germany.
If Poland should attempt to prevent the city of Danzig coming to Germany, there would be war. If Poland did not interfere, then the ten-year non-aggression pact could be extended to 25 years, if necessary. Colonel Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister was not interested in Hitler's alternatives. He made it clear that if Germany should attempt to alter the status of the Free City of Danzig that, too, would mean war. At loggerheads! Beck and the Poles were not going to be as easy to deal with as Schuschnigg and Hacha and the inhabitants of their countries.
Britain and France had already proposed a four-power pact consisting of Britain, France, Russia and Poland to resist further German expansion. Chamberlain, however, was not so keen on including Russia. In any case Poland would not think of an alliance with Russia. Beck was, nevertheless, assured that Britain and France would lend all support in their power against Germany.
When the attack on Czechoslovakia was planned, some German generals were prepared to oppose Hitler and someone might have succeeded in removing him from the scene if they had been sure of the support from Britain and France. Hitler's plans had so far succeeded in spite of warnings by his military chiefs. They had become rather shame-faced and the chances of their opposing Hitler over Poland were diminishing.
Britain and France could have had active Russian support to prevent the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia but they would not even invite her to the meeting in Munich. Now, once more, Russia's aid was not sought. Poland herself "at whose heart the dagger was pointing", scorned Russian help.
When it became obvious that Germany and Poland, non-aggression pact notwithstanding, would be at war at any moment, the activities of ministers, diplomats and envoys, openly and secretly, increased in tempo.
On April 7, shortly after Hitler's string of successes, Mussolini, not wishing to be outdone, sent his troops into Albania, throwing the Balkans into turmoil. Britain and France assured far-off Greece and Rumania of their support, thereby increasing their foreign commitments still further. President Roosevelt became perturbed and asked Hitler and Mussolini to give assurances not to invade or attack a number of countries, which he named.A special request for assurances was pointedly directed at Hitler, concerning Poland. He was now asked to give assurances to the president of a country that had only surveyed conditions from afar. This request gave Hitler the opportunity to reply to Roosevelt in a speech to the Reichstag on April 28, 1939, of which Shirer, who was present, had this to say:
"It was, I believe, the longest major public speech he had ever made, taking more than two hours to deliver ... In many ways, especially in the power of its appeal to Germans and to friends of Nazi Germany abroad, it was probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave, certainly the greatest this writer ever heard from him. For sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm, hypocrisy it reached a new level that he was never to approach again. And though prepared for German ears, it was broadcast not only on all German radio stations but also on hundreds of others allover the world; in the United States it was carried by the major networks. Never before or afterwards was there such a world-wide audience as he had that day."
This speech amounted to Hitler telling Roosevelt to mind his own business and that of his prosperous, opulent country. He had his own and Germany's business to mind. Germany was a poor country, in need of rehabilitation. It was no affluent state. He had already reduced the unemployed from six to less than one million. He had no leisure time at his disposal to meddle in other people's affairs like the idle President of the United States. He had a mission to fulfil. He had set himself certain tasks and nothing and nobody would stop him from completing those tasks. He was under no obligation to satisfy Roosevelt's curiosity but he had taken the trouble to establish that the countries mentioned by him, had expressed no fears that Germany had evil intentions towards them. There were a few countries in the Middle East with which he could not make contact because they were occupied by British troops. Did this come as a surprise to the President?
Not a word was mentioned about Poland. The time had already been fixed for the axe to come down on her neck.
Mussolini had hesitated for some time to link himself too closely with Hitler's exploits. Now, on May 22, 1939, the Pact of Steel, as it became known, was signed. Italy and Germany agreed that if either party were to be involved in war, the other would immediately come to its partner's assistance and neither would conclude a separate peace.
It was important to Hitler to have Mussolini on his side, largely because of Italy's strategic geographical position. Of far more importance, however, was what Russia's attitude and likely reactions were to be in a conflict between Germany and the Western Powers over Poland.
Stalin was not so sure that if he allied himself with the West, and Germany should attack Poland, that Britain and France would act effectively or not at all, as in the case of Czechoslovakia. That would leave only Russia to honour the promise of assistance to Poland against Germany.
Another possibility had to be investigated first. A better move might be to find out what Hitler had to offer. Hitler and Molotov, the Russian Foreign Commissar, would be extremely wary of each other though, and so, attempts to obtain agreement to a pact with Britain and France should not be discarded altogether. A two-pronged probe had to be made.
Stalin requested Britain to send representatives to discuss matters. Chamberlain had his doubts and so had his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. They would not send Anthony Eden either. An official of the Foreign Office would go. Stalin and Molotov decided that this was positive proof that Britain and France would not seriously consider an agreement otherwise they would have sent their top men to negotiate with them on such an important issue. Germany must be tried. It appeared that Germany was interested.
Even now, Stalin would not close the Britain-France avenue finally. Would these countries send a military mission to a discussion on the military position of the countries involved? Britain and France, not wanting to appear too eager, sent a mission by sea instead of by air. Stalin was annoyed by this delay and came straight to the point when the mission eventually arrived. Precisely, how many divisions would France and Britain be able to provide in the west to prevent Hitler from using all his forces in the east? Molotov was shocked by the reply, more particularly by the meagre contribution Britain would be able to make, initially. That was not enough to cause Hitler one sleepless night. Had the British and the French governments agreed with the Polish government for Russian troops to enter Poland? If not, how did they expect Russian troops to reach Germany? No, there was no such agreement. They knew only too well that Poland would allow no Russian troops on her soil. Result? No agreement with the West.
Germany could hardly wait to make an offer. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Foreign Minister came with it on August 23, 1939. A German-Soviet Commercial Agreement had already been signed a few days before. Now, a non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia was signed. To this agreement was added a Secret Additional Protocol to the effect that if circumstances at any stage in the future should bring about a need for changing the position of the Baltic States, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then these territories would fall within the sphere of influence of both Russia and Germany who would negotiate with each other about steps to be taken. In south-eastern Europe, Bessarabia was to fall within the Russian sphere of influence.
At this late hour, Hitler informed Mussolini for the first time that the attack on Poland was imminent and that a German-Soviet non-aggression pact had been signed. Mussolini was thunderstruck. He thought it had always been understood that he would not be able to honour his Pact of Steel obligations until about 1942 because he was sure it would result in a European war for which he was not prepared. He requested an enormous amount of raw materials from Germany before Italy would be able to play her part. No matter, Hitler could not alter his plans.
Upon hearing about the German-Soviet non-aggression Pact, the British government assured Poland that this would make no difference to her obligations to Poland. Chamberlain requested Hitler to settle his disputes with Poland. He offered his services to arrange a meeting between Hitler and Beck. Hitler had one of his many tantrums. He informed Chamberlain that he had already made the most generous proposals to Poland to prevent a conflict but it was Britain's offer of support to Poland that had encouraged Beck to "unloosen a wave of appalling terrorism against the one and a half million German inhabitants of Poland". He would however, make one last offer to Britain. He would guarantee the existence of the British Empire in all circumstances as far as Germany was concerned. He would gladly enter into a non-aggression pact with Britain as he had done with Russia but this could only come into effect after the solution of the German-Polish question.
There were some more tedious and pointless attempts made by the Western Powers to avert war, but Hitler had made up his mind.
On September 1, 1939, strictly according to Hitler's timetable, drawn up many months before, a murderous attack started on Poland from all directions, the immediate consequences of which Shirer describes as follows:
"Overhead, German warplanes roared towards their targets; Polish troop columns and ammunition dumps, railways and open cities. Within a few minutes they were giving the Poles, soldiers and civilians alike, the first taste of sudden death and destruction from the skies ever experienced on any great scale on the earth and thereby inaugurating a terror which would become dreadfully familiar to hundreds of millions of men, women and children in Europe and Asia during the next six years."
But still the Western Powers hoped that a major war could be averted, and negotiated and arranged negotiations while German forces were striking deeply and mercilessly into Poland. Then followed the ultimatum from Britain. Unless German troops were withdrawn from Polish territory by 11 am on Sunday September 3, His Majesty's Government would without hesitation fulfil her obligations to Poland. Pressure from the House of Commons and Chamberlain's own convictions by this time that further talks with Hitler would be pointless, were the deciding factors.
France was less determined. France would once more have to bear the brunt of the war on her soil on the Western Front until Britain could send adequate assistance across the Channel. France was hoping that with the cooperation of Italy, it might be possible for the four powers, Germany, Italy, Britain and France to manipulate another "Munich Agreement" this time with a view to settling the Polish question. When this futile hope disappeared, France also sent her ultimatum.
By September 15, the Polish government had established itself in Rumania. The Poland that was, was no more, in exactly the number of days Hitler had predicted it would take the German army to overrun Poland - fifteen days.
Now there were spoils to be divided between Germany and Russia who stood so quietly by while Hitler dealt with Poland. In the process of dividing spoils, it became quite clear that the German-Soviet non-aggression pact had been built on the shaky foundation of expediency - each having in mind to use the other to her own advantage. The outcome of it all amounted to more agreements. The Russians would add Lithuania to their sphere of interest in return for Germany retaining the provinces of Lublin and Eastern Warsaw, which she had just occupied. Russia naturally had to have a free hand in Estonia and Latvia if Germany were to have control of the majority of Poles. Bessarabia had already been assigned to the Russian sphere of influence. This placed an obstacle in Germany's way to the Ukraine and Rumania from where supplies of wheat and oil, respectively, might have to be obtained for future German needs. For Russia's generous agreement to remain non-aggressive while Hitler prepared himself to deal with the Western Powers, he had no option but to agree to these hard bargains on which Stalin insisted.
Russia, like most countries everywhere, especially in Western Europe, was stunned by Hitler's object lesson. The rapid successes he had achieved by means of his blitzkrieg tactics, frightened them. Russia was looking for security. The non-aggression pact with Germany suited her. She needed time to prepare herself for eventualities. France, too, had reason to be concerned. How wise the French government and the military authorities had been, it was argued, to have provided for French security. She had built the formidable fortifications of the Maginot Line for the very purpose of defending herself against possible German onslaughts. She could afford to wait until Britain could come to her aid. It could not have been more disastrous than if it had been positively planned to do nothing until Hitler had all the time he needed to move his forces from east to west. It was not like that of course, but it was the period of the "phoney war" and of "business as usual". Allied soldiers were soon to go and "hang their washing on the Siegfried Line".
Having wiped Poland off the map, Hitler turned his attention to the west but first he had to make his usual peace proposals. There was no need for war between Germany and the two Western Powers. Whether there was to be war or not depended entirely on whether Britain and France rejected his outstretched hand of friendship, or not. He even proposed a conference of leading European nations to deal with problems such as the Jewish question, the matter of colonies for Germany, the settlement of minority problems in Europe and the Polish question. He had made it quite clear however, that there was to be no question of a restoration of Poland. She had to cease to exist as an independent nation. There were still hopes raised in several quarters, in France, Italy, the Low Countries, the Vatican and elsewhere that war might still be averted by means of negotiations with Hitler.
As soon as Hitler made it known to his generals that France was to be attacked via Luxemburg, Belgium and Holland in the near future, another familiar reaction occurred. There were those generals who were vigorously opposed to his plans on the grounds that they were not ready for such a major undertaking. Hitler had to be induced to change his plans or else. But the "or elses" had failed dismally thus far, however seriously they were planned. There were several reasons for that. One reason was that Hitler began to wonder when his weak-kneed generals would ever be prepared to carry out his instructions. He began to scare them out of their wits with his threats and ravings whenever they came to him with suggestions that ran counter to his plans. Hitler had proved them wrong so often that they began to hesitate to oppose him. Some would go so far and then would get cold feet. On a much later occasion during the "Battle of the Bulge", after the Allied invasion of the continent had taken place, Hitler was still faced with this attitude amongst some of his Wehrmacht generals and field marshals. He had ordered a counter-attack to which some of them objected. He exploded; "Gentlemen", he shouted, "I have been in this business for eleven years, and ... I have never heard anybody report that everything is completely ready .... You are never entirely ready. That is plain."
On November 8, 1939, a time bomb was planted behind the platform from which Hitler spoke in Munich to commemorate the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. His speech was shorter than usual and he and his top leaders did not stay for their usual reminiscences about those days. When the bomb went off, seven people were killed and 63 wounded. It was but one of the dozen or more attempts to do away with Hitler that failed; others were still to fail. Providence seemed bent on saving Hitler's life.
Hitler did postpone his attack in the west. He had trouble with his Axis partner Mussolini for the part he was to play if or when he could make up his mind that the Pact of Steel meant that he had to stand on Hitler's side like Hitler would stand on his. Something else occupied Hitler's mind. For the first time he gave attention to a military plan that did not originate in his own mind but in the minds of his naval officers. It was a bold plan unlike those from his generals who always seemed to advise caution. It was a memorandum suggesting that it could be of the utmost importance for Germany to secure bases along the whole of the Norwegian coast if the German navy was to have any success against Britain's naval power. Moreover, in order to ensure the success of the plan, it would be necessary to occupy Denmark as well, to allow the navy to move out of the Baltic and to provide air bases for the operation. This plan appealed to Hitler. He ordered the necessary arrangements to be made without delay.
On April 9, 1940, an ultimatum was presented to Denmark and Norway demanding their immediate acceptance without offering resistance, of the "protection of the Reich" against Anglo-French occupation of their countries. Denmark accepted. What could she do? German bombers were roaring overhead. Norway would not accept voluntarily. She became the target. The German navy had already taken up positions before Britain could do much about it. The Norwegians had neglected to mine the entrances to their fjords. After all, Norway was a neutral country.
Narvik in the north was their first target because iron ore from Sweden came to Germany through that port. It was occupied after slight resistance.
Then came Trondheim, much farther south. Further south still, at Bergen, which was joined by rail to Oslo, the Norwegians received their first but ineffective assistance from the British navy. The strategic Sola airfield near the port of Stavanger was occupied by German parachute troops. The Luftwaffe was within striking distance of British naval bases and any ship movements in the direction of Norway. Shirer writes:
" ... the five principal cities and ports and the one big airfield along the west and south coasts that ran for 1500 miles from the Skagerak to the Arctic, were in German hands. They had been taken by a handful of troops conveyed by a navy vastly inferior to that of the British. Daring, deceit and surprise had brought Hitler a resounding victory at very little cost."
The traitor Quisling had not played as great a part as was attributed to him and Hitler was soon tired of him. He appointed Josef Terhoven, a young fanatic Nazi to administer the country with the necessary severity during the period of German occupation.
British attempts to gain a foothold in Norway failed, except for the occupation of Narvik for eleven days from May 28, 1940, until June 8. By that time Norway had become a sideshow. British troops had to be withdrawn for they were badly needed at the central show that had started a month previously.
On May 10, 1940, Belgium and Holland were informed that German troops were entering their countries on that day to "protect their neutrality" against Britain and France. It was also on that day that Winston Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister of Britain. The Norway affair caused the crisis that developed in the British Cabinet, leading to the resignation of Chamberlain.
Belgium and Holland had received considerable warning from German conspirators against Hitler that this would happen. They had also informed Britain and France but what could they do to assist these neutral countries that had not wanted a common front with Britain and France against Hitler?
There had been a plan of attack on France through Belgium and Holland to which Hitler himself had given much detailed attention. This plan had to be scrapped because there was much evidence that these plans had fallen into Belgian hands when a German aircraft was shot down over Belgium some considerable time before the attack started. It was now too dangerous to operate on a plan about which the enemy had detailed information. Attention had to be given to an entirely new plan of attack on France. This plan had grown in the mind of General Erich von Manstein who had the energetic support of his senior officer Gerd von Rundstedt. It would obviate a frontal attack on the Maginot Line. Hitler approved. This would result in another blitzkrieg instead of a sitzkrieg - static warfare, which was outmoded World War I strategy.
This plan was briefly, that the greatest mass-tank attack that the world had ever known would be launched in the centre through the Ardennes, where it would not be expected since it was considered impossible country for tank warfare. This force would cross the Meuse north of Sedan and advance into open country to the Channel at Abbeville. There would, however, first have to be a minor but fierce attack on the right flank through Belgium and Holland. Allied troops would be concentrated there. They would naturally think that this was the main attack. They would have every reason to expect that since they knew all about the original plan but not about it having been scrapped. Large numbers of Allied forces would than be hemmed in against the sea where they would be doomed.
Herman Goering had insisted on the Luftwaffe playing a major role in this northern sector. When Holland refused to accept Hitler's offer of protection, she had to pay the price. Rotterdam had to experience to some extent the devastating bombing raids that Warsaw had suffered earlier. Holland fought bravely and tenaciously for five days only. For the rest of the war the occupation chief Seyss-Inquart ruled the roost in Holland. King Leopold III of Belgium surrendered on May 28, much to the disgust of many soldiers. Belgium had resisted Hitler for eighteen days.
On May 14, 1940, Manstein had launched his main central attack, which Shirer describes as follows:
"An army of tanks unparalleled in warfare for size, concentration, mobility and striking power ... broke through the French Ninth and Second Armies and headed swiftly for the Channel behind the Allied forces in Belgium."
When this force was assembled on May 10, it "stretched in three columns back for a hundred miles far behind the Rhine ... This was a formidable and frightening Juggernaut. .. It was preceded by waves of Stuka dive-bombers which softened up the French defensive positions ... Combat engineers launched rubber boats and threw up pontoon bridges to get across the rivers and canals ... Each panzer division was preceded by its own self-propelled artillery and by one brigade of motorised infantry ... The armoured corps was closely followed by divisions of motorised infantry to hold the positions opened up by the tanks ... This phalanx of steel and fire could not be stopped by any means in the hands of the bewildered defenders." Brigadier General Erwin Rommel was Commander of one of the tank divisions.
On May 24, the British, French and Belgian armies were herded in a triangle round Dunkirk. When the Berman tanks broke through to Abbeville on May 20, Churchill planned the evacuation of British and other Allied forces from Dunkirk. "A motley armada of 850 ships and other watercraft started the operation on May 26." It is estimated that more than 300 000 Allied troops escaped encirclement. Although this almost miraculous feat saved these troops from falling into enemy hands, all their equipment was lost. Churchill appreciated the gravity of the situation.
It was on June 4, 1940, that a voice came over the air. It was not Roosevelt's voice requesting Hitler to give assurances that he would not attack other countries. It was not the well-known voice of a great orator of the time, pouring torrents of words into the microphone. The voice came booming in sonorous, measured tones from another great orator of the time. "His words were for his own people to hear, for the whole world to hear and especially for the US to hear."
The voice announced, "We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender ... "
By this time Hitler had launched attacks on a 400-mile front against the French and whatever British troops had escaped encirclement. On June 10, the French government left Paris. On the same day that "jackal, Mussolini", as I can still hear Churchill call him, honoured his Pact of Steel obligations by coming in at the kill. He did blow-all towards the defeat of France.
"Adolf Hitler", says the Consolidated Encyclopaedia, "looked up at the swastika flying from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. He gazed down upon the tomb of Napoleon in silent pride." France had lasted six weeks.
Hitler had decided that the signing of the Armistice Agreement with France had to be a dramatic occasion. In 1918 the Armistice Agreement had been signed in a railway car in a clearing in the forest of Compiégne. Marshal Foch occupied the chair on behalf of the victorious allies to dictate terms to the defeated Germans. This whole scene had to be re-enacted in the same railway car that was to be brought from a museum nearby to the same clearing in the forest. The difference was that Hitler would occupy the chair that Marshal Foch had occupied then. The victorious Germans would dictate the terms to the defeated French. This dramatic preliminary meeting took place on June 21, and on the 22nd the agreement was signed. The railway car was then taken to Berlin. Two days later the armistice between France and Italy was signed in Rome.
Hitler had indeed every reason to believe that he had become that something which he set out with an indomitable resolution to become when he left for Vienna in 1907, for here, Shirer, who stood a few feet away from Hitler, remarks, "I saw his face light up, successively, with hate, scorn, revenge, triumph as he strode to the little marble block that marked the spot where Foch's wagon-lit had stood in 1918 and read the lettering:
Three days later the marble block was blown up on Hitler's orders.
Why did France collapse so easily? From all accounts France had all the necessary war equipment to at least, have dealt the Germans a severe blow. The severity of the onslaught on France did not penetrate to either the French government or the Army High Command until it was much too late. When it did dawn on them, the Germans had overcome whatever initial difficulties they had experienced and which could have been exploited by the French. The army commanders in the field waited in vain for orders from the top. When some of them expressed concern, they were treated with disdain.
Shirer in his book, The Collapse of the Third Republic, "more moving", according to one reviewer, "than its predecessor, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", relates the story of the unrealism and defeatism, the inaction and lack of determination which had gripped the political and military leaders of France in her hour of need.
In March 1940, when it had become obvious that there was a lull before a storm which was sure to come, Edouard Daladier, who had his share in the betrayal of' Czechoslovakia at Munich, was ousted as Premier to be replaced by Paul Reynaud. Daladier had also been Minister of Defence for four uninterrupted years since 1936 when Hitler invaded the Rhineland zone; Reynaud could bear it no longer to have Daladier as Minister of Defence. On May 18, 1940, he sent Daladier to the Foreign Ministry and took over Defence himself. Daladier had refused to accept this suggestion from Reynaud when he became Premier in March. Now he gave in. At this stage it was merely a matter of putting the seal on France's collapse unless something of a miracle could happen. Manstein was on his way to Abbeville. Daladier, who as Minister of Defence, says Shirer, "was more responsible for the state of the army than any other politician, now struck those who saw him as a broken man. Like the top generals who had fashioned it, he was stupefied to see it falling apart in nine days."
Reynaud decided to make other dramatic changes. He recalled two of the most "illustrious" surviving generals from World War I. Marshal Henri Phillipe Petain, the "victor of Verdun", now 84 yearS old, was recalled from Madrid and made Vice Premier and Minister of State. General Maxime Weygand, now 73 years old, was recalled from Syria. On the 19th General Maurice Gamelin was dismissed and Weygand appointed Chief of the General Staff of National Defence and Commander in Chief of all operations on land, sea and in the air. Until then there had been no coordination of the three services.
Gamelin had spent 50 years in the French army. In the middle of the battle of France for which he had so many years to prepare, he, "in the great test of ten days, in May 1940, was found lacking in determination to act and to command". "Failure to command the army", Shirer continues, "which he himself as top man since 1935, had fashioned was his greatest and most inexplicable fault. Not once after the Germans had struck, did he attempt to dominate the course of the battle, to counter enemy moves with those of his own, to manoeuvre his divisions, thirty of which were left to wither on the vine behind the un-attacked Maginot Line, to vital positions in time."
The press and the politicians hailed these new appointments as measures that would now alter the position in France's favour. Daladier and Gamelin were out of the way. I well remember how hope replaced despair even in far away South Africa at that time. But the press and the politicians did not appreciate how hopelessly out of date these two very old gentlemen, Petain and Weygand, were. Pitched against a German army well equipped and well trained in modern blitz warfare, fully aware of the advantages of tank warfare, these two old men had no hope. During the inter-war years they "had used their immense power and prestige to prevent the French army from adapting itself to it".
Charles de Gaulle who had been appointed Brigadier General some time before the Germans struck, was now commanding the only intact armoured division left. He had no reason to expect much from these new appointees. Petain and Weygand opposed him, quarrelled with him and dismissed him during the prewar years "because of his stubborn advocacy of tank warfare". de Gaulle knew that Weygand "lacked the youth, the boldness, the imagination to take hold and save the day".
The rest of the story of the collapse of France makes sad reading. The front was ripped wide open. Officers and men were befuddled by conflicting rumours and orders to continue fighting; to discontinue fighting since armistice talks were being considered. The roads became clogged up with refugees. Morale was at its lowest ebb. Everybody in high places in Government and Army Command, excepting Reynaud for a while, until he too, was overwhelmed by opposition, believed that the war was already lost. They believed that all that was left for France was to seek the best possible terms of surrender from the Germans.
They believed with an unshakable conviction that the fall of Great Britain was as imminent as that of France. There was no need to honour her agreement with Britain not to make a separate peace. They would both be forced to do so soon enough. Above all, the feeling persisted in French circles that Britain had let France down. Proposals at the time that a union be formed between Britain and France to pool their resources and energies to continue the fight, from British and French overseas possessions, if necessary, were considered outrageous . Relationships between the two Allied powers became so strained that it left the impression that these two countries were enemies with nothing in common.
Under these circumstances, Churchill's main concern was the French navy. If France was determined to deliver herself to the mercy of Germany, he would take an equally determined stand to ensure that the French navy would not fall into Germany's clutches.
Despite considerable hesitation on the part of admirals as to the likely outcome of the measures which Churchill proposed. he had by June 2, made up his mind. He took what he described as "a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned". He ordered the Admiralty to instruct Admiral Somerville: "You are charged with one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks that a British Admiral had ever been faced with, but we have complete confidence in you to carry it out relentlessly". The French navy was given the choice of continuing the fight with the British; of sailing to a British port; of sailing to a French port in the West Indies or the United States; of sinking their ships within six hours. Failing that, the British would use whatever force might be necessary to prevent French ships from falling into German or Italian hands.
Only at the French naval base of Mers-el-Kebir in North Africa did it result in an unfortunate and disastrous battle for the French admiral who would not comply with these demands. He would meet force by force.
"In the course of a single summer's day" says Shirer, "the British had taken over or destroyed the bulk of the French fleet. It could never be used to help defeat them. When the next day, July 4, Churchill rose in the House of Commons "with profound sadness, to recount the details of the tragedy at Mers-el-Kébir and to defend what was done on the ground that it was necessary for the survival of the Britain, the members listened silently and, when he had ended stood up and loudly cheered. Painful though such an action against the old ally was, it somehow gave a shot in the arm of the British people who now faced alone the Germans."
As the hours ticked past during those last days of the Third Republic, the French government under the pressures and manoeuvres of Pierre Laval particularly, became more and more convinced of Britain's death. Some hoped the Germans would deal severely with Britain. They saw nothing but virtue in Hitler's "New Order" for Europe. "We have only one road to follow," exclaimed Laval, "and that is a loyal collaboration with Germany and Italy. We must practise it with honour and dignity. And I am not embarrassed to say so. I argued it during the days of peace."
Charles de Gaulle was in Britain at the time, struggling desperately to get followers to conduct the war from the French colonies. On August 2, 1940, Weygand had him condemned to death in absentia, for desertion.
French generals in North Africa were disturbed by the trend of events in France. General Augusti Nogues, Resident General and Commander in Chief of the North African theatre of war took up a determined stand against his chief, Weygand. He appealed over his head to Petain to allow him to continue the struggle in North Africa, but Petain, like Weygand, had no intention of continuing the war anywhere. The North African command was dissolved. Nogues and de Gaulle had tried in vain to resist the two "illustrious" remnants of World War I. Only after four long years later, de Gaulle "returned in triumph as the head of the Free French Forces, to Paris, after its liberation" in 1944.
After the collapse of France, Hitler hesitated to carry out an operation order to attack Britain. It had been planned with meticulous care. All he had to do was to fix the date on which the invasion of England had to take place and then give the starting orders. He fixed and unfixed the dates. The order to start never came.
First of all he had to resort to his usual game after having gained a victory, of offering generous peace proposals to his remaining adversaries. Now that Great Britain was the only adversary left, she should surely realise that she had no option.
After the occupation of the Rhineland zone, peace proposals, provided: the restrictions placed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, limiting the strength of her army, were lifted. After the annexation of Austria, peace proposals, provided: no interference in Austro-German affairs was attempted by Western Powers. After Sudetenland, peace proposals, provided: nobody interfered with German attempts to restore order in the rest of Czechoslovakia, should her government fail to do so. After Memelland, peace proposals, provided: nobody came to the assistance of Lithuania who had willingly allowed German troops to occupy Memel. After Poland, peace proposals, provided: there was no insistence on the restoration of an independent Poland, ever. After France, the most generous peace proposals. Germany would make no claims about her previous colonies, provided: Germany was allowed a free hand on the continent of Europe. Hitler was soon to prove that he had by no means finished with the continent, yet.
If Britain was already the defeated nation as Hitler often said she was, why no invasion. It remains a puzzle but there are pointers.
After the occupation of the Rhineland zone, peace proposals, provided: the restrictions placed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, limiting the strength of her army, were lifted. After the annexation of Austria, peace proposals, provided: no interference in Austro-German affairs was attempted by Western Powers. After Sudetenland, peace proposals, provided: nobody interfered with German attempts to restore order in the rest of Czechoslovakia, should her government fail to do so. After Memelland, peace proposals, provided: nobody came to the assistance of Lithuania who had willingly allowed German troops to occupy Memel. After Poland, peace proposals, provided: there was no insistence on the restoration of an independent Poland, ever. After France, the most generous peace proposals. Germany would make no claims about her previous colonies, provided: Germany was allowed a free hand on the continent of Europe. Hitler was soon to prove that he had by no means finished with the continent, yet.
If Britain was already the defeated nation as Hitler often said she was, why no invasion. It remains a puzzle but there are pointers.
The German navy doubted very much whether they could transport troops across the Channel to form bridgeheads in England and then to supply the forces with their needs to expand their holds. The army was in two minds about whether troops should be landed on a wide or a narrow front in England, if the navy were in a position to do either the one or the other.
Goering knew all the answers as far as the Luftwaffe was concerned. They would assist in all operations. However, the Luftwaffe had given the army little indication thus far that they could even keep the RAF from bombing ports in France from which the invasion would have to start. The obvious answer was first to wipe the RAF from the skies, then invasion would be an easy matter. That, Goering thought, could be done. He did not know how very nearly he was correct. Several factors prevented it.
British radar development was far ahead of anything in Germany and this enabled the RAF to overcome German superiority in the air. The bombing of cities by Germany enraged rather than subdued the British workers and prompted them to increase production. Much later the bombing of German cities had a similar effect on German workers, until it became too devastating. Germany could not afford heavy air losses because by this time it had become clear to Hitler that in spite of all his attempts to avoid fighting on two major fronts, this was the very monster that was staring him in the face. Russia was no longer playing the game. He could not allow more air losses in the west. His air forces would soon be needed in the East. A major factor, undoubtedly, was that Churchill could say about the RAF, "Never in the history of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
By September 15, Hitler had postponed invasion plans indefinitely, perhaps until the spring of 1941. That spring dawned but with it came no invasion.
While the partners, Hitler and Ribbentrop, on the one hand, and Stalin and Molotov on the other, were laying the foundations of the Russo-German nonaggression pact, they watched each other cynically, knowing that neither side was unduly concerned about laying a sound foundation. Each side knew the other was cheating. The foundation was not meant to support a lasting structure.
The day after German troops entered Paris, on June 14, Soviet troops entered Lithuania. Latvia and Estonia suffered the same fate during the following few days. Elections were arranged in all three states after all political parties had been declared illegal, except the Communist Party. The three governments, thus elected, voted for their countries to be incorporated in the Soviet Union.
But not only this. Bessarabia, which was part of Rumania, had been placed in the Russian sphere of interest by the non-aggression agreement. Now, Russia also claimed Bucovina. Rumania had to yield these two areas to Russian troops, which occupied them on June 28, 1940. There was, as yet, no open conflict between Russia and Germany and Hitler was in no position to advise Rumania not to make this concession to Russia. It did not really matter what Russia was planning. Hitler had already decided that Russia would be destroyed, the sooner the better, probably in the spring of 1941. Hitler had heard of such things, as Stalin was capable of doing to small states, unable to resist effectively.
With Russia grabbing parts of Rumania, further demands came in from Hungary and Bulgaria for portions of Rumanian territory. Hitler had to step in to prevent Russia from benefiting still further from this uneasy position. He decided that Germany and Italy would arbitrate in the dispute between Hungary and Rumania. Hungary received the major portion of Transylvania, which had been taken from her after World War I. The Rumanian Foreign Minister fainted but he was assured that the rest of Rumania would be guaranteed by Germany and Italy.
Stalin was furious about these arrangements in the south but so was Hitler about the arrangements in the north in the Baltic States. Things were hotting up but it was necessary for Hitler not to allow them to reach boiling point yet. His troops were still in the west. Although the plan to invade Britain had been abandoned, the Luftwaffe continued its attacks on cities in England, notably on London. The German navy and Uboats continued their attacks on British shipping. The latter were so devastating during the winter months and deep into 1941, that Churchill admitted on a later occasion that the U-boat menace was the only thing that really frightened him during the war.
At this time Admiral Erich Raeder tried in vain to influence Hitler to consider getting at Great Britain via her fleet in the Mediterranean. This would enable Germany to pursue her policy of expansion towards the east through Turkey and the Suez Canal. The idea appealed to Hitler but he would not allow it to interfere with his determination to annihilate Russia by means of a frontal attack. A drive through the Balkans to the Mediterranean could be undertaken. In October, Nazi troops entered Rumania to guard the oil fields and Black Sea ports. Mussolini was not informed in advance. In a childish tit-for-tat game, the blundering Mussolini ordered Italian troops in Albania to cross the Greek frontier without informing Hitler. The consequences were to prove disastrous.
Early in 1941, Bulgaria had joined the Axis powers in spite of Russia's warning. German troops had spilled over the Rumanian border crossing the Danube into Bulgaria, leaving her no option but to join the Axis powers. The Italians, as Hitler knew, could make no headway in Greece. In order to go to the assistance of his partner, Yugoslavia stood in his path. She had to be browbeaten. The Regent agreed on April 24, to join the Axis powers but this caused a storm of protest from the people and he was ousted. Hitler could not tolerate such behaviour. He ordered a merciless attack on Yugoslavia in which he was assisted by Hungarian and Bulgarian troops. Opposition was crushed. The Luftwaffe flattened Belgrade during three days of intensive low-level bombing. The way to Greece lay open. German tanks were in Athens on April 27. Crete was taken by parachute and other air-borne troops. It was a costly undertaking for Germany but paid dividends in that British troops which were sent to assist Greece, had to be "Dunkirked" out of Greece and Crete.
In the meantime, on February 8,1941, the United States House of Representatives had passed the Lend-Lease Bill by a majority of 260 to 165. In the Senate the vote was 61 - 30 in favour. At this late hour when Hitler was lording it over the major portion of the continent of Europe, the US was still far from united in her determination to become militarily involved in European affairs.
On May 4, 1941, Hitler made a momentous speech in the Reichstag asserting that Germany could defeat any conceivable combination of powers. To prove this he attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Mussolini's blunderings to attack Greece had caused Hitler to postpone his attack on Russia from May 15 to the end of June. By this time a whole month had been lost and this made all the difference to the time available before the Russian winter, which happened to set in early that year.
Flenley and Spencer in their book Modern German History, give this account of the position on the Russian border:
During the night of June 21, 1941, "about three million troops were assembled along the 2000 mile front close to the Soviet border. The 153 German divisions included 19 panzer and 15 motorised divisions ... and were supported by 2700 aircraft. Six Rumanian divisions were included in Rundstedt's Army Group South, which was to strike south of the Pripet marshes, through the Ukraine to the Black Sea and towards the Caucasus. The Schwerpunkt (main force) lay to the north. Here, von Beck's Army Group Centre was to strike through Minsk and Smolensk towards Moscow, while von Leeb's Army Group North was to clear the Baltic States and with the assistance of the Finns seize Leningrad and prepare for a gigantic pincer movement enveloping Moscow."
Thus had started "Operation Barbarossa" about which Hitler had predicted, "that the world will hold its breath". He ordered that it was to be conducted with "unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness". Even before this, there was nothing in the way of brutality that the communists had practised, which Hitler and his henchmen had not absorbed, perfected and applied in their dealings with those who stood in their way.
In the foregoing summary of events, which had taken place in Europe by the time we arrived at Mareopolis, I have tried to indicate only the main volcanic peaks, which had erupted during those years. They rose above the magma of misery that was poured out over the valleys and gorges below. What lay hidden below the surface, in the way of suffering by millions, will never be known. It would make one sick to know. And yet, the end was not in sight. Numerous peaks were still to erupt and to stand out above further expanses of magma obscuring from view even more gruesome sufferings.
On July 23, 1941, after spending a month at Mareopolis we left in troop carriers. There was a small railway siding some 60 or 70 miles from Alexandria on the railway line that ran westwards to a desert railhead. This railhead was shifted from time to time still further to the west in accordance with the demands of the army.
To the north of this little siding on the tarred road, we came across the flags that marked the frontage of the terrains to be occupied by various battalions. Northwards, each terrain stretched to the sea. We had arrived at El Alamein. It was mid summer and it did not take long to make acquaintance with the sea.
Near the coast at El Alamein
It soon became obvious that we were to be here for some time because much to our distress we had to start digging elaborate defensive positions.
The fortunes of pushes and counter pushes in the Western Desert had fluctuated, favouring first the one side and then the other. Although we did not appreciate it fully at the time, there was reason for the Allied Command to be concerned about the position in North Africa. There was a gap of about 30 miles between El Alamein in the north and the Quatara depression to the south of us. Any enemy force attempting to reach Cairo from the west would have to pass through this gap. This would have to be held and we accepted that ours was not to reason why; ours was but to dig and fry - for the time being at any rate.
But for the mediocre performance of Hitler's partner, Mussolini, on the one hand, and the tenacity of Winston Churchill on the other hand, it is doubtful whether Britain would have survived as unscathed as she did, during the autumn - winter - spring period at the end of 1940 and the beginning of 1941. She had to contend with the onslaughts of the Luftwaffe and the destruction of her shipping by the U-boats. In addition, her armed forces had to operate in far-flung theatres of war, as well as keeping her hold on bases in the Far East. France had collapsed and the US was providing valuable aid but no direct military support. It was her darkest hour.
The need for our troops to construct defensive positions in this gap was due to the fact that the situation in North Africa had become far less secure than it had been at the end of the previous year, 1940.
By mid September of that year, Mussolini had ordered Marshal Rodolfo Graziani to cross the Libyan border into Egypt with a large Italian army. Patrols and skirmishes continued for weeks on end on the Egyptian border until Graziani's forces reached Sidi Barrani to the west of Mersa Matruh. Here his forces suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of General Sir Archibald Wavell's forces, in December 1940. The Cold Stream Guards did not count the prisoners. The story is told that they herded them together, sent a message to Cairo that they had 5 acres of officers and 200 acres of other ranks. What were they to do with them?
By the time Graziani's forces had been driven across the plateau of Cyrenaica as far as Benghazi, this Italian army had practically ceased to exist. Cyrenaica and Tobruk were in British hands. Australian units established themselves in Tobruk.
The position could have remained like this but the blundering Mussolini had other grandiose ideas. It was in the spring of 1941, that he ordered the Italians in Albania to cross into Greece. It was this undertaking by Mussolini, that had forced Hitler to postpone his attack on Russia from May to June. It was this undertaking that forced Hitler to burst through Yugoslavia to come to the rescue of Mussolini's forces in Greece. It was this undertaking that forced Britain, after the defeat of Graziani, to send troops from North Africa to Greece and Crete to help stem the German attack, but to no avail.
After Graziani's defeat in North Africa, it was clear to Hitler that Mussolini would have no success in the North African Campaign without German assistance. In February 1941, he sent General Erwin Rommel to North Africa with the Afrika Korps, strengthened by tank and Luftwaffe units. Rommel was placed in overall command of the Axis forces in North Africa, much to the annoyance of Mussolini.
By the end of March 1941, Rommel was ready to strike back at the British. This coincided with Britain's commitments to Greece. After twelve days Rommel was in Bardia. Apart from Australian forces, which he bypassed in Tobruk, Cyrenaica was in Axis hands again. For months to come, the responsibility for supplying the Tobruk garrison, fell to the British fleet in the Mediterranean. It was a costly undertaking.
All these events accounted for us having to dig defensive positions at El Alamein. The future was uncertain but everything pointed to the likelihood that fierce fighting would have to take place in North Africa before the end would be in sight.
In November 1941, Wavell's Army of the Nile was renamed the Eighth Army and placed under the command of General Sir Alan Cunningham who had completed the war against Abyssinia. The First South African Division was there to play its part after its epic move up the length of Africa. Mussolini's East African Empire, which he had acquired and was to hold at the points of eight million bayonets, had expired.
Cunningham now made a lightning attack on Rommel who withdrew, allowing the Tobruk garrison to be relieved. He left a pocket of German and Italian forces in the defensive positions, which he had in the meantime established on the Libya-Egyptian border. It was during these battles of hit-and-run, which followed on Cunningham's attack, that the Eighth Army suffered heavy losses in tanks and which led to the destruction of the Fifth South African Brigade at Sidi Rezegh on November 23, 1941. Cunningham had to withdraw, finding his armour inadequate against Rommel's tanks.
The British War Cabinet demanded action. General Sir Neil Ritchie took over the command of the Eighth Army and drove Rommel back to his retreat at El Agheila on the border of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.
But the "Desert Fox" was not to remain there for long. In a counter push during January /February 1942, he came back across the plateau of Cyrenaica but had to stop short of Tobruk where he established new positions in the Gazala area.
The story from this point will be continued later.
At El Alamein we had to be on the alert in a land in which the enemy within could well operate against us because of the damn-the-lot-of-you attitude of the populace. It was a dangerous place to put the slightest trust in anybody who might in the end prove to have been the last person who should have been trusted.
It was here that we first set eyes on that most wonderful of all containers, the Jerrican, manufactured by the Germans. Here was something so adequate in comparison with our own containers that it astonished us. It could hold liquids like fuel and water. It could hold dry grain and cereals. It had a spring-clipped bung or lid, which prevented spilling and leaking. It had rounded corners and slightly bulging sides which made it possible to wedge several against each other into spaces in vehicles where they sat firmly. It had a strong handle in a depression at the top of the can, which did not interfere with stacking other equipment on top. I wished I had patented it.
Training of a kind of which we knew very little had to be undertaken. Manoeuvres and exercises were necessary to gain experience in the orderly movement of vehicles and men, well-dispersed but remaining in box-like formation while going in a fixed direction at night with hardly a light showing. Companies, platoons and sections were to maintain their positions in relation to one another. The going was tough on vehicles, tyres and drivers. The terrain was extremely rough and rocky with sand patches at places into which the vehicles sank to their bellies. This resulted in much revving and roaring and pushing and swearing. It was not difficult to appreciate that vehicles with two-wheel drive could serve many purposes in North Africa but not under circumstances calling for rapid and orderly movement over terrain of this nature. There was a crying need in the desert for vehicles with four-wheel drive.
We gave some attention to recreational activities although not with a view to keeping fit. The digging we had to do was more than enough for that purpose. Soccer was the easiest game to organise and with little effort reasonably good fields were soon available in the beach area for inter-company and inter-battalion games.
Somebody in the Sixth Brigade had the good sense to arrange for instruments of the South African Police Band to be brought to North Africa. These instruments formed part of the equipment, which took a long time to come from Port Tewfik. They certainly did not receive priority from the transport section. The conductor and his men to play these instruments were in the police battalions. A remarkable amphitheatre to seat several hundred people was constructed on the slope of the wadi. It was ideal. Here the band entertained us on many occasions. Talented soloists appeared, some from neighbouring units. Nostalgic memories stirred in us while familiar tunes wafted away over the desert air on long twilight evenings and on glorious starlit nights. There are no obstacles to the mind travelling a million miles in no seconds at all and my mind flitted effortlessly away to where I longed to be. As the weeks advanced towards late October, our daughter, of whom I had seen so little, was to celebrate her first birthday.
While we were here, I received instructions to go to Helwan for a fortnight. This was a transit camp on the outskirts of Cairo, known to thousands of South African troops who had come and gone over many months. It was an uninviting, dismal, dreary, bleak, fly-ridden place. As soon as I saw it I was determined to get back to the desert, fast. I was not there on a tourist holiday but I did the "done" things. I boarded a clattering tram, which took me to the pyramids and the sphinx. I could not miss seeing these impressive monuments of ancient Egypt. I was photographed in sheik's attire sitting on a camel. This too, was the expected thing to do.
Like everybody else I bought trinkets at bazaars in the side streets of Cairo. Fascinating places they were. I paid shoeshine boys to clean my shoes after they had poured brown liquid polish over them while I was window-shopping. No one escaped street urchins inviting one to their sisters, very clean, very hygiene. I did not visit brothels. I share the sentiments expressed by Stuart Cloete in his book A Victorian Son to the effect that he had always been averse to eating off other people's dirty plates.
One could juggle with the name Helwan. Most people thought it was one hell of a place and preferred to spell it Hell-One. Halfaya on the Libyan-Egyptian border easily became Hellfire.
Soon, I was back at Alamein. I found letter writing under these circumstances a frustrating exercise. Somewhere up North. No indications of one's whereabouts. No news of movements. No relating this or that incident. One could mention that khamsin winds blew everybody out of sorts and everything out of place; that it took days to clear one's eyes, ears and nostrils of dust and sand; that murders that took place under these circumstances were not even investigated. It was assumed that the body would soon be covered by sand leaving no corpus delicti. One wrote home as if from a vacuum where nothing ever stirred. Heavens above, how little I knew how many more letters I would still be writing under similar and worse conditions. But how dependent we were on receiving letters from home. Manna for bread and quail for meat were never more welcome to the Israelites of ancient times, than letters from home were to us.
We stopped digging at Alamein. There were rumours of an impending move. Certain provisions had to be obtained from "Skandria", the Egyptian corruption of the name Alexandria. Three of us went on this trip, experiencing slightly more than we expected. The Egyptians were notorious for not looking either left or right when crossing a street. One such crossed a busy street in Alexandria holding a large tray of small loaves on his head, which obscured his view in both directions. Our driver knocked him flying, scattering his loaves all over the place. What a commotion. Anyone, who ever had the slightest accident of this nature in that land, can testify to the nature of the row that such incidents caused. Milling crowds surrounded our vehicle. The mob became decidedly bellicose. We were to be ripped to pieces and trampled underfoot. In the end we managed to escape from the wailing, screaming, gesticulating crowd only to discover that during the "shamozzle" one of the crowd had neatly lifted a small suitcase from the trunk, containing amongst other valuables the only camera which the battalion was authorised to have in the desert. We were to have had the film with 36 exposures developed.
Later in the day our driver went round the wrong way of a traffic island. He had momentarily forgotten that right was right and left was wrong when driving in Egypt. He bumped into a small Fiat driven by a civilian. The occupant jumped out holding his elbow. He yelled and heaped damnation on our heads. He said he was one of the city engineers and would be claiming on the British government for a fantastic number of thousands of pounds. He was sure he would not be able to continue in his profession after this severe injury. We told him that we would report the incident to the police and give them our names and that of our unit, which we assured him was at that time somewhere between Alexandria and Tripoli. We did report to the police and to our Commanding Officer when we returned. The police did communicate with our OC. In order to keep the record straight and to show our willingness to cooperate with the Egyptian authorities our OC fined the driver one Egyptian pound and informed the police that he had taken appropriate action. The British government was left none the poorer for this incident.
But our day had not ended. We were parked in a city square. It was getting dark and the city was blacked out. Suddenly the air-raid sirens sounded. The inhabitants of blocks of flats nearby poured out on to the streets going to air-raid shelters. There was much screaming and shouting and crying of children who were being carried or unceremoniously dragged along by adults.
Flares started to descend and searchlights came into action. The harbour area close by was the target. We decided to stay in the open. The risk of being struck by pieces of flying masonry seemed preferable to risking the possibility of solid walls collapsing on us. The bombs screamed down. One had the impression that all hell was let loose but it was no doubt tame in comparison with what other cities had suffered. I recalled days when instructors shouted to recruits in training, to get right down on their bellies when we were playing at being subjected to an air attack. I wondered now why the instructors ever bothered. When the necessity arises, one knows automatically that being flat on one's belly like a snake was still not far enough down to one's liking. The raid continued for what appeared to be an exceedingly long period especially as some of the bombs missed their targets and appeared to be aimed at us. However, things died down and we left there unscathed after a delay of a couple of hours. We had to dodge rubble in the streets where buildings had collapsed during the raid.
We expected our unit to have moved on by the time we would return to Alamein. We had arranged for our belongings to be taken with them. We were to follow them to Charing Cross where none of us had ever been. It was somewhere south of Mersa Matruh. We had expected to reach our unit about midnight but our luck was out. The military police stopped us at a roadblock just short of Mersa Matruh and the reason for this was obvious. The sirens sounded and the flares came down. An air-raid was in progress. After some time the police diverted us off the tarred road on to tracks leading southwards into the desert. They warned us to look out for minefields in the area into which we were going. Fortunately there was no mistaking the tracks we had to follow even in the slight beam of light one was allowed to show when travelling at night. We found our unit and made no further attempts at orientating ourselves. We slept where we were. The enemy was aware of troop movements in their direction and they were bombing supply centres all along the line, hence our experiences in Alexandria and Mersa Matruh. Fighting had once more begun on November 18, 1941.
Solum Wadi
Solum Pass
It was on November 23, 1941, a few days after we arrived at Charing Cross that news of the Sidi Rezegh disaster filtered through. Practically the whole of the Fifth South African Brigade had disappeared. The men had been either captured or wounded or killed. Evidence of the disaster was brought home to us when convoys of ambulances started passing through Charing Cross on their way to Mersa Matruh where there was a large casualty clearing station (CCS) underground.
I visited this CCS on November 25 with a list of names of people about whom the men in our battalion desired information. Visiting a place of this nature was another new experience for me. We had seen little of this aspect of war thus far. There is always a danger in relating first experiences of this nature. One may mention things, which to the more experienced are so commonplace that they do not impress. The place was filled to capacity. Beds and mattresses were everywhere. It was quiet in there. A calm atmosphere prevailed. I heard few moans and groans. I thought, as I have thought so often in my life, that one of the major blessings to mankind lay in the discovery of anaesthetics and pain-killing drugs. I found out from the register that there were some of the men I was looking for. I talked to them, some eager and some not so eager to talk. They said little about their own conditions. They talked rather about their experiences. They talked about their having been completely overwhelmed by something too devastating to withstand. They had not yet collected their thoughts. They were looking forward to being up and about, soon.
In his book Brazen Chariots Robert (Bob) Crisp describes the utterly confused conditions, which reigned throughout this campaign, which was launched on November 18. He was a tank commander in the Third Royal Tank regiment. He gives the following description of their desperate attempt, with ineffective equipment at their disposal, to give aid to the Fifth Brigade.
"As the massed enemy drew nearer", he writes, "they became distinguishable as a vast array of tanks, guns and lorried infantry ... a solid embattled column with heavy panzers at the head of the battering ram in a ponderous phalanx of destruction followed by lines of tall lorries protected on flank and rear by the ranks of light tanks and armoured cars ... They came steadily nearer - a great, black juggernaut of irresistible menace; the sombre camouflage of the tanks redtinged as the frightened sun sank behind them. Then our artillery went into action breaking up the solidity of the design with sudden bursts of smoke and dirt. But there was no break in the tempo or the purpose of that evil, crawling mass. We waited for the tanks to come within range of our puny guns, letting the full and horrible fascination of the sight sink indelibly into our minds, forever. The enemy column was now at its closest point to the South African position, and the battle in my vicinity reached a crescendo of noise and furiousness. The mass of tanks passed steadily across our front and the dark air was patterned with tracers and the vivid flashes of guns."
This "juggernaut" went rolling on over the positions occupied by the Fifth Brigade.
What I saw at the CCS in Mersa Matruh was apparently a pale resemblance of the stark realities which Bob Crisp experienced in the CCS at Tobruk, when, towards the end of the November/December campaign, he was taken there badly wounded and having been transported, first in his tank, and then for 50 miles in an ambulance over the rough terrain to Tobruk. I had seen the men at Mersa Matruh at the beginning of the campaign before the confusion reigned, which Crisp experienced. I did not see these men on their arrival after having been transported over the rough terrain from Sidi Rezegh to Mersa Matruh. I saw them in that mercifully calm stage after they had been made as comfortable as possible. I saw them before they were fully aware of the seriousness of their position. Some of them would never recover.
Casualty Clearing Station
The inland plateau rises appreciably from Mersa Matruh to the border between Egypt and Libya. The escarpment, which fringes this plateau is characterised by deep gullies or wadis, as they are known locally. The escarpment runs closer and closer to the coast as one goes westwards from Mersa Matruh until it reaches the sea at Solum where the tarred road winds up the escarpment towards Capuzzo and beyond. In this rugged terrain of deep valleys and cliffs towering above the sea, some German and Italian forces were left behind, either by accident or design, when Rommel had to retreat after his initial successes when he landed in North Africa. These forces denied to the Eighth Army the use of the Solum Pass. They could shell the approaches to the pass and harass troop movements in the area. All Eighth Army movements had to take place from Mersa Matruh along the top of the escarpment where there were no roads, only a wide expanse of tracks, which testified to the struggles of those who had no option but to come and go over this rough terrain.
Bay at Bardia
It was obvious that the Eighth Army would not be able to operate effectively unless the Bardia - Solum - Halfaya obstacle could be removed. Many units had in the meantime moved through Charing Cross along this bypass, spreading from the railhead to Capuzzo and along the Trig Capuzzo to Sidi Rezegh and beyond, seeking to engage the enemy forces, which were as much in a tumult as our own.
Fort Capuzzo
Bardia
At first little was known about the actual positions and strength of the enemy in the Bardia - Halfaya area. Probing patrols by New Zealand units early in December revealed that the enemy was firmly entrenched in the deep wadis and that it would be no easy matter to dislodge them. It was the task of units of the Second South African Division to overcome the enemy in this area.
Harbour at Bardia
The attack on Bardia was launched on New Year's Eve, 1941. From all accounts it was masterfully planned and executed. Enemy resistance was fierce from their numerous dugouts, gun emplacements and machine gun nests. On New Year's Day a second phase of the battle was launched. On the January 2, 1942, the enemy surrendered in Bardia. The Luftwaffe could do little to assist their forces because of the difficulty of taking part without endangering their own men. They carried out, instead, repeated dive-bombing attacks on supply dumps at and near the railhead and started several fires. Some of us who only reached Bardia on January 2, when there was only some mopping-up to be done, spent two nights exposed at the railhead. An icy wind blew over the bare plateau. The ground was hard and rocky. No hope of digging in anywhere. The Germans soon discovered that we could offer little resistance. They intensified their attacks.
When we reached our main forces, we learned that no direct attack on Halfaya was planned. The forces entrenched there were bound to surrender if the area were to be pounded by shellfire. It was, however, necessary to deny them their water supply at Fig Tree Wells below the escarpment. Stiff opposition was encountered in this area as could well be expected when their water supply was at stake.
Tomb of a Senussi saint (Sidi)
Our headquarters was in a wadi just below a gun position. At short but irregular intervals, shells were fired with merciless monotony all through the night, night after night. Other guns from other vantage points were doing the same thing. It nearly drove one crazy but it caused havoc at the receiving end. Early in the morning of January 17, an enemy vehicle appeared at our headquarters with an envoy carrying a white flag. They could endure it no longer. Halfaya had surrendered.
Towards late afternoon we had provided thousands of prisoners with food and water and sent them off in trucks to the railhead from where they started their long, long trail a-winding into the land where prisoners went, some of them to our own home towns in far away South Africa.
I observed these prisoners of war with interest. They were mostly Italians. They arrived at the appointed place, a long line of straggly, disorderly individuals, ostensibly with nobody in command who had any control over them. They were exhausted. It was obvious that water was not a commodity of which they had a good supply and they were hungry. They were not easily controlled at ration points. There were far fewer Germans. They came after the Italians. They came marching along. They were clean-shaven or looked it in comparison with the Italians. They had spruced themselves up as well as they could. The Italians told us that the Germans had far more than their share of what had been available towards the end. The German column came to a halt some distance away from the ration points. NCOs detailed their men off in manageable sections to receive their rations. Apart from their firmly-locked jaws which revealed their dismay, they gave the impression that they thought nothing untoward had happened to them. They were masters of their fate.
The behaviour of these troops emphasised blatantly the differences between German and Italian soldiers in their attitude towards the war. I was to appreciate these differences much better as time went by. Arrogance from the Germans. They were not defeated; they were let down. Docile acceptance of the inevitable from the Italians. They were tired of it all. Almost inherent military discipline versus almost inherent aversion to military discipline. Thorough Teutonic attention to detail of organisation on the one hand and a couldn't-care-Iess attitude on the other hand. The willing soldier versus the reluctant soldier. Complete faith and belief in the destiny their Fuhrer had in mind for them versus grave doubts about what their Duce was hoping to achieve for Italy in this alliance. Whatever the reasons, the contrast was striking. Their mutual dislike and avoidance of each other was all they had in common. Neither would think of going into a troop carrier with the other.
For the Eighth Army the coast road was now open. The Solum pass could hardly cope with the traffic. We returned to the coast at Sidi Barrani to refit. There was still a menacing factor, which plagued us. Dense traffic on the coast road offered sitting targets for the Stukas and the Messerschmitts 109, the latter a fighter plane against which our own had little chance in the numerous dogfights that took place. We had not seen the Spitfire in North Africa by that time, which would have been the answer to the Messerschmitt. I watched with a sinking feeling the superiority of the Messerschmitts when our fighters were shot down to dive vertically into the sea, making hardly a splash, or to crash in the surrounding wadis. A sandbag was usually quite big enough to hold the remains of pilots who came down in the desert during these dogfights.
Coast at Sidi Barrani
At that time and under these circumstances, I for one found little consolation or comfort in the words of Laurence Binyon:
It was heart-rending to witness the end of these young lives, which we needed so badly. They died for want of equipment, at least as effective, if no better, than that of the enemy. At this stage German machines were superior to ours in the air. The German tanks out-armoured ours. We had no answer to the formidable 88mm guns of the Germans, which were mounted on tanks or operated as selfpropelled artillery pieces. Our own gunners operating 25-pounders, deserve medals for the stands they took everywhere, and so do our airmen who, against great odds, resisted the enemy so gallantly and fearlessly.
Our production centres, mainly in the US, were far, far away from North Africa and supplies took a long, long time to reach us. For us there was Faith, Hope and Charity, these three, but by far the greatest of these, was Faith. Faith never waned that in the long run the production of everything that was required would far outstrip anything that the enemy could produce. Hope tended to fade at times that the long run would be completed in record time. Charity, of course, had fallen a victim to the first shot fired if it had not perished much earlier. Such is war.
Our successes at Bardia and Halfaya were of great importance for conducting the campaign in North Africa. Without minimising its importance to the individual who has but one life to keep or to give regardless of the over-all situation the significance of these battles tended to pale against the background of the depressing situation, which the Allies now had to face.
A new dimension had been added to what had been thus far, essentially a European war. Overnight it had become a World War. On December 7, 1941, Japan had launched her attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, on the Midway and Wake Islands and on the Philippines. The United States and Britain had declared war on the Japanese Empire on December 8. This was followed on the 11th by the US declaring war on Germany and Italy. Our position in North Africa had worsened as a result of this blow. The world was indeed aflame and Roosevelt warned that it would be a long and worldwide war.
On January 2, 1942, when Bardia fell into our hands, Manila, on the other side of the globe had fallen into Japanese hands after they had gained strong footholds on the Philippine Islands. The British had lost Hong Kong on Christmas Day, 1941. While we were re-fitting at Sidi Barrani at the beginning of February, British civilians were being evacuated from the strong naval base at Singapore, which fell to the Japanese on February 15.
On land, on the seas and in the air, the victorious Japanese forces went on the rampage from the frozen north to the steaming forests of the equatorial regions. They pressed on to the mainland of Burma, Indo-China, Thailand and Malaya. They used the smaller islands as stepping- stones for their attacks on Sumatra, Java and New Guinea and had Australia in mind.
Hitler, calculating badly, was delighted that he had now taken on the three major powers of the world. Although he would have preferred Japan to have attacked Russia from the east, he satisfied himself that Japan would deal effectively with the colonial possessions of those mother countries in Western Europe on which he now planted his heel. The commitments of the US and Great Britain were now too far-flung for effective action against Germany.
In February 1942, the time had come for us to move westward from Sidi Barrani. The enemy had been retreating slowly towards the border of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania as a result of the push during November/December 1941. Their forces avoided strong stands and decisive battles. Our supply lines were stretched over long distances. Those of the enemy became relatively shorter.
In an article written in German by Rommel in the Italian magazine 'Tempo' of July 1942, he refers to this withdrawal as resulting in "building up the swift power of a compressed spring". According to him, this spring was released on January 21, 1942, with sufficient thrust to throw the enemy back from the shores of the Gulf of Sirte, on to the Cyrenaican Plateau as far back as Gazala.
Poppies between Tobruk and Gazala
The story now links up with the portion related earlier up to this point in time.
I translated this article by Rommel and have kept it. I shall refer to it again.
View of the desert escarpment
We moved to Acroma to the south-west of Tobruk, outside the defensive perimeter, which formed a semi-circle from coast to coast at a radius of approximately ten miles from Tobruk. At Acroma a strong point had to be established on the Axis road, which was constructed by the Axis powers to bypass Tobruk when the Australians held it.
Signposting in the desert - outside Acroma
To reach Tobruk from Acroma we had to join the tarred road running parallel to the coast from Gazala to Tobruk. There was a straight stretch on this road known as Messerschmitt Alley. The pilots of these planes took a devilish delight in sweeping down on the many vehicles, which had to use this road, spraying everything on it with machine gun bullets from one end to the other. None of our vehicles was without its aircraft spotter, sitting on the hood or canopy to scan the skies and to warn against approaching aircraft. Invariably they were spotted barely in time for the driver to turn his vehicle off the road while he and everybody else dived headlong away from it. It was not funny but the airmen must have laughed to see such fun like the little dog did when the cow jumped over the moon and the dish ran away with the spoon.
Journey's end
On May 18 we moved inside the Tobruk perimeter to occupy the western portion adjoining the sea. At that stage there was much talk that a combined land, sea and air attack could be expected on Tobruk from that side. The narrow beaches between the cliffs and the sea and all inlets, were heavily mined. For the rest we occupied and strengthened existing defensive positions - and waited.
To give an indication of the buildup in the area, which the Eighth Army now occupied, I shall refer to Rommel's article that I mentioned. I found it illuminating in that it gave the enemy's point of view. Allowing for over-dramatisation to establish all the better how gloriously the Axis forces acquitted themselves of their tasks, it nevertheless seems to me that his description could be correct in the main. His account confirms much of what our own people related. His sketch maps, which I simplified, illustrate the position still further.
His article mentions the various units that took part. His operational movement started at El Agheila. his usual retreat, on May 21, 1942, three days after we had taken up our positions in Tobruk. Rommel asserts that his organisational plans were not quite ready when he attacked, facing a mid-summer campaign in scorching heat when temperatures reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit at times. He had not fully restored the Benghazi harbour, which was destroyed by the Eighth Army during their November/December push. He had hoped for his supplies to come more directly through Benghazi rather than through Tripoli and then over hundreds of miles of desert roads. He did not like the enemy buildup in front of his Gazala positions. He was going to strike first. In his report about the enemy positions, he states: "The enemy had established itself in a vast entrenched camp to the west of Tobruk with a first line of defence stretching from Gazala to Bir Hachiem. This line bristled with every obstacle including vast minefields and formed a defensive system with the triangle Tobruk, Acroma and El Adem, together with another line of defence from El Adem to Bir El Gobi. In this labyrinth of field works, trenches, minefields strong points, anti-tank ditches and wire entanglements, lay the troops of the British Eighth Army preparing for their revenge." He says, "In the first defensive line there remained a break between Bir Hachiem and Bir El Gobi which could be exploited by our armoured units by penetrating into the enemy zone and giving battle. Only after annihilating the enemy armoured forces would it be possible to look to wider horizons."
His plan was as follows:
"These plans", says Rommel, "placed our supply lines in an extremely precarious position because they offered the enemy the possibility of cutting them by using armoured cars and tanks throughout their length. The foreseeable loss of some supply columns could not affect our will to win and our certainty of victory. In any case a rapid development of the operation would soon create the necessary conditions of security to obtain adequate supplies of ammunition, fuel, food and water."
He then describes the first phase of the attack which was launched on May 26, and was aimed at achieving points 1 and 2 of the plan, to attack the Gazala - Bir Hachiem line and at the same time to move rapidly round the south of Bir Hachiem and to penetrate by surprise the gap left between Bir Hachiem and Bir El Gobi into the fortified enemy positions.
"In exactly twelve hours", Rommel says, "after having had numerous bloody encounters with British armoured units, our forces crossed the Trig Capuzzo towards the north to isolate the intricate enemy labyrinth." A little later his units crossed the El Adem crossroads and arrived at the southern and western forts of Acroma.
Rommel continues, "The enemy armoured units, surprised and bewildered, attempted during the night to offer obstinate resistance here and there but withdrew to the east. Then, recovering from their surprise they attempted uncoordinated attacks in various sectors which were repelled with heavy losses to the enemy."
In Tobruk we knew of the attack, which had started on the 26th. To learn on the 27th that enemy tanks had crossed the Trig Capuzzo and were advancing on El Adem, appeared quite impossible but for the fact that the gunfire which could be heard in the distance could not be explained unless these reports were true.
To achieve objective number 3 of the plan was the most difficult namely to destroy the armour of the Eighth Army and to deprive it of large-scale operations and to clear up the bypassed positions in the Gazala and Bir Hachiem areas.
In this area of approximately 30 to 40 miles, tens of thousands of troops, operated thousands upon thousands of war machines in the form of troop carriers, armoured cars, artillery and tanks all bent on causing as much death and destruction as possible in the shortest possible time. No wonder it became known as the "Devil's Cauldron". In this comparatively limited and featureless area, fast-moving forces on both sides could scarcely manoeuvre out of sight of each other unless obscured by darkness or dust storms or smoke screens, all of which often created more confusion than opportunities for orderly re-grouping.
The story of attacks and counter-attacks; of withdrawals and advances; of milling and whirling; of victories and defeats; of daring exploits amidst choking heat and dust; of hunger and thirst; of utter exhaustion and suffering; of death and destruction which characterised the battles in this desolate region will never be known. There was only one consolation. There were no defenceless women and children, no long lines of refugees seeking refuge where it was not to be found. I was always thankful for not having to witness in the desert, this ghastly aspect of war.
During the night of June 10 and 11, resistance ended at Bir Hachiem after the Free French could hold out no longer. Their supplies had been cut off and there was no hope of sending assistance to them. The Axis forces intensified their attacks on pockets of resistance remaining in this defensive line. They needed the use of the coastal road for supplies if they were to hold what they had gained thus far. Our forces had to deny them this road. The Gazala forces had to hold their positions. Attempts were hastily made to establish a west to east defensive line to the south of the coastal road to keep it open for supplies to be sent to Gazala. Some of the fiercest battles developed but by the middle of June this coast road was under continuous enemy shellfire. The position at Gazala became untenable. An orderly withdrawal was ordered but the situation had deteriorated to beyond this possibility. The withdrawal resulted in what became unflatteringly known as "The Gazala Gallop". These troops had to withdraw through the Tobruk garrison entering through a narrow gap in the perimeter. It resulted in a traffic snarl-up unprecedented in desert warfare where space is usually not at a premium. Enemy air forces were at this stage preparing for the attack on Tobruk or they could have had a field day at this bottleneck. The outside protective shield of Tobruk was alarmingly shattered by this withdrawal from Gazala.
Rommel says: "The 17th, 18th and 19th June were spent in preparing to invade the fortress of Tobruk and the air bases, which were now too far back, were also moved forward. The units inside Tobruk were gradually deprived of communications with the outside world".
At this stage I wrote a letter to my wife. It must have left Tobruk with the very last batch of overland communications, which reached the outside world. I said, more or less, what Churchill was soon to say to the world the day before the attack started. He said he had been assured that the defences were good, he believed the garrison was adequate and that ample supplies were available for the troops. Why should I have told my wife what many of us felt at the time? We gathered round the radio to listen to this announcement. We looked at each other in silence, but for an explosive remark of somebody: "Balls!" he said.
Many of us knew that numerous mines had been lifted outside the Tobruk perimeter for use in the Gazala area. There were few anti-tank· guns and 25pounders along the perimeter. We also knew that not much assistance could be expected from our bombers, which had been withdrawn to more secure positions after they had played their part in the more open operations in the Devil's Cauldron. In the meantime the enemy air force had been brought forward and was operating from a stone's throw away, at El Adem. Rommel remarks in his article that his air force enjoyed complete freedom of action. We knew it would be extremely difficult to withstand a combined air, tank and artillery attack on the Fortress.
We had been accustomed to hearing all sorts of rumours about the intention of High Command in connection with Tobruk. We heard that Tobruk would be held. The forces there, were in ever so much better a position to do so than when it was held on a previous occasion, by the Australians. Then again it was rumoured that Tobruk would not be held. It had been far too costly an undertaking to supply the Tobruk garrison on the first occasion. It would not be attempted again. It was speculated that in his eagerness to push on, Rommel would bypass Tobruk. This would stretch his lines of communication, which would then be attacked by fresh British troops from the southeast to link up with Tobruk. Rommel would be in the bag.
Although Rommel's forces did pursue the retreating Eighth Army towards the Egyptian border, Rommel did not act as anticipated. He was not going to leave Tobruk as a thorn in his side and therefore, so the rumour went, Tobruk would not be held as a fortress. The Tobruk forces would have to fight their way out to establish this linkup.
If there was ever an "order" to this effect, it never reached us. In any case it would have had to be a coordinated effort. We had no knowledge of such a plan. Any attempt to escape from Tobruk under such circumstances would therefore have been nothing less than desertion. We only knew Tobruk had to be held.
Enemy planes had been bombing the area for some days as a preliminary to the attack. They were now operating from El Adem. They came in droves. When every anti-aircraft gun was silenced, they proceeded with impunity to harass and eventually to stop practically all movement of troops and vehicles inside the perimeter. It was not long before enemy artillery had moved to within shelling range of the perimeter, thus adding to the softening-up process.
First phase of Rommel's plan of attack on Tobruk
According to Rommel's account, his operations were commenced at 05,30 hours on Saturday June 20, by launching a massive air attack which enabled his engineers to slope the tank ditches for the armoured units to break through. Simultaneously his forces "engaged the whole of the defences in the western sector in artillery action using harassing artillery fire to assist the attacking column. The enemy reacted violently but locally. There was a lack of combined action between the artillery and the infantry. We gained the impression that single units were fighting tenaciously but that the enemy command did not guide and did not coordinate the battle."
Rommel's attack on Tobruk
By 11,00 hours the breakthrough had developed to such an extent that the penetrating forces could undertake a two-pronged attack, one striking directly towards Tobruk; the other swinging westwards to the rear of our defensive positions. By this time a dark pall of smoke was hanging over the whole of the eastern and south-eastern sectors. It gradually spread over the whole area obscuring the sun. I remember distinctly that by 15,00 hours, I gained the impression that the sun had already sunk low in the heavens. It was only much later that I recalled that the day to f01l0w was the longest day in the northern hemisphere. The dark sky provided ominous proof that numerous vehicles and large quantities of equipment and supplies were going up in smoke.
By nightfall, the depressing situation was that several forts and strong points inside the perimeter as well as the town itself were already in enemy hands. Numerous fires were burning. The glow showing through the haze of smoke, made the sky look reddish-purple, dirt-splashed and bloodstained. It was an ugly sight, spelling doom. Loud explosions from time to time, confirmed that ammunition dumps were falling prey to the large-scale destruction, which was going on all round - partly because of enemy shelling and partly because our own troops were preventing supplies from falling into enemy hands.
Desperate attempts on our part, under cover of darkness, were being made to establish a defensive line between Tobruk and such sectors that had been bombed and shelled but had not been over-run by tanks. It was a night of frantic but largely ineffective activity. Enemy patrols were active in order to gain information they might require for the following day.
Rommel says: "The battle was resumed at dawn on Sunday June 21, and at 07,00 hours an enemy envoy had presented himself to propose negotiations for surrender. But negotiations were not conceded, as events were moving too fast. At 09,00 hours, 21 Corps (which had been engaging the southern and western sectors) was ordered to suspend fire because it was too dangerous for our armoured columns, which were advancing inside the perimeter to the west. Tobruk had fallen. In little more than 24 hours, the enemy had lost the African Sevastopol .. "
Rommel was referring to something that had not yet happened when Tobruk fell but which was to happen ten days later on July 1, when Sevastopol, held by the Russians, fell to the Germans. By the time he wrote this article, it had fallen, enabling him to make this dramatic statement.
He did not know, of course, that by that time he was heading straight for his Waterloo. He did not know that El Alamein on October 23, in that year would be followed by Stalingrad, three months later, on January 30, 1943, and that these two events would lead in due course to both Tobruk and Sevastopol being retaken from the Germans. We did not know these things either and that was where the rub lay.
News of the surrender reached us at about 09,00 hours. What indescribable consternation, what confusion in the minds of men, what disillusionments, what a colossal disaster. Men refused to admit that they had surrendered. I saw a brawny warrant officer in charge of an armoured car unit. His eyes were filled with tears. However, in case it was binding on us as well, the men went berserk. Not a single item of equipment that might be of use to the enemy would fall into their hands. The few vehicles we had, were driven to the edge of the cliffs, set alight and pushed over where they careered down into the sea below. We held on to our rifles until German armoured cars came roaring in our direction with machine guns pointed at us. This was the signal for the men to decide that not even their rifles would fall into enemy hands. We smashed machine guns, rifles and revolvers.
A German NCO jumped off the front armoured car, shouting: Achtung! Nicht brennen. We were to pay attention and to stop burning equipment. There were curses and backchat, but not quite audible to our captors. Machine guns were trained on us and these fellows looked decidedly trigger-happy. "Oh, go to hell." they mumbled, "What would you have done?" There were unprintable explosions, not all of them directed at the Germans either. They were directed at some nebulous figures, unnamed blunderers high up on the military ladder in Cairo or elsewhere, who were responsible for this disaster.
The fall of Tobruk - "a dark pall of smoke
... obscuring the sun"
What shall one say about the debacle that was Tobruk? For those who had to bear the brunt of the attack it was all finished in the short space of a few hours. The severity of the onslaught could not be withstood by any means at their disposal. Our own people could confirm Rommel's observation that there was a lack of combined action between the artillery and the infantry. Who was responsible?
For those of us on the western and south-western sectors who were less directly engaged in the attack, it was a series of depressing experiences. It was largely a matter of waiting and watching while events were taking place which left no doubt about what was coming our way, inescapably. We were subjected to continuous bombing attacks for days and nights even before the attack started. Lack of sleep and exhaustion were beginning to have their dazing effects. When the attack did start, bombing was intensified. Shelling was now added to increase our discomfort and dismay. Infantry units had no means of counteracting attacks of this nature. The enemy remained un-get-at-able while we became more and more vulnerable as the attack developed. Attempts to strengthen existing defensive positions were largely exercises in futility and the men knew it. For one thing, they were facing the wrong way once the perimeter had been breached, allowing the enemy to operate behind our lines - a disconcerting experience.
That the position was deteriorating rapidly became only too evident. All too evident, also, was the fact that no counter-measures likely to be taken, even if they were laid by those in command, could alter the desperate position in which we found ourselves. And yet, the thought of surrender entered nobody's mind, excepting perhaps the minds of those who had to consider what next to do when there appeared to be so little left to do next. Bewilderment reigned supreme.
We were allowed to take with us what we had near at hand, a few odds and ends in a valise. It was midsummer and we were scantily dressed. At the last minute some of us managed to grab our overcoats. It seemed a silly thing to do at nearly high noon on a summer's day but we knew of temperature changes between day and night and we did not know what was in store for us.
We were told to start walking towards the ruined barracks in Tobruk. An armoured car followed us. Numerous other columns of prisoners of war were converging on the town. Yes, prisoners of war we were. It is a strange thing that one expects many things to happen to one in time of war and more or less prepares oneself for them, but the likelihood of being captured in a mass like this, does not seem to enter one's mind. That is something that happens to others. It smacks of action by panic-stricken men. It is what people with shattered morale might do, but neither criterion applied to us.
Fear gripped me; fear of the unknown; fear of what life, as a prisoner would be like. It gripped me like no fear of anything else in other situations had ever gripped me. It made me breathless like when we had to run with gasmasks on while training. Can one experience claustrophobia in the open? Can the mere thought of being a prisoner of war, of not being free, of being hemmed in, controlled, restricted for an indefinite period, unlike someone sentenced for a definite period, affect one's breathing apparatus to this extent? I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to run away from myself; to run with my arms aloft so that my lungs could expand. I was scared stiff of being a prisoner of war. From time to time down the years I have had nightmares. We were still in prison camps, standing near the gates that would not open. We were doomed inmates for whom no release would ever come. We had long white beards. Happiness was to wake up from these dreams and to recognise them for what they were.
It was here at the barracks in Tobruk that we learned from others that General "Strafer" Gott of the Eighth Army did make an attempt to link up with Tobruk from the south-east. Some believed he might still succeed and here we were, resembling a bunch of half-drowned rats. What were we going to do about it? What indeed, could disarmed people do about it while colossal German tanks were rumbling endlessly by in pursuit of the remnants of the Eighth Army?
If only we could find out about the retreating forces. Would they perhaps be making a stand somewhere? Might our predicament not be of a temporary nature only? But there was no news. We had passed through a barrier, which had suddenly shut us off from our world. Gloom descended on us, for we had not seen much evidence over the past few weeks that the retreating forces would be able to put up effective resistance in the near future.
Rommel's article throws light on what did happen to Gott's column. The attack on Tobruk was already well advanced when it was discovered according to Rommel, that "during the night the enemy had come up from the south of El Adem in a wide movement with a motorised brigade supported by armoured and reconnaissance elements and threatened our line from behind. It thrust to the north-east of El Adem. The Axis road was already under fire from its light artillery. Troops were quickly sent to the south to face the new threat and the artillery made a change of front. For the moment the enemy thrust was in this way held within limits and was not a matter for concern but it could increase and assume dangerous proportions." So much for the link-up about which we heard much but had seen nothing.
Farewell to the desert
This potentially dangerous situation might have spurred Rommel on not to waste any time after the fall of Tobruk. His version of what happened after Tobruk fell, is as follows:
"Our columns did not delay. They were hurriedly moved eastwards. The material scattered over the vast battlefield could be collected later. Only a few men at the stores who had to re-establish the harbour services, remained behind. On the afternoon of June 21, troops were ordered to reach as soon as possible, the area west of Capuzzo and Bardia. Certain units were given the task of surrounding the enemy from the south, thrusting on to Solum and Sidi Barrani.
On the Egyptian border the enemy had established a strong entrenched camp, protected by vast minefields on the Solum heights and on the strong points of our old defensive system at Halfaya. The attack on the new defensive system was already organised for the evening of June 22. It took place the next day but the enemy had extricated itself and withdrew. Vast fires bore testimony of the rout of the remainder of the Eighth Army, which in one month had lost 50 000 prisoners, 1000 tanks, 300 armoured fighting vehicles, 600 guns and 5 000 vehicles."
Right or wrong in minor details? What does it matter? It tells a ghastly tale.
To Churchill, the collapse of Tobruk was a disaster, comparable to the collapse of France.
Oh, the endless arguments about the surrender of Tobruk, but not at this stage. We were too confused. They came later when we were less dazed.
The real protective shield of Tobruk was never located in the defensive positions of the perimeter itself. It was out yonder in the south and south-west, more or less as described by Rommel. It was shattered in the Devil's Cauldron. Some would say that once this had happened, a determined stand at Tobruk would have resulted in near-massacre of the defenders without their being in the position to inflict more than minor damage on the attackers. Tobruk could provide fierce rifle and machinegun fire. It could attack tanks with bayonets, hand grenades and Molotov cocktail bombs, but this was soft stuff. Tanks and guns were needed and there were few left. Some would say it was still worth a trial. Some would ask what there was to be gained. Some would ask whether this was the way to evaluate military exploits. Was it not true that fighting to the last man, to victory or death, has always gone down in the annals of history as the great and glorious thing to do? Monuments to the brave are not erected where mass surrenders had taken place.
Should something have been done before the enemy reached Tobruk? Should thousands of men not have spilled out of the fortress of Tobruk to stop the enemy at Gazala? Numerous speculations about what should or could have been done. I have heard it said that if this, that or the other had been done before the attack on Tobruk was started, then "the sorry story of Tobruk's effete resistance and despicable collapse, may never have been written." Let us leave it at that.
During the afternoon we were taken in batches from the barracks to a large open space outside the town. The Germans had done what they intended doing here. There was more to be done elsewhere and so they were off, leaving Italians to deal with us.
All officers were ordered to get into trucks, which were waiting to take us away. We were given some army biscuits from our own supply stores, which were now in enemy hands. Soon we were on our way westwards to a place, or a map reference point, named Timimi. It was pitch-dark when we arrived there. We were ordered to stay for the night where we were offloaded in open country. Italian and Senussi guards formed almost a solid cordon around us. They seemed to be unduly jittery. We were exhausted and sought to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. What an illusion! Soon there were loud verbal explosions from men all round. There was human excreta everywhere. In the dark it was impossible to find out where or how to lie down. The men were milling round increasing the stench as the muck was carried and spread everywhere they went. Only those more than half dead from exhaustion slept a wink that night. We were at a place in the vicinity of which the Italians had a temporary camp a few days before. This was their latrine area. The guards told us we could not be moved before domani. Unlike at any other time something did happen when domani arrived. Early the next morning we were on our way to Derna. That night we did get some sleep under better conditions, but nothing to eat.
Desert scenes - Farewell to the desert
All I remember about the journey to Derna is the magnificent road leading from the escarpment down to the coast. If the Italians were not particular about sanitation, they were considerably more concerned about road building. The numerous hairpin bends were engineering feats. The ability of the drivers to negotiate these bends was impressive too.
The next day we were once more on our way. We did not ever know where we were going but it turned out to be Barce. We were to be here for a week until June 29, but, of course, prisoners were never told anything in advance. For the first time after a long period, we saw civilians going about their business and staring at the new arrivals in what must have been an established transit camp through which thousands of Italians must have passed over the years.
It was towards the end of our stay here that I became fully conscious of what had happened to us. I couldn't believe it. My first and foremost concern was about my wife's predicament. No channel of communication open, not for her and not for me. One did know vaguely about the Red Cross organisation. They might do something about it but how does that come about and when? If she had received my last letter she would know at this stage that I had barked up the same tree as Churchill had. When would she ever know what had happened to me? She had the harder row to hoe. I had every reason to think that she was at least safe. She knew nothing.
I started to think back. The minutes since that ghastly day in Tobruk had become an hour while we walked to the barracks. The hours had accumulated until we were herded into trucks. Once more the hours mounted up amidst the stench of Timimi. The number of hours had become a full four and twenty while we were on our way to Derna. How many days had I been a prisoner of war? One - two - three and more. The days had become a full week. How long could one last if a week were like this? What if it built up to a full month? What, if the months piled up and up? Could it go on piling up for a year? Could it possibly pile up to two years? For heaven's sake I must pull myself together, stop thinking about it. Has anybody lasted for three years or more? I was going crazy after barely a week.
I heard someone shout: "Grub, you chaps." Barce is situated in a wheat producing area although not on a large scale. The harvest had been gathered. "Grub" for that day consisted of a small loaf of wholewheat bread each, about the size of a cricket ball. I thought it was delicious, wholesome, as good as any doctor could have ordered. I devoured mine, being careful not to drop a single crumb. To my consternation but secret delight, I discovered that many fellows did not share my enthusiasm. In the garbage tins I discovered a number of loaves with only a bite or two out of them. I chased the flies away and retrieved a number of these loaves and stuffed them into my army overcoat pocket and into my valise. They stood me and a few others in good stead. We had a little reserve when hunger started to set in - the shape of things to come. We were to be hungrier yet.
The guards at this camp seemed to me to be typical of Mussolini's concept of Italian soldiers. On one occasion he confessed to his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, that Italian soldiers were capable only of singing and eating icecream. These guards had no icecream but they gathered every night and sang beautifully as far as I could judge, quite contented in the knowledge that they were far away from the Front and not too far from home like those who at one time had to defend Mussolini's East African Empire in Abyssinia. They had not a care in the world. Let the Germans do all the fighting and not even good luck to them.
On June 29, we were told to get ready to move immediately. The gesticulating and shouting Italians made us wonder whether perhaps some miracle had happened to favour us. Perhaps we were on the point of being released from some unknown direction by some phantom army operating in the mysterious desert. Such were the straws to which one clung. We were on our way. Why? Where? After having gone for some hours through not unpleasant country we came over a ridge to see a multitude of aircraft parked on what turned out to be the Benghazi aerodrome. Obviously these planes were ordered to evacuate us to Italy. The operation could not be delayed hence the near panic of the Italian guards. My heart sank. Once across the Mediterranean, no miracle would be able to save us. We were going into perpetual captivity. If we survived to the end of the war, there would be months of wrangling over what to do with prisoners of war.
Benghazi aerodrome - evauation of POWs
We were split into small groups. Into the planes we climbed. They had hard, slatted wooden benches. We did not know what the RAF on Malta might do to us. We took four hours to cross the sea. Not being acquainted with the distance over the sea or the speed at which we were flying, we could not tell whether we took a direct or a roundabout route. We landed at Lecci on the heel of the Italian boot, not far from Brindisi. The armed guard in our plane had turned green soon after takeoff. He discarded his rifle and was violently sick. I often wondered why we did not hi-jack that plane. Perhaps it was not the hijacking season yet. Perhaps we missed the chance of a lifetime.
While we were being transported from the airport to an army barracks in the town, the populace stared at us rather gloomily. Did we remind them of the thousands upon thousands of their own folk in captivity allover the world?
I was aware of my eyes adjusting to the green fields of Italy after having gazed at bleak desert surroundings for just over a year. We left for Bari by train the next day.
We reached the Prisonniers de Guerre, Campo 75 on July 1, 1942. It was the day Sevastopol fell to the Germans but we knew nothing about anything at that time. The camp was situated on the coast near the sea and was surrounded by olive groves. I suppose it could be a pleasant place but this camp was a badly run, disorganised place. The Italians were unprepared for dealing with the influx of prisoners from North Africa. We were fed largely on figs and grapes, which grew in the area. Delicacies they would be under normal circumstances but we received little else to eat. The result was long queues forming at hopelessly inadequate sanitary facilities. It became disquieting but the domani on which matters were to be improved, never came.
Here we learned about tripwires, those strands of wire about a foot above ground, which ran parallel to the main barbed wire fence, some five paces away from It. We were warned that If anybody touched this wire he would be shot dead on the spot. An unfortunate fellow hung his socks on this wire to dry. A triggerhappy guard acted impulsively and shot him dead. This incident caused a commotion. Practically the whole camp demanded to march in procession to the funeral the next day. This would look like an ugly demonstration and the Italians did not know how to deal with the situation. A fairly large representative section of the prisoners was eventually allowed to attend the funeral.
Wholesome food had become something of the past and we were hungry. On one occasion a packet of olives arrived for each room in the bungalow where we slept on three-tiered bunks. Someone counted the olives and divided them amongst the men. There were some left, insufficient for one each. They were thrown up into the air for anybody to catch. The tumble-down from top bunks on to those emerging from lower bunks, was something akin to the behaviour of farmyard fowls when a handful of grain is scattered amongst them. In civilian life these fellows conducted themselves with dignity and self-control in a variety of professions and occupations. Hunger had destroyed all restraint.
A fortnight was long enough at Bari. On July 14, we were moved much further north to Chieti (PG 21). This was a new military camp, which was now to house prisoners of war. There were big bungalows divided into sections for about 40 men each and we had army beds. Not bad. Sanitation? Everything was provided for a water-borne sewerage system but there was either no water supply to which to connect the system or the domani on which it had to be done, once again, never came. There was a well in the middle of the camp where one had to haul up a bucket of water every time a toilet was used. Why should things be made too easy for mere prisoners of war?
We were now in our second month of captivity and we were still alive. As the days and weeks went by, signs of deficiency in our diet or simply of insufficient food, began to tell. Some suffered more than others - people are just made that way. An uncomfortable rash appeared on the faces of some of us. It formed small watery blisters, which prevented us from shaving. The watery fluid knotted our beards. Some started losing weight to an alarming extent.
It was here that the first attempt was made to sort us out for the purpose of informing the Red Cross who and where we were. There was hope that those at home might hear something of what had happened to us. We received lettercards for writing home once a week. You posted your letter into the blue, hoping that by some mysterious means it would eventually reach its destination in spite of the confusion that existed in war-torn countries. We also heard that we might one day expect to receive Red Cross parcels of the nature of which we had no knowledge at that stage.
Communications between the Camp Commandant of the Retaining Power and inmates of the camp were conducted through what was termed the SBO (Senior British Officer) whether the senior officer was British or not, when as in our case, there was a mixture of British and Commonwealth officers.
There was every indication that we would stay in this camp for a considerable time. While we were on the move at frequent intervals the question of adjusting ourselves to a lengthy monotonous existence, did not arise. Now it was upon us. Ways and means had to be devised, individually or jointly, for whiling away the dreary hours of the dreary days of the dreary weeks ahead.
There were the eternally optimistic and the eternally pessimistic amongst us. It was difficult to assess the realism of the situation in a world cut off from the necessary sources of information. We were isolated, forgotten and doomed to an existence in which we had no say and for which we could not plan meaningfully.
There were at least two types of prisoners as far as their attitudes towards food were concerned. One type kept a box or a bag or some kind of container in which he hoarded everything hoard-able for the day when he would get the opportunity to escape or for the evil days, which were sure to befall us, when no food would be provided by our hosts. There was the other type to which I belonged. This type was always ravenously hungry. He could not bear to see even the tiniest morsel go uneaten. It was a complete mystery to him how anybody could save anything to hoard and not die of starvation. Perhaps he had his eye on the hoarded stuff, should the owner eventually have to leave it all behind when he passed away as a result of having hoarded what he should have eaten.
There were three types of conversation going on in the camp apart from discussing rumours of unlimited variety. Sometimes we were very, very hungry. When we were in this state the conversation centred round the wonderful dishes that mother or some aunt used to prepare. If only one could have one of those fresh homemade loaves straight from the oven. Endless reminiscences about food, which was available, often scorned, in days long gone by.
There were times when we were a little less hungry. Then the conversation would get stuck in a groove about sex and its numerous manifestations.
There were times, especially when Red Cross parcels started to arrive, when hunger was eased considerably. When this happened, everybody was a philosopher. There was not an ill in the world for which somebody did not have an infallible cure. Everybody was an intellectual giant expounding his theories. Perhaps this is the order of priority in the struggle for survival. First comes food in order to live, then comes sex in order to reproduce, then comes higher thought processes in order to adjust. It was during one of these periods of intellectual emancipation, of freedom from the grip of gnawing hunger, that we established a university organisation in the camp, the equal of which had never existed. Professors and lecturers we had by the score capable of dealing with every subject in the sciences and the humanities and they were paid not a piaster or a lira. There were students by the hundreds demanding lectures in every subject under the sun, free, gratis and for nothing and these were provided. Never were such complicated timetables drawn up. Anybody who wanted to attend lectures in numerous subjects could do so without finding many clashes, which only occurred because of lack of space on the campus or lack of hours in a day. When the days were fine the lecture venues spread over the whole area. When the weather drove us inside everything was squashed into tiny spaces. One could listen to a lecture on the ships of the sea by turning one's head one way and to one on the ships of the desert by turning one's head the other way.
Rollcalls had to be attended regularly, mornings and evenings, but any amount of additional ones could be sprung on us, disrupting our well-planned lecture periods. The Camp Commandant might be wondering what all these gatherings were about, or if he knew, additional rollcalls would be an ideal way of disturbing our peace, something that prisoners should not be allowed to experience.
Our Commandant got a bee in his bonnet that seeing we were so near Rome, we should be forced to do as the Romans do. We were accustomed to coming to attention at a word of command from someone entitled to give such a command. That was our way. Apparently the Italian way was to jump to attention at the sound of a silly little trumpet blast. This procedure was explained to us at roll call one day. They tried to rehearse it. No response. They tried again. No response. They tried once more. No response. The blood vessels on the faces of some Italians were swelling visibly at witnessing such insubordination. They tried to drive a wedge into our ranks. Would the South Africans do it, if the others wouldn't? Try again. No response. Would the others do it if the South Africans wouldn't? Try again. No response. We sat down on the parade ground. The spectacle was lasting too long. This led to a whole battalion of Italians being marched into the camp with bayonets fixed. "Oh, my word," that Australian of few words who married Mrs Bong in A Town like Alice, would have said. I was sure we would be disembowelled before much longer. Some bright sparks amongst us thought it would improve the marching ability of the Italian battalion if we were to sing a marching song and soon they were marching to the tune of The Wizard of Oz. Oh, so accidentally, one of their soldiers was tripped by one of our men when they marched too close to our ranks. His rifle clattered to the ground. A farcical situation had developed. Fortunately, someone had the sense to march this battalion out of the camp before further incidents occurred. The only outcome was that we received no rations that day. To be a little hungrier than we already were, was not a great hardship.
Prisoners of war are supposed to make life uncomfortable for their hosts. It is a two-edged sword. Both hosts and guests get hurt. Nevertheless, it had to be done. Rollcalls often resulted in disturbing our own comfort but we were supposed to be happy in the knowledge that it also disturbed the comfort and routine of our hosts if we caused trouble at rollcalls. Without our cooperation, roll calls could be chaotic affairs resulting in enraging the Italians. They could do terrible things to us but there were always fears of reprisals. There were many thousands of Italian prisoners in Allied camps. We sometimes stood on parade for many a long hour under nasty weather conditions because we manoeuvred miscounts on parade. The guards would scatter into the bungalows to conduct searches for missing people. By the time they came back the count would be correct or someone had arranged to be counted twice resulting in a surplus - infiltration into the camp without their knowledge. Intolerable.
On one occasion Red Cross parcels arrived in the camp. Our hosts had reason to be particularly annoyed with us. Their childish punishment resulted in this: instead of handing the parcels to our own people to distribute, as was customary, they opened the containers in the parcels and emptied the contents into galvanised baths, resulting in our receiving a monstrous mixture of tea leaves, condensed milk, sugar, coffee, biscuits, cheese and whatever else the parcels contained. There was damn nearly a riot. Our SBO naturally protested appropriately but whether the Red Cross organisation ever heard about it, I do not know.
Cigarettes, or rather the shortage of cigarettes, played an important part in our lives. Being a scarce commodity, like gold, their exchange value was high. The exchange value of cigarettes in terms of items in Red Cross parcels was fixed regularly by a Central Committee in the camp. Anybody trying free bartering which violated the official exchange rate was severely frowned upon. A tin of "Klim" easily fetched the top price in terms of cigarettes. Few were likely to exchange a tin of "Klim" for anything less than 50 cigarettes or more, depending on the supply of these items in the camp.
The effect of lack of cigarettes on various types in the camp could be an interesting study in psychology. The most fortunate was he, who, realising that his cigarette days were over, decided with willpower that could bend iron that he would smoke no more and stuck to it. He suffered but he got over it. The worse type was he, who was a human being only when he had cigarettes. Without cigarettes he turned into a bear with a perpetual sore head, barking and snorting at everybody. Most of us were betwixt and between, suffering all the hardships, which come to the betwixt of the world. We suffered more or less in silence. We did not have the willpower to forget about it, nor the escape valves of the bears with sore heads. Our problems were legion.
An ever-present source of misery in the camp was homesickness but this too had to be suffered more or less in silence. Few liked to bother others or be bothered by others. Anniversary dates connected with one's home and family came round. We had been a week at Bari on the date of the third anniversary of our wedding. My wife might have guessed at that stage that I was a prisoner of war but it still left so much uncertainty. She was no doubt miserable about it and I hated the thought of it. Others knew that their wives were not at all likely to be miserable about it. They hated the thought of that even more.
I seem to remember that it was at some time during our stay at Chieti that the first letters from South Africa arrived and there was one from my wife. The letter, which I posted into the blue had obviously not arrived when she wrote; she made no mention of it. One sensed a new spirit in the camp after the arrival of these letters. I am sure people walked more upright. They turned their faces to the sky. A greeting, "How are you this morning?" could easily evoke the reply, "All the better for your asking" instead of a grumpy, "None the better for your asking." There was much exchange of news from numerous homes and items of general interest were collected and embodied in a newssheet, which started to appear on a central notice board. There was a buoyant spirit in the camp. It provided proof that there were some things in life, which most people will continue to put high up on their scale of values.
We did not stay at Chieti for as long as we thought we might. I have a suspicion that it was suggested in some quarters by one of our hosts that the inmates of this camp should be split up. That silly trumpet-blast incident showed too much solidarity in our ranks. I seem to remember that only South Africans left Chieti on October 17, 1942. Our daughter was soon to have her second birthday.
We were moved by train to Modena, PG 47, still further north. In our history lessons at school about the Unification of Italy, we talked about Modena. I now learned that it was pronounced Módena.
Campo PG 47 - Modena
Inside the main gate to this camp, there appeared a notice saying: "Demurrage no allowed." We puzzled about this until it dawned on us that it might perhaps be "loitering" or "hanging around" that was "no allowed" in this area. There had been an incident of a vehicle coming into the camp to collect refuse tins from the kitchen. At the gate a prisoner managed to attach himself by means of willpower to the belly of the vehicle while others were "demurraging" there. There was always a chance that a vehicle might be parked somewhere to make an escape possible if one could cling leech-like to the vehicle until nightfall. This was the reason for the notice. There were other places in the camp where we were "no allowed".
Language difficulties wherever one goes. I made very little headway with learning Italian. I could not make myself understood. I had less difficulty understanding the Italians because by means of their gesticulations they conveyed a world of meaning.
We did not transfer the university idea from Chieti to Modena. Lectures, talks, gatherings and concerts were still held. Discussion groups, societies and clubs came into being as time went on. The Central Committee to fix exchange rates remained a necessity throughout our existence as prisoners. It was also necessary to form a Central Escape Committee. If it were known who had in mind escaping and how, when and where, much assistance could be given by this committee. Maps of the environment were always being prepared. Efforts were made to determine possible escape routes. Civilian clothing was being tailored in the camp from blankets, hessian, sacking and anything that could be of use. A small quantity of enriched chocolate, which sometimes arrived in parcels, was held in stock for escape purposes.
One such coordinated plan of escape is worth mentioning. From time to time we were allowed to go for walks in a column of four under strict supervision by armed guards. It was quite a pleasant innovation, as officers were not allowed to go out in work parties. Two of our officers were dressed up in civilian clothes made in the camp. Their uniforms were put on, over the civilian outfits. The seams of these uniforms had been undone and put together again by a thread, which could be pulled out allowing the uniform to yield it's component parts to prisoners who were detailed to retrieve them and to hide them under their tunics. At an opportune moment when the column turned a corner, Italian civilians would nonchalantly step out and go on their way. For this purpose a number of tall fellows had to screen the operation from being detected by the guards. It worked like a charm. We were counted when we left camp and again when we returned. Bedlam broke out when it was discovered that we were not all present and correct. No prisoner could throw any light on this mysterious disappearance, nor could the guards. What would the Camp Commandant say and do? Would the guards be shot first for not being alert on duty and then we for using the walk for subversive purposes? We were all searched. The portions of uniform were discovered. Somebody had a list of all the tall fellows who screened the affair. No amount of asserting on his part that it was a list of the members of his basketball team, had any effect.
In due course we were confined to barracks, which meant having to be locked up in a bungalow on the Italian side of the wire for a month. We were to be allowed out for an hour's exercise a day. We were in gaol already so this was not too much of a hardship. During that month some of us improved our chess considerably. Some of the guards were very good at the game. They provided the chess sets. How dared they have fraternised with us in this way? It did not worry them in the least provided they were not caught. Their hearts were no longer in this, for them, a tedious and useless war.
I think it was here that I found Rommel's article on the attack on Tobruk. We heard that something sensational had happened at El Alamein. More of the rumours, which were always flying thick and fast. We could obtain scant information to determine whether they were true or false. The sensational part of the rumour turned out to be, not that the Axis powers had broken through to Cairo. Quite the reverse had happened. Mussolini had apparently been waiting at Derna in North Africa for an opportunity to steal a march on Hitler. He, and not Hitler, would be taking the salute in Cairo at the march-past of the victorious Axis forces. Disappointment and dejection for Mussolini.
Because Hitler had put Rommel in charge of the combined German-Italian forces in North Africa, Mussolini had become even more morose that he had been for some time. Christopher Hibbert in his biography entitled Benito Mussolini describes how long periods of depression were only occasionally broken by short periods of elation. Count Ciano, his Foreign Minister, was finding it increasingly more difficult to cheer him up. During periods of depression, Ciano had to hear from Mussolini that the Italians were a mediocre race of good-for-nothings, only capable of singing and eating icecream. However Mussolini always defended the Italian soldiers against Hitler when the latter showed signs of disapproval of their performances in battle. Mussolini was particularly depressed and annoyed when Hitler bestowed a field marshal's baton on Rommel after the fall of Tobruk. The Italians, after all, had to bear the brunt of British attacks from Malta and the British navy while shipping war supplies to Rommel in North Africa. At such times, Hibbert reports, Mussolini thought the Germans were "uncouth barbarians who were trying to ride rough-shod over Italy for their own ends." The next moment he would admit that "the Italian army was useless, that the Italian Generals, almost to a man, were paralytic and the admirals were worse."
In prisoner of war camps, attempts at tunnelling one's way to freedom, were always going on. They were seldom successful, but they kept some prisoners busy and the Detaining Power on the hop - never quite sure whether they had things under control. The guards would come into our bungalows, tapping their rifle butts on the floor trying to detect hollows under it. If Dr Suess had already written his books in those days and I had known about them, I might have told the guards:
Winter was now approaching. We dreaded the thought because we still only had the clothing in which we were captured on that fateful day in midsummer. In their reaction to cold weather there were different types amongst us. I was of the type that suffered most. I could more easily live far away from frost, snow and ice and severe winters, than with them. My mind conjured up visions of fires, heaters and hearths at the thought of icy winter. I knew that winter, without much in the way of fuel in these climes, would make me as happy, in reverse, as an Eskimo would be at Beit Bridge in midsummer. But there were these Eskimos amongst us. How I envied them their unconcern about ice and snow around them! They turned blue under the showers but not a yell came forth. It couldn't have been all pretence and stoicism. Clearly, we are not all made of the same fibre. Then there was the type who hardly experienced the winter. But for irritating rollcalls and calls of nature, they almost went into hibernation, staying under the bedclothes such as they were. They expended little energy and so, short rations did not disturb them unduly. I had no wish to be like that and did not envy them.
I don't know on what date winter started officially but on that date we received an additional blanket each. Any blanket, which covered the normal-sized Italian soldier, left me naked from the knees down or from the navel up. What there was of it was not meant to provide warmth. It was thin and threadbare and ersatz. Under such circumstances one puts all one's spare clothes on top of the blankets and decides stoically not to move during the night for fear of letting in breezes.
Winter scene outside Modena camp
We kept ourselves clean, or clean to the extent that we seldom had lice. There was something else which kept us clean. It was DDT, the very substance that was taken off the market recently because of its killer qualities. In 1948, Dr Paul Mueller of Switzerland was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering these qualities of DDT. Ever since 1938, potato crops in Switzerland had been dusted with DDT powder to combat the attacks of the Colorado beetle, thus staving off famine and starvation. During World War II it saved millions of people from contracting typhus, malaria and other diseases. We were deloused regularly by having DDT powder puffed up our trouser legs, up our shirt-sleeves and down our necks.
As prisoners we were very much aware of a feeling that the world passed us by. Who and what went by and in what manner remained unknown. You are awake and alive but your world extends no further than the tripwire, the barbed wire entanglements, the fences and the sentry boxes. Of course there are rumours, there are newspaper reports, there are stories brought in by odd prisoners, there are encouraging whispers from our guards. All these reveal almost nothing, for no-one can vouch for their truth.
What is happening in Russia? Are the Germans still in Stalingrad? Where are Rommel's forces in North Africa? Is it true that the Americans have landed in North Africa? Can anybody tell us something about Japan, about the Pacific? What is happening in Sicily and Malta? Is Malta still there? Are the U-boats more active or less active? What about bombing raids on Germany and Italy? What are the chances of an invasion of Italy taking place? When is the Second Front coming? Do Hitler and Mussolini still see each other? Do they still want to see each other? Does anybody, for heaven's sake, know anything? Why does nobody speak, come and tell us? When will it end? Will it ever end?
Near Modena
Christmas 1942, New Year 1943 had approached, had come, had gone and were already forgotten. They meant nothing to us. Then, suddenly, spring was in the air. This is something. The world is not dead. We see little evidence of spring, our view is limited but those trees over yonder were bare and dead, now they are budding and alive. Summer is coming. Something must surely happen this summer. Was this not the time of the year that Rommel chose to move, to strike, to overcome? Who will move, strike and overcome this summer? We knew little of what had happened during the eternity of time, which had elapsed since last it was summer.
But things had been happening all through the winter months, which bridged the years 1942 and 1943. They continued to happen in the spring of 1943 and into the summer, which was now upon us. Within a few months of that dreadful Tobruk day, Rommel's advance into Egypt had been stemmed, partly because of the inability of the Axis powers to provide him with the necessary transport, fuel and equipment; partly because the British navy and the air forces operating from Malta and Egypt destroyed convoys and overland transport columns to a depressing degree for Rommel; partly because the embryo defensive positions, which we helped to create, had now become the bulwark against further advances to Cairo.
A road nearby
To pass the time
Rommel was aware of the buildup of forces behind the EI Alamein defences. On the night of August 30, 1942, he launched an attack on Alam el Haifa using the same tactics as at Gazala by moving southwards in an attempt to bypass the main EI Alamein defences and to penetrate by surprise into the area behind the line. This time he did not succeed and by September 2, he had to withdraw having suffered severe losses.
By this time Rommel was a sick man. General Stumme arrived in North Africa to relieve him. Having briefed Stumme, Rommel left on September 23 for Austria on sick leave. One month later, on October 23, 1942, Montgomery launched the fiercest attack ever witnessed in North Africa. It marked the beginning of the end for the Axis forces. Stumme died from a heart attack on the 24th. Hitler recalled Rommel. He had not recovered but he went back to learn that the position had become untenable.
Rommel thought it would be necessary to withdraw to Fuka, some 40 miles away, to re-group. Michael Carver, in his book El Alamein, tells the story of Rommel's predicament after his return to North Africa: "The Afrika Korps was now down to 35 serviceable tanks and had fired off a great deal of the remaining stock of ammunition." Rommel issued orders for withdrawal of certain units and "reported his decision to Hitler's headquarters (in East Prussia), saying that his army was now exhausted, physically and materially and could no longer expect to prevent a breakthrough, which he saw as inevitable the next day. He could not hope to disengage and would rescue what he could but his shortage both of vehicles and of petrol, severely limited what he could achieve."
In response to this report, Hitler replied: "In the situation in which you find yourself, there can be no other thought but to stand fast, yield not a yard of ground and throw every gun and every man into the battle ... As to your troops you can show them no other road than that to victory or death."
Carver remarks, "In a mood of fatalistic apathy orders for withdrawal were cancelled." That night Rommel sent his ADC Lieutenant Berndt to Hitler "with a message that if Hitler's orders were upheld, the final destruction of the panzer army was a matter of a few days only and that it had already caused immense harm." On the evening of November 4, "Rommel realised clearly that he was in danger of encirclement by an enemy with twenty times as many tanks. There was no longer any point in attempting to obey his Führers orders ... he gave the order ... for the retreat to begin immediately."
About the battle of Alamein Churchill wrote that it could almost be said: Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat. Carver makes this comment: "Almost, is a necessary qualification considering the earlier victories in the desert and Abyssinia."
At about the same time that Rommel had his troubles in North Africa, General Friedrich Paulus of Stalingrad fame was also forced to inform Hitler that unless he could withdraw for about 40 miles to the bend of the Don, the whole of his Sixth Army would be surrounded. Hitler ordered: "No withdrawal." He would recall Field Marshal Fritz von Manstein from the Leningrad sector to advance on Stalingrad with a newly-formed army group. He would assist Paulus to hold Stalingrad at all costs. This was an impossible task. Manstein did not make it. Stalingrad was completely surrounded. There was no hope of a breakthrough to Stalingrad. The position deteriorated disastrously for the Germans during the next few months. General Paulus radioed Hitler on January 30, 1943: "Final collapse cannot be delayed for more than 24 hours." Hitler conferred a field marshal's baton on him by radio. Paulus should know that a German field marshal does not surrender to an enemy. When Paulus had fought to the last man, either killed, wounded or captured, he, being in a state of utter collapse, surrendered. Hitler ranted and raved over having wasted that baton on Paulus.
Disaster, by this time in North Africa where Rommel, for the first time, had to abandon his stronghold at El Agheila and retreat into Tripolitania. Disaster on the southern sector of the Russian front with the fall of Stalingrad.
But events had moved on. On November 7, 1942, the Americans had landed at four points in North Africa, west of Tunisia. The Axis forces withdrew from Tripolitania to Tunisia. They were trapped by the American Second and the British Eighth Armies. At the beginning of May 1943, Tunis and Bizerte had fallen. For several days, until May 12, the Axis forces resisted in the narrow confines of the Bon Peninsula. No Dunkirk for them. Resistance on the African continent had ceased. Mussolini's African Empire was no more. Ten times the number of soldiers taken at Tobruk, nearly a year previously, had surrendered.
Allied air attacks on Pantellaria, Sicily and Sardinia were preludes of worse to come for Italy. On July 20, the Allied forces had established themselves firmly on the Sicilian coast, assisted by British and American warships and an umbrella of strong air support. On July 19, Rome had been bombed. Hitler and Mussolini met in North Italy. What was to be done now? Mussolini was not given much of a chance to consider what to do. The vast majority of Italians, especially those in the south as well as the members of Mussolini's Grand Fascist Council, which he had been ignoring completely, were sick at heart of their deflated Duce and his lost Empire.
On July 25, 1943, King Victor Immanuel III and Marshal Badoglio announced that the Fascist regime of 21 years duration had ended. Mussolini, a prisoner of the new regime, was taken away from the king's palace in an ambulance. Martial Law was declared. The new regime would continue the war. This last piece of news did not bluff Hitler. This was the last thing on which he could rely.
The news about Mussolini caused a near earthquake in our camp and threw it into confusion. Italians thrust their bayonets through Mussolini's portraits and photographs and waved them in the air. But there were still staunch Fascists about. After much running about, shouting and gesticulation, all excitement died down on their side of the wire. Italy was still allied to Germany. All hell would be let loose if the Germans were to hear, as certainly they would, of what had happened. If anything, control of the camp became more severe. The guards were doubled. Somebody had clamped down on their unruly behaviour.
For us, one of the most dismal, frustrating and soul-destroying periods had set in. What were we to do? This must be the beginning of the end. This must be a prelude to armistice and peace. Would we be released soon? Should we wait for that day or add to the confusion by staging a mass escape and damn the consequences? Divided opinions, fierce arguments. Must it be a combined effort? Why should each man not do as he liked?
The end must be in sight and yet, hope alternated with despair; hope that the Allies would soon land in Italy; despair at setbacks they appeared to have suffered according to rumours. Hope that the Germans would retreat and leave us to our fate; despair at the news that Kesselring had formed a new front, which would leave two-thirds of Italy still in German hands. Hope that the Italians might assist the Allies to drive the Germans off Italian soil once and for all; despair at the ability of the Italians to do anything of the sort. Hope that the Italians would block the Alpine passes and sabotage attempts to bring supplies to the Germans; despair when we heard that Rommel was once more on the scene. He would occupy and safeguard Northern Italy while Kesselring held the Allies in the south.
How long would it take the Allies to dislodge the Germans? Six weeks? Impossible. Six months? Possibly. No miracles to save us. The collapse of Mussolini had brought the end not one day nearer. Or had it? Speculations, conjectures, wherever there were two or three gathered together.
The ousting of Mussolini brought back thoughts, which I had had on my mind that day at Halfaya when I observed the difference in attitude between German and Italians prisoners going into captivity. It seemed to me at the time that an explanation of the attitude of apparent unconcern on the part of the Italians could possibly have been that they were experiencing a sense of relief at having been freed from the clutches of their Duce and from further collaboration with the Germans. There were few Italians prepared to fight willingly and tenaciously in support of the grandiose, aggressive and expansionist notions, which had been building up in Mussolini's mind. A deep chasm had developed between the Duce and his people.
Christopher Hibbert writes: "Certainly it was Mussolini's wild arrogance ... and wilful misapprehension of Italy's fundamental necessities that led to his invasion of Abyssinia and thereafter inevitably to his downfall."
When on June 10, 1940, Mussolini announced dramatically that Italy had joined Germany and her victorious armies against the Allies, he had started anew on his path "to conquer" - a path for which Italians were neither militarily prepared nor mentally and emotionally attuned. Ciano recorded in his diary: "I am sad, very sad. The adventure begins. May God help Italy." Despite the wild cheers of young black-shirted Fascists who heard this announcement, Hibbert remarks: "That night in Rome the city was strangely, dreadfully quiet as though sunk in gloom in the knowledge of the miseries to come." They were not long in coming. Mussolini was to suffer humiliation upon humiliation on his path "to conquer".
After the collapse of France, Mussolini knew that Hitler would dictate armistice terms to France without taking much notice of him. Ill-equipped Italian divisions had made no advances while trying to cross into southern France and contributed nothing to assist the Germans. Ciano remarks: "In truth, the Duce fears that the hour of peace is growing near and sees fading once again that unattainable goal of his life: glory on the field of battle." Frustration in his attempts to reach this goal, led to his numerous outbursts against the Italians. This nation which was "soft and unworthy"; this race made "flabby by art"; this "nation of sheep" which "we must keep disciplined and in uniform from morning to night ... beat them and beat them and beat them."
By 1942, when we were rounding up prisoners at Halfaya, Mussolini, according to his Minister of Education, Guiseppe Bottai, "had decayed intellectually and physically". Humiliations, disappointments, defeats had taken their toll.
Seen in this context, Hindenburg's remark that not even Mussolini could make anything but Italians out of Italians does not appear unkind. He at least knew what Mussolini refused to face - militarism was not in the blood of the Italians. Apart from a few, Italy's glory does not stem from the prowess of Italian leaders on the field of battle. Her glory is rooted instead, in the field of peaceful pursuits by a long line of richly endowed Italians who gained international respect and fame for their achievements in literature, the arts and the sciences. They enriched the lives of people the world over. It passed Mussolini by.
And then it happened on September 8, 1943. Peace between the Allies and Italy. It was my wife's birthday. On the 9th, the Germans entered Modena in typical blitzkrieg fashion, which had served them well on numerous occasions in the past. Armoured fighting vehicles careered into town, blazing away to right, left and centre. The occupants of the town were thrown into confusion. In no time the Germans had occupied all government and public buildings and controlled all installations. German troops poured into our camp. They patrolled the fences, entered the sentry boxes, disarmed the Italians. There was sporadic firing all round the camp. Some Italians were obviously trying to escape, some trying to resist.
We were told to be ready to leave at a moment's notice. No, it was not necessary for us to know precisely, when. Nobody need know. That night? The next day? The day after? The following week? No concern of ours.
The heraus order came on September 12. We were marched to the station and almost pushed into cattle trucks in which we had standing room only. I noticed that the SS were in charge of the train. We could hear the truck doors being slammed shut, all up and down the platform: Off we went to Germany. My misgivings at the time when we flown from Benghazi, across the Mediterranean, that we were doomed, were intensified. Things were now getting worse. By midday we were thirsty. The train had stopped somewhere. There was an SS outside our truck and a water tap next to him on the platform. I asked him whether I could go and fill my water bottle or would he fill it for me. I suppose I got what I might have expected - a mouthful of abuse. He told me I was mad. He told me to shake off the sunstroke from which I was suffering, picked up in the desert. He was obviously confused about when we left the desert. Oh, well, my introduction to the SS. Charming fellows.
There was a small Italian boy of about twelve on the platform. He had filled a water bottle for someone in a neighbouring truck. When he returned to the truck, the guard opened the door and flung the little boy into it. The door was shut. Whether the poor little blighter was let out at the next stop or taken to Germany, I do not know. His father and brothers, if he had any, were probably on their way to Germany as well by that time to go and swell the ranks of the foreign labour gangs.
One of the conditions of the Armistice Agreement was that the liberated Italian troops would continue the fight on the Allied side. But the Italians would fight no more. Division after division surrendered to the Germans. The Germans benefited far more from this clause than the Allies. Germany acquired a large labour force. They would use these Italians as labourers. They had not been of much use as reluctant soldiers.
Later that afternoon, we arrived at Verona. We were herded out of the trucks into an enclosed asphalted courtyard at a factory building, three or four stories high.
We were told to do on the spot whatever nature makes come natural. Women and girls peered through the windows overlooking the courtyard. They tittered and giggled. They had not witnessed a spectacle of this nature previously in their lives. Soon after, Italian workmen were told to get busy with hoses and brooms to clean up the mess. We were herded back into the trucks.
I kept a record of the places through which we passed on this Cook's tour of places eagerly frequented by tourists, under entirely different conditions: Reggio, Mantua, Verona, Trento, Bolzana, Brenner Pass, Innsbruck, Munich, but our viewing facilities were limited from cattle trucks. There was a hold up somewhere between Bolzana and a tunnel in the Brenner Pass. Anti-aircraft guns came into action and some bombs were dropped. Conditions were getting most uncomfortable in the truck. We took turns, standing up, sitting down, lying down. The inevitable calls of nature had to be answered as best we could.
We arrived at Innsbruck the next day. Once more we were herded out of the trucks. This time we went to a long trench that had been dug alongside the railway line. We had a good view of the magnificent mountainous surroundings of this popular tourist centre. We almost refused to move from our squatting positions.
While the train was standing on the line some distance from the station, several trains overtook us, packed to capacity with Italians on their way to Germany to supply much-needed labour. One of us swore he saw amongst them the Camp Commandant we had at Chieti, stripped of badges of rank.
We left soon afterwards. We passed beautiful and tidy little villages and clusters of cottages displaying brilliant flowers in their window boxes. Apart from a few chalets high up the slopes of the steep mountainsides, no homes climbed out of the valleys below. The mountains forced them to stay beside the clear waters of the winding streams, shimmering in the sunlight as the waters cascaded into and out of the pools. Was there a war on in this land, which looked so undisturbed, beautiful, tidy and peaceful?
We arrived at Munich. What I could recall about Munich was not very inspiring. I remembered that it was here that the Nazi Party was born; that the Beer Hall Putsch took place here; that it was here that Czechoslovakia was thrown to the wolves. We did not know at the time that the notorious Dachau concentration camp was in this vicinity.
We left almost immediately for Moosberg, not very far from Munich. After 58 hours in those cattle trucks we were glad to be dumped even in a place like Moosberg, an enormous prisoner of war camp. We could at least stretch our legs.
I suppose somebody knew why we were sent to Moosberg and then, within a week, back in the opposite direction all the way to Strasbourg where we arrived on September 21, 1943, having gone via Augsburg, Ulm, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. At Ulm the train stopped on a bridge. I managed to get a good view of this beautiful town. I had a fairly closeup view of its famous cathedral in Gothic style.
At Strasbourg we were taken by truck through a portion of the city where huge banners were stretched across the street, reminding factory workers in bold letters: Die Räder sollen rollen für den Sieg - The Wheels must turn for Victory. We arrived at Fort Bismarck. It was a depressing, dungeon-like place and it stank. We were marched through a gate on to a bridge, which led to the only entrance to the fort. The bridge spanned a moat not many yards wide, with high walls. The floor of the moat was the only space where we could mill around when we were not huddled inside the building. It consisted of a long dark corridor from which one entered small rooms through doorless doorways. The windows had bars across them, befitting a fort or dungeon. Ablution and toilet facilities were dreadful. The civic authorities sent one of those sanitary vehicles with suction appliances from time to time but not nearly often enough. I have recollections that we were fed sauerkraut most of the time. I took a dislike to it.
Fort Bismarck near Strasbourg
The walls of this fort could possibly tell many a tale about the days of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and thereafter, but I was not attuned to a mood for listening to them. Perhaps it became a bombing target after we left. While we were there the area was frequently subjected to air-raids.
I don't know how we survived in that place for eighteen days. On second thoughts, why am I exaggerating? Why am I not being realistic? If the conditions under which we existed, had been several times worse, they would still have been several times better than those in other types of camps - camps in which thousands had already died; in which more thousands were in various stages of collapse; to which still more thousands were destined to be transported to experience the same fate. From what little one could find out about conditions in these camps, one knew enough to feel inclined to say nothing whatever about hardships and discomforts one had to endure. We occasionally saw groups of political prisoners being herded off to some task they had to perform. They wore pyjama-like outfits with vertical black and white stripes. They were easily identified. They moved like automatons. There was no comparison between our conditions and theirs.
Some German prisoners of war who were repatriated by the Americans from North Africa, via Spain, experienced dreadful conditions. A German journalist interviewed them at Barcelona and wrote an article entitled, Glimpses through the Barbed Wire. Oh yes, they experienced some hardships at which the Geneva Convention "would have shaken its head". How bad things were, could be gathered from the fact that while arrangements were being made for their repatriation, they had to be interviewed by none other than American officers of Polish and Jewish descent. The smell of those officers was still in the nostrils of these poor ill-treated but repatriated prisoners of war. To have none other than a German soldier subjected to this treatment was to endure hardship and degradation beyond compare.
But to return to Fort Bismarck. We had officers from the UK with us. There was a Scot who had managed to bring his bagpipes with him. We noticed that our guards were fascinated whenever he played them. This could be exploited. He played another tune. We all congregated around him. The guards congregated there as well, forgetting that if not watched, a prisoner could stand against the wall of the moat. Another could climb on top of his shoulders. They could assist a third to get on top of the shoulders of the second one. He could possibly reach the top, pull himself up and be off, if lucky. This was exactly what happened. When the Scotty had played himself completely breathless, the guards remembered that they were supposed to be on duty. But the bird had flown. He reached England and in due course, someone received a letter from him.
We left Fort Bismarck for Weinsberg (Oflag VA) on October 9, 1943. It is an interesting town near Heilbron. While we were there an article appeared in the press about this town. Occasionally articles did appear in the press that had nothing to do with the war or with propaganda. The article mentioned, inter alia:
"The little town of Weinsberg nestles at the foot of a vine-clad hill, which is crowned by the ruins of an ancient castle. Whether fact or fiction," the article says, "what does it matter? Of all the many stories centreing round the country of Wurtemberg, that of the fidelity of the wives of Weinsberg is the most enchanting."
In the distant past, the town was surrounded by the forces of a certain king. Before he attacked the castle, into which all the inhabitants had moved, he "with kingly grace" granted permission for the wives to take away with them whatever they could carry on their backs. Being more concerned about the loyalty they owed their men-folk, than about saving what was left of their possessions, they left all household articles behind and descended the hill carrying their men-folk on their backs. When the king's brother saw what was happening, he raised an objection. The king, however, replied: "Regum, verbum non decere immutari" Let not a king's word be violated. That there might be an element of truth in the story is suggested by the name of the hill on which the castle stands:
"Weibertreu" - Fidelity of wives. From what else could the name have originated? And the "memorable words" which an historian attributes to the king, "do they not raise the story to the realm of authentic history?"
The hill Weibertreu (the fidelity of wives)
seen from the Weinsberg camp
When we arrived at Weinsberg, we had been prisoners of war for longer than I cared to remember. After all this time, German thoroughness was to ensure that we were individually identified, photographed, numbered, classified, nailed down, pinpointed. Each person was photographed, holding a school slate on which his number was written in chalk. I turned out to be number 2825. We must have had identity numbers in Italy but I can remember no fuss being made about it. I can't remember what mine was.
But this was not all. They did not like the discs, which South Africans wore around their necks. I refer to those, which assumed importance only after you were killed. They had a better system. They had a small rectangular metal plate, perforated along the middle with one's number on each section. When one was found dead, the plate was bent over along the perforated line. It then broke into two parts. One half remained with the dead soldier. The other half was collected for record purposes. This was efficiency, thoroughness and attention to detail. It took a long time to complete all this documentation but we were now well and truly identified. All these procedures indicated to us that we might be here for life, when the purpose of the discs would be fulfilled.
ID card
and dog-tag disc: "German thoroughness ensured
that we were individually photographed, numbered"
Metal tags were perforated and if the person was killed,
then the tag could be split in two with one part staying with the body
There was a large central mess block in this camp to which we went only once a day for our midday meal. It was no use going there more often. There was no food at other times. At this meal we received the cooked food, potatoes, turnips or sauerkraut. The sharing out of food was a palaver. If twenty men had to be served at one table, one person shared out the food on to individual plates as fairly and squarely and honestly as he possibly could. One person was detailed to turn his back to the table. The disher-out then pointed to a plate requesting the looker-away to mention the name of one of the lookers-on to whom it should go. No arguments after that.
The bread was dark, rye-coloured, rather solid and on the sour side but it was bulk. I liked it. The loaves were round, about the size of a normal plate. It varied in thickness from about two inches to one inch, according to the amount the dough had risen or flopped in the baking process. It was not so bad when the loaf could be divided amongst four of us. The Russians, however, had by this time not only curtailed supplies of Rumanian oil but also of wheat from the Ukraine.
The loaf was now for five of us. A template was devised to divide it into five pieces. We had mint tea. I was determined to acquire a taste for it and I did. We took our wedge-shaped portions of bread to our bungalows to look at, to touch, to turn over, to wrap up, to bless and then to eat for our supper.
When we arrived at Weinsberg, we could not help noticing that there was hardly a guard in the camp who was not a victim of frostbite. Portions of their noses, ears and fingers were missing. It rather disfigured them. Judging from the way they hobbled, it was obvious that their feet and toes had not escaped being affected. My sympathies were with them. Nobody will ever get me to Siberia alive. The very thought of having to go there would make me collapse on the spot. It was all a reminder of an earlier period when the fortunes of war had turned into misfortunes for the German army, never to be forgotten by those who experienced them.
On October 3, 1941, almost exactly two years before we arrived at Weinsberg and barely four months after the attack on Russia had started on June 22 1941 when we were in Mareopolis, Hitler had announced to the German people: "I declare today and I declare it without reservation, that the enemy in the east has been struck down and will never rise again ... Behind our troops there already lies a territory twice the size of the German Reich when I came to power in 1933."
Hitler's press chief, Otto Dietrich, told correspondents of leading newspapers of the world in Berlin on October 9, that Marshal Voroshilov's army in the north, Marshal Timoshenko's army in the centre and Marshal Budenny's army in the south, were all on the point of collapse. The world could not believe that it was true: that Hitler's blitzkrieg tactics were once more paying dividends. Hope faded in the west.
Perhaps all this would have come true if Hitler had heeded the warnings of his army commanders at the front, who, from as early as July 1941, started sending in reports to the effect that the Russians were "offering resistance such as the Wehrmacht had not experienced before"; that "the conduct of the Russian troops was of a different kind to that experienced in Poland and France"; that the "strength of the Russian army was under-estimated"; that instead of having to face 200 Russian divisions, "360 had already been identified"; that "everything that had been written about Russia, was nonsense"; that "the T-34 tank of the Russians was so heavily armoured, that shells from the German anti-tank guns, bounced harmlessly off them"; that "fresh Soviet fighter planes kept appearing, like the fresh divisions, out of nowhere"; that the invasion of Russia by Germany had caused no political upheaval in Russia. Hitler's prediction that "we only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down" was proving completely false.
The field marshals and generals of the Wehrmacht advised a concentrated attack on Moscow before the winter came. For that purpose, armoured units from the northern and southern sectors would have to be diverted to the central sector. Hitler would have nothing to do with these suggestions. Those who pressed too hard were dismissed. The drives on Leningrad and Stalingrad had to continue. When at last he reluctantly and half-heartedly agreed to the sending of some armour to the central sector, it was too late. By that time half-a-million Russian troops had massed in front of Moscow.
Yet the drive towards Moscow succeeded remarkably, resulting in numerous Russian losses. By October 20, it seemed that Hitler's predictions of October 3, were coming true. German armoured units were within 40 miles of Moscow. The Russian government and foreign embassies were moved to Kubishev, 500 miles to the east. The West trembled.
Then the autumn rains came, turning roads and countryside into mud into which vehicles sank to their axles. Supplies were interrupted by partisans operating behind German lines. Russian resistance stiffened. Winter was at hand but no winter clothing arrived. The German army was on the same road at about the same time of the year as Napoleon's Grand Army in 1812.
Soon after Hitler made his speech on October 3, snow began to fall in the vicinity of Moscow. By mid November temperatures had dropped to below zero. Winter had set in early that year and it was to be a winter of particular severity. The German armies were trapped in the vast snow- and ice-bound inhospitable interior of Russia, ill equipped to face subzero temperatures. Fuel and lubricants in vehicles, tanks and aircraft, ceased to perform their usual functions. By contrast, fresh Russian troops, well fed, warmly clad, fully equipped for winter warfare, appeared on the scene. Nevertheless, Hitler, studying his maps at his headquarters in East Prussia, could say: "German troops, north, south and west of Moscow were within 20 and 30 miles of Moscow".
The final heave was to take place on December 1. Alas, every German commander on the spot knew there could be no final heave. They could drive their men no further. General Georgi Zhukov, who had replaced Marshal Timoshenko, struck at the German armies with both seasoned and fresh troops. For the rest of December and into January, fighting continued until the spires of the Kremlin were from 70 to 100 miles out of sight. Shirer writes:
"Perhaps it was Hitler's granite will and determination and certainly it was the fortitude of the German soldier that saved the armies of the Third Reich from a complete debacle. But Moscow had not been taken nor Leningrad nor Stalingrad nor the airfields of the Caucasus."
Germany had lost more than a million men - killed, wounded, captured, frostbitten, missing.
And here at Weinsberg, two years after that fearsome experience, we had as our guards some of the 112 000 men who had suffered severe frostbite during that period. But Hitler had already planned the summer campaign against Russia, which led in the winter of that year, 1942, to the disaster at Stalingrad, which was mentioned previously.
Scene from Weinsberg camp
In planning the summer campaign of 1942, Hitler once more took no notice of the advice of his army commanders. Once more he was trying to bite off more than he could chew. Gone were the days when his political manoeuvres and propaganda stunts produced spectacular results against nations incapable of withstanding Germany's military might. Now the situation had changed. The principles of strategy and operations based on objective and realistic reports from Army Intelligence sources were what mattered now. He was planning to drive his armies in two directions. One was towards Stalingrad on the Volga River, from where he hoped to attack Moscow from both the front and the rear. The other was towards the Caucasus and the Grozny oil fields. These drives would provide Germany with the food, the industrial resources and the oil, which she so badly needed. But Russia needed these commodities as badly and was preparing to prevent Germany from reaching these goals.
All the information which General Franz Halder, Hitler's highly intelligent General Staff Chief, had at his disposal, was to the effect that these plans, if attempted, would lead to complete failure. Hitler dismissed Halder from his post for supporting such "idiotic twaddle". He was, of course, in the habit of dismissing Wehrmacht generals who had the impertinence to attempt to advise him. He told Halder: "We need National Socialist ardour now, not professional ability," Halder commented on a later occasion: "So spoke, not a responsible warlord, but a political fanatic."
Once again, because of the prowess and fortitude of German soldiers, initial successes were amazing but in the end armoured units driving towards the Grozny oil fields to within a hundred miles of the Caspian, Sea, had to be diverted to stem the Russian onslaught after the fall of Stalingrad. Stalingrad was lost and the Grozny oil fields were not reached. Another winter had caught the German armies preventing them from reaching the objectives set by Hitler.
There was to be another summer offensive in 1943, the one that preceded our arrival at Weinsberg in the autumn of 1943. Shirer writes: "On July 5, 1943 he (Hitler) had launched what was to prove his last great offensive of the war against the Russians. The flower of the German army - some 500 000 men with no less than 17 panzer divisions, outfitted with the new heavy Tiger tanks - was hurled against a large Russian salient west of Kursk." Hitler believed, "it would not only entrap the best of the Russian armies, one million strong - the very forces which had driven the Germans from Stalingrad and the Don, the winter before - but enable him to push back to the Don and perhaps even to the Volga and swing up from the south-east to capture Moscow."
Again Hitler's dreams did not come true. This time there was not even a spectacular initial success. In a matter of three weeks, half their tanks were lost. In quick succession the Germans were driven out of Kursk, Orel and Kharkov. The Russians were attacking on the whole of the Eastern front. Smolensk was lost on September 25, the key city, which had fallen in German hands so soon after the attack in 1941.
"In the first week of October," writes Shirer, "the Russians crossed the Dnieper, north and south-east of Kiev, which fell on November 6. By the end of the fateful year of 1943, the Soviet armies in the south were approaching the Polish and Rumanian frontiers, past the battlefields where the soldiers of Hitler had achieved their early victories in the summer of 1941 as they romped towards the interior of the Russian land."
The further the Russians advanced towards the borders of Germany, the more field marshals and generals of the Wehrmacht were to be dismissed for daring to advocate withdrawals and tactics which clashed with Hitler's orders to stand firm at all costs. Thus, Field Marshal Fritz von Manstein had to go. With Hitler it counted for nothing that he masterminded the attack on France through the Ardennes, which had such a devastating effect on France; that he was successful in capturing the Soviet naval base at Sevastopol on July 1, 1942; that he stabilised the German army after their disastrous defeat at Stalingrad.
This was the position on the Eastern front when the winter of 1943/44, came round. At Weinsberg it seemed to me that this winter was severe enough, although from all records not nearly as severe as the winter of 1941/42 had been. It was certainly the first time I had experienced temperatures remaining far below zero for days and weeks on end. We were inadequately fed and clad for such conditions and we had very little fuel. Strips of wood serving as bed boards were being used for firewood, which only added to one's discomfort when it came to sleeping on the few strips, which remained. I had never seen dust arising from ice. While we walked briskly up and down the camp to get warm, little puffs of ice-dust rising from the surface would settle on our boots. What little perspiration one's socks absorbed as a result of the walk, would freeze as soon as one stopped walking. We suffered from chilblains. One could not sleep at night unless from utter exhaustion after this had gone on for days and days. I sympathised all the more with those who had suffered far more from frostbite.
What was happening on the Southern Front in Italy? The Allies appeared to us to be moving up the boot of Italy at a snail's pace. But who were we to be critical?
1943, 1944 ... when would it end?
We did hear on one occasion that Mussolini had been rescued from the Italians. He had been moved from one locality to another ever since the day when the King and Badoglio had him arrested on July 25, 1943. We knew little about Mussolini's fate. Hitler was determined to get him back. One of "Himmler's resourceful SS intellectual roughnecks, an Austrian by the name of Otto Skorzeny" was selected by Hitler almost immediately after Mussolini's arrest to search for him and to bring him back alive. In September 1943, Skorzeny discovered that Mussolini was kept prisoner on top of the Gran Sasso d'ftalia, the highest range in the Abruzzi Appenines, which could only be reached by a funicular railway. This meant something to us. From our camp at Chieti we had a good view of the peaks of these mountains. On September 13, the day after we left Modena for Germany, Skorzeny and his men landed at the hotel in gliders and scattered the Italians without firing a shot. A small Fieseler-Storch plane was all that could land there and into it climbed Skorzeny and Mussolini. The pilot nearly had a fit at the thought of taking off with such a load but he managed to become airborne just in time to prevent the creaking little plane from going over a precipice.
Mussolini was rescued to serve Hitler's purpose although it must be admitted that Hitler was, and always remained, strangely attached to "his old friend" even when Italian troops were a great disappointment to him.
Hitler persuaded Mussolini, much against his will, to establish a pro-Fascist government in Northern Italy. It was a farce but it had propaganda value in that Mussolini was restored to power by Hitler. The fire had been dying down in Mussolini's soul over the past months and years, even before he was overthrown in Rome. There was no spark left now to kindle enthusiasm for the Fascist cause. Moreover, he knew he was now only a tool in Hitler's hands. He was under constant surveillance of 88 troops because the likelihood of his being recaptured by the anti-Fascist elements was ever present.
Hitler and Goebbels brought pressure to bear on him from the start to bring his conspirators to book, including his son-in-law Count Ciano who was now in Germany with his wife Edda. A special tribunal was appointed. Only five of the conspirators, of which one was acquitted, appeared in court with Ciano. The other thirteen had either escaped from Italy or were hiding somewhere in the south. They were nevertheless, condemned to death. At Verona, on January 11, 1944, so says Christopher Hibbert in his biography of Mussolini, "the five victims were tied in a row to school chairs and shot in the back".
When Berlin was first bombed by the RAF way back in August 1941, it did not amount to much. Hitler had promised an audience consisting mainly of women who were perturbed at what was happening, that when the RAF dropped two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs on German cities, the Luftwaffe would increase their bomb loads for English cities a hundredfold. They screamed approval and delight at this assurance.
When we arrived at Weinsberg more than three years had passed since that announcement was made. It was now a common occurrence for a thousand bombers to drop thousand-pound bombs on German cities. American bombers operated by day and the RAF by night. We would stand watching squadron upon squadron of bombers appearing on the far horizon. Then more and still more would appear to the left and to the right. They would approach ominously and awe-inspiringly until the distant drone became a thundering roar overhead. Vapour trails from accompanying fighter planes would weave fantastic patterns in the sky. The sun shone feebly through an artificially created, mist-like atmosphere. The targets would be nearby cities, Stuttgart, Heilbron, Manheim, Karlsruhe or further afield. When the bombs had been dropped and the all-clear had sounded, one could well imagine what destruction such onslaughts must have caused.
Even before we arrived at Weinsberg, during the summer of 1943, the Allies had stepped up their bombing of German cities. During that summer of 1943, Goebbels had found it increasingly difficult to explain the disasters, which were being brought home to the German people. News from the war fronts was bad but those disasters were far removed from the home front. Air-raids, on the other hand, brought the war to their doorsteps as it had brought the war close to the inhabitants of cities in England when the Germans had had the advantage in the air. Goebbels became disturbed about the distressing situations that were caused by the bombing, leading to "serious consequences which in the long run wIll prove unbearable", he wrote. Reports from Dortmund indicated, "some eighty to a hundred thousand inhabitants without shelter ... The people in the west are gradually beginning to lose courage. Hell, like this, is hard to bear." A heavy raid on Hamburg was a real catastrophe. "There were some 800 000 homeless people who were wandering up and down the streets not knowing what to do."
For how long would these cities hold out? For how long could people withstand so much death and destruction? It went on and on. Could Hitler hold out on all fronts, including the home front, to victory or to death?
Weinsberg late autumn 1943
It was a great relief to Goebbels when he could make much of promises that soon the Germans would have secret weapons of vengeance (vergeltungswaffen) with which the cities of England would be flattened. He was referring to the V1 bombs and the V2 rockets and to the jet fighters, which the Germans were to produce. The Allies discovered where tests and experiments were being carried out. Devastating air-raids on Peenemunde in August 1943 upset and retarded not only the tests but also production programmes. The V1 and V2 weapons did not start operating until the Second Front was opened and by that time numerous launching sites, which had been prepared in advance on the Channel, had been destroyed from the air. Jet fighters would have a greater menace. The Germans were ahead of the Allies in this field of research, but the production of these was also halted because of the continuous bombing raids.
Christmas card sent home 1943
back of card
Of course, air warfare and the bombing of cities brought in its wake the necessity for evacuating children from the big cities. It called for new types of organisation. In the vicinity of Weinsberg there were many children living in "estate" premises and other buildings scattered in the woods. We often saw them when we went for walks, as we did in Italy. In addition there were air-raid shelters in towns. I frequently saw through the barbed wire fence of the camp, a little boy of about twelve years, running hand-in-hand with his little sister, younger than himself, towards a shelter nearby whenever the sirens started to wail. They were never accompanied by adults and I often wondered who looked after them. They knew the routine. They were often fascinated by the multitude of aircraft above and would halt and linger and stare. Then they would run again, all the faster. After the all-clear had sounded, they would amble back past the camp. On one occasion I threw a small slab of chocolate over the fence to them. A guard saw me. He was furious. I turned back. I was sure he would shoot me if I offered him a slab too.
It came over the air with monotonous regularity: Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt - The High Command of the Armed Forces announces ... and then would follow the news items which Goebbels thought fit to make known to the German people and to others elsewhere who cared to know his version of what was happening. We could not put this loudspeaker out of action. It was mounted on a high post inside the camp.
Somewhere in our camp some of our men had constructed a radio set on which the BBC news could be obtained. Its locality was a closely guarded secret. This news was disseminated by word of mouth to each of the bungalows while some of us kept guard outside to give warning of any guards in the vicinity.
It was disturbing in the camp to experience a feeling that there might be stooges and informers amongst us. From time to time we were puzzled by actions on the part of our hosts that did create the impression that someone had conveyed secret information to them. It was an unwholesome state of affairs. Or were some of our bungalows bugged? We became particularly suspicious when a lone prisoner was brought into the camp, usually an airman. Was he genuine or was he a well-briefed enemy agent planted on us?
Groups of Gestapo would on occasions enter our camp unannounced. We would be ordered to leave our bungalows while they entered to make a thorough search of our possessions. They generously allowed one from each bungalow to accompany them. I had laboriously made a quilt for myself out of two blankets expertly sewn together and stitched through at appropriate intervals to hold the wood-wool in place, which I had collected over a long period from Red Cross parcels. A masterpiece in stitch craft. When I came to my bed, which was on the lower bunk of a two-tiered affair, after one of these Gestapo visits, I found my quilt slashed to ribbons and the wood wool scattered. What was I hiding between these blankets? The bastards. I cursed them for the rest of the winter. Did they obtain information that we were receiving BBC news? Where was the apparatus hidden? Nobody was more expert than the Gestapo at finding hidden radios. In spite of several visits, they found nothing. On one occasion, one of them lost an attaché case while searching a bungalow. Consternation. The inmates of that bungalow had a tough time being searched, interrogated, threatened. The case never turned up. How thoroughly satisfying to have out-manoeuvred even the Gestapo.
There were some cupboards in the passage of each of the bungalows. One day the guards came into the camp and started to move the cupboards to the opposite wall. Why? They found it impossible to move some of the cupboards - too heavy. They were filled with soil from a tunnel, which was nearing completion. Reprisals. No more walks after this. What a pity. The guards
accompanying us on. these walks would sometimes take us through an apple orchard. We could pick up those that had fallen from the trees. Sometimes the haul was considerably bigger than we could possibly have found on the ground. It depended upon the guards at the gate whether we would be allowed to take our apples into the camp or whether they would rather have them themselves. It appeared we were being used to collect apples for the guards. Oh, well, no more apples for us or for the guards.
Soon after this episode we had to carry the cupboards through the gate to the German side of the camp. They had to be stacked in an empty bungalow. At the appointed time the cupboards were carried through, four men to a cupboard, one at each corner. The guards did not notice that the men carrying two of the cupboards had to strain rather more than the others. These cupboards were placed on the floor, near a window in the bungalow. There was a prisoner in each of them. That night the occupants emerged cautiously and escaped. They were away for a week when they were placed in a "cooler" on the German side of the camp for some weeks before they were allowed to join us again. The Germans expected them to inform us how pointless it was to try to escape in Germany.
At Weinsberg we received regular supplies of German newspapers, We were encouraged to place orders. It was important that we should acquaint ourselves with the German point of view. The Völkischer Beobachter became my daily paper for many months. Others obtained other papers and we swopped around. We could read quite a variety.
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is seldom found in newspapers even in times of peace. Somebody once said something to the effect that Truth falls a victim to the first shot that is fired in a war. It would be more correct to say that Truth is throttled to death long before the first shot is fired, hence the need for firing at all. After that less of the truth is revealed in newspapers than an iceberg reveals of its true bulk by what it shows above the water. In a dictatorship it is worse.
Of course, there were in all German-occupied countries, certain pro-Nazi elements. Thus, an article appeared about Holland, showing pictures of Hollanders from all walks of life who had come forward voluntarily to join the SS units, eager to fight on the Eastern Front so that Germany's "New Order" could be established as soon as possible. Unless one was in a position to learn from other sources that millions of Hollanders were praying for the day when "Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Quisling and most recently the butcher of Holland", would depart from their soil for ever and ever, one's mind became as slanted as that news item.
The list of names appearing in the newspapers of brave officers and other soldiers to whom Iron Crosses, second and first classes, were being awarded, grew longer and longer. Sprinkling of awards to the bravest of the brave of the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves were announced too. Perhaps every one of them was deserved. German soldiers had formidable tasks to face. Not a word, though, about the dozens of Wehrmacht generals that were dismissed, cashiered and done away with for daring to suggest strategic withdrawals which might have resulted in less of those heroic stands to victory or death, which in the end served no purpose at all.
Field Marshal van Manstein, himself a victim, revealed at the Nuremberg trials that, "of seventeen field marshals, ten were sent home during the war and three lost their lives as a result of July 20, 1944 (the plot on Hitler's life). Only one field marshal managed to get through the war and keep his position. Of thirty-six full generals eighteen were sent home and five died as a result of July 20 or were dishonourably discharged. Only three full generals survived the war in their positions." Like General Franz Haldef they also supported "idiotic twaddle", according to Hitler. They were the ones who lacked the necessary "National Socialist ardour".
Shirer reveals: "I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state ... It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one's inherent distrust of what one learnt from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions, made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
And what of people who had been subjected to it all their lives? In 1933, Hitler could say about those who did not want to come over to his side, "What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in a new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community." On May 1, 1937 he declared: "This Reich will give its youth to no one but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." "The German schools, from first grade through the universities were quickly Nazified ... Mein Kampf was made, in the words of Der Deutsche Erzieher, official organ of the Educators, our infallible pedagogical guiding star."
Perhaps this is where Mussolini failed. Had he produced such an infallible guiding star for his teachers and had seen to it that they used it effectively, Italian soldiers might have been more prepared to lay their all on the altar of their Duce.
I requested the same feldwebel who lent me his copy of Mein Kampf to bring me some of the primary school books being used in Germany. He did bring me a fair sample. This little evidence left no doubt in my mind that Hitler was being heil-ed day in and day out throughout Germany in all the standards of the primary school - the correct place to start. There was a German way of teaching mathematics. According to a journal Deutsche Mathematik, "any idea that mathematics could be judged non-racially, carried within itself the germs of destruction of German science." I have heard it said in this country that there is a Christian National way of teaching mathematics. Fortunately, someone was at liberty to say: "Rubbish, two and two make four even behind the Iron Curtain".
Springtime in 1944 had arrived. Almost overnight, vineyards had sprung up on the slopes of Weibertreu and the surrounding countryside. When the vines are pruned, in the late autumn, a single, fairly sturdy shoot about three feet long is left. This is bent over and secured to the ground. There it lies dormant sometimes under the snow for long periods all through the winter months. When spring comes, wooden stakes are driven into the ground to which the shoots are attached in an upright position. They start budding almost immediately and hey presto, a vineyard appears where nothing was visible for months on end.
Surely the summer, which would follow, would spark off new activities, on the various battlefronts like previous summers had done. Fortunes and misfortunes, victories and defeats would follow in the wake of these drives until winter set In again. This might or might not, bring a lull in the fighting, allowing for the licking of wounds and preparation for new onslaughts. Was It ever to end? What would the summer of 1944 produce? What would be the position when the months had rolled by and tne winter of 1944/45 was upon us? Would Italy collapse this summer? Would the Second Front be opened? How long would Germany continue the unequal struggle? Have the people not had more than flesh and blood can endure?
April came and went. Nothing untoward happened as far as we were concerned. Time was standing still or so it seemed to us who had no more part to play in any drama, who had not even spectator seats, which provided anything but a blurred vision of the numerous actors on the stage.
Would something happen in the month of May? Weather reports were tending themselves to speculation about a Second Front. Calm weather and favourabletides would favour landing operations but this would also favour the Germans. Unfavourable conditions would bring disadvantages to both sides. Which would be preferred? A succession of pleasant days came and went. So pleasant were the days that we sat in the sun for the first time in Germany, with our shirts removed. Haymaking was in full swing by people, very young and very old, mostly women. The men, not so young and not so old, could not be spared for this type of work, however important. The month of May grew older and older. Haymaking continued while the sun was shining. Nothing of consequence to us happened. Would anything ever happen? The end of May arrived. It was June, The weather turned dirty, nasty and blustery. Nobody could operate under such conditions, not an air force, not a navy, not an army. A golden opportunity had been missed. Nothing would happen after all. Damn and damn and damn.
Was there still a possibility? Was this not the sort of situation, which could be exploited to spring a surprise? The Germans appeared uneasy and on edge. They expected something but they did not know what, where or how. Would it happen when the weather stations predicted bad weather? Why would an invasion place along the longest rather than the shortest route across the Channel? Why between Caen and Cherbourg and not between Calais and Dunkirk? They did not know. We did not know. Few would know.
Between Calais and Dunkirk, opposite the shortest route lay the German Fifteenth Army. Between Caen and Cherbourg, lay the German Seventh Army. Many units of the latter army were inland, towards the south on manoeuvres and shooting practices.
On June 5, "at 10pm, the Fifteenth Army interrupted a code message from the BBC to the French Resistance, which it believed meant that the invasion was about to begin. The Fifteenth Army was alerted but Rundstedt did not think it necessary to alert the Seventh Army in whose sector of the coast further west, between Caen and Cherbourg, the Allied forces were now - toward midnight approaching on a thousand ships."
Thus came to an end all the waitings, the guessings and the speculatings. Should we collect our meagre belongings? The war would soon be over.
The danger, which Hitler feared most, had come about - to have to fight on yet another front while his troops were engaged In desperate battles In the east and while others were doing what his Pact of Steel partner, Mussolini, had failed to do in the south.
There was another danger of which Hitler was well aware and of which he said, "the only preventative measure one can take is to live irregularly - to walk, to drive and to travel at irregular times and unexpectedly." By this means he had escaped being blown up on several occasions mostly without his even being aware of the fact that he had narrowly escaped death. Death very nearly came his way again after the danger of the additional front had materialised. He was largely powerless to avert the military threats, which were to follow on the events of June 6, when the long-awaited invasion in the west was launched, although he would on no account admit it. However he had all the means and determination at his disposal to deal ruthlessly with those who were remotely or otherwise connected with the plot to do away with him on July 20, 1944. By the time accounts had been settled an estimated 5 000 people had died, many of them in the most gruesome manner, which Himmler and his SS men with their long experience in these matters were able to devise. Relatives and friends of all those connected with the plot or suspected of having been connected with it were rounded up and sent to concentration camps where most of them died.
The story of the dozen or more attempts to remove Adolf Hitler from the German scene is a fantastic one. It is a story of early attempts on the part of his opponents to make contact with foreign powers to determine what their reactions would be if they did away with Hitler. It is a story revealing no positive support or assistance from them; it was a German domestic affair. It is a story of no support, initially, from any of the field marshals who would be able to lend military support for the cause. They had sworn solemn oaths of obedience to Adolf Hitler in person, not of allegiance to the State. It is a story of strange mishaps, which accompanied every effort when it reached the stage when Hitler was to die. It is a story of some people talking too much and doing too little; a story of some plotters revealing too much in the presence of SS and Gestapo stooges posing as genuine anti-Nazi fellow-travellers; a story of brave men fully prepared to risk their lives and of others suffering from cold feet when it came to the push. It is a story of people denouncing Nazism under torture unto death; a story of others breaking down under prolonged solitary confinement in pitch-dark cellars and then "betraying" others. It is a story of some collaborators on being apprehended, preferring suicide to facing farcical trial in a People's Court.
For a while, Hitler paid far less attention to the military threats to Germany on the various fronts, than to making elaborate plans to safeguard himself and to giving orders to eliminate his enemies amongst the German people.
He knew how desperate the military position was. Field Marshals von Rundstedt and Rommel who had to face the Allied invasion, informed Hitler that "the struggle was hopeless against the superiority in the air, at sea and on land" of the Allied forces. If only Hitler would allow the Germans to withdraw out of range of the enemy's murderous naval guns. To take their panzer units out of the line to re-form them for a later thrust. Hitler's answer was as usual: No withdrawal. Fight to victory or death. Rommel had received a similar answer to his request in the desert at Alamein in 1942. Von Manstein and Paulus had received similar instructions at Stalingrad. It was Hitler's stock reply.
"On June 20, the long-awaited Russian offensive on the central front, began, developing with such overwhelming power that within a few days the German Army Group Centre ... was completely smashed, the front torn wide open and the road to Poland opened."
On June 29, Rundstedt and Rommel had made another appeal to Hitler, "to face realities both in the east and in the west and to try to end the war." Field marshal Franz Keitel, the yes-man appointed by Hitler in Halder's place when the latter was dismissed for supporting "idiotic twaddle", had phoned Rundstedt on June 30, to enquire about the situation in the west. Rundstedt told him that four panzer divIsions had just been repulsed in an all-out attack on the British lines. Keitel enquired: "What shall we do?" "Make peace, you fools." Rundstedt retorted, "What else can you do?" Keitel, no doubt conveyed this to Hitler. The next day Rundstedt was replaced as Commander in Chief, West, by Field Marshal Guenther Kluge.
On July 15, Rommel wrote to Hitler: "The troops are fighting heroically everywhere but the unequal struggle is nearing its end." He added a footnote: "I must beg you to draw the proper conclusions without delay. I feel it my duty ... to state this clearly."
Rommel told General Speidel, his Chief of Staff: "I have given him his last chance, if he does not take it, we will act." Rommel was referring to the fact that he had already, in February, promised his full support to the plotters to rid Germany of Hitler. He was now ready to inform them that the time had come. Alas and alas, the plotters had to act without him, their "pillar of strength". Two days later, on July 17, Rommel's staff car was peppered with bullets from low-flying Allied fighters resulting in Rommel being so badly wounded that he was not expected to live. But the plan to kill Hitler would have to be carried out.
It was necessary to have somebody who had easy access to Hitler in his strongly guarded headquarters, either at Obersalzburg in Bavaria or at Rastenburg in East Prussia.
Apparently, the plotters had given no thought to other methods of doing away with Hitler than that a time bomb should do the job. On one occasion, a bomb failed to explode in a plane in which Hitler was travelling. On another occasion the bomb was in the overcoat pocket of Colonel Freiherr von Gersdorff. He was to be blown up with Hitler while standing close to him at an exhibition that had been arranged. Hitler left before the requisite number of minutes had ticked away to set the bomb off. Failure.
Captain Axel von dem Bussche was to "model" a new army overcoat for the forces, which Hitler had ordered to be designed and which he wanted to inspect. The captain would have two bombs in his pockets. At the appropriate time he would grab Hitler and hold him until the bomb blew them both to pieces. Something went wrong and Hitler did not turn up for the inspection. Bussche tried again on a later occasion but Hitler had decided to leave for Berchtesgaden for the Christmas holidays. Shortly afterwards Bussche was wounded on the Eastern Front. The next overcoat inspection was to take place in February. This time an infantry officer Heinrich von Kleist was to be blown up with Hitler, but Hitler failed to appear. Hitler's habit of living irregularly and coming and going unexpectedly, was paying dividends but not to the plotters.
The man who became the central figure in attempts on Hitler's life now that Rommel was no longer available, and which culminated in the attempt July 20 1944, was Colonel Count Klaus von Stauffenberg. At this stage he was far from the handsome young man he once had been. In April 1943 his vehicle was blown up by a mine in Tunisia. "He lost his left eye, his right hand, two fingers of the other hand and suffered injuries to left ear and knee. For several weeks it seemed probable that he would be left totally blind if he survived." He recovered, badly scarred and crippled.
Fortunately for the plotters, Stauffenberg was appointed Chief of Staff to General Fromm at the end of June 1944. Fromm was in charge of the replacement army in Berlin. In his present capacity, Stauffenberg was often summoned by Hitler to attend conferences to provide information about replacements that he could draw from this force.
On July 11, Stauffenberg was at Obersalzberg with his bomb in the presence of Hitler but it had been decided the previous night by the plotters in Berlin that Himmler and Goering had to be done in at the same time as Hitler. Himmler was not there. No attempt. It was then decided that on the next occasion, Stauffenberg could act even if the others were not present. On the 15th he was at the Führers headquarters at Rastenberg with his bomb in his briefcase. He made his report about the replacement position. Then he left briefly to telephone his collaborators in Berlin that the time had come for them to be ready to put their plans into operation for taking control. Hitler was to die within a few moments of his return to the conference room. Hitler had left when he returned. Another flop.
Then, on July 20, Stauffenberg was once again at Rastenberg, bomb in briefcase. This time he placed his briefcase in the conference room near to Hitler. It was time for the bomb to go off. Stauffenberg left unobtrusively to watch the result from some distance away. "He saw the conference room go up with a roar in smoke and flame, as if, he said later, it had been hit directly by a 155mm shell. Bodies came hurtling out of the windows and debris flew into the air. There was not the slightest doubt in Stauffenberg's excited mind that every single person in the conference room was dead or dying."
Elaborate plans had been made which had to be set in motion in Berlin and other major centres in Germany as soon as the news of Hitler's death came through. Someone had been detailed at Rastenberg to phone Berlin to give the news and then to cut the telephone wires. Stauffenberg was to go to Berlin by plane to observe what progress had been made. In Berlin the message did not come through clearly. No way of confirming what had happened - no telephone connection. Confusion. Conflicting reports. Hitler was dead. Hitler was not dead. Action in some quarters; failure to act in other quarters. No coordinated attempts to put into operation what had been planned.
It is a long and intricate tale, the details of which are not needed for this story.
In less than twelve hours after the explosion the whole plot had misfired with disastrous consequences. There was much shooting and killing at Fromm's headquarters until Skorzeny, who rescued Mussolini, arrived on the scene with a band of armed SS men. He stopped the shooting and killing of men who could be tortured into giving much valuable information as to the extent of the plot. Suspects were sent off to the Gestapo prison. He ordered detectives to collect all papers and documents, which might reveal information about the plot. He was a policeman before the war. He knew what he was doing.
Soon after midnight Hitler's voice came over the air as if from beyond the veil to those who thought he was dead. The voice said:
"My German Comrades: if I speak to you today it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know that I am unhurt and well and secondly that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history.
A small clique of ambitious, irresponsible, and at the same time senseless and stupid officers had concocted a plot to eliminate me and with me the staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.
The bomb planted by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg exploded two metres to the right of me. It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal collaborators, one of whom has died. I myself am entirely unhurt aside from some very minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence ...
This time we shall settle accounts with them in a manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed."
A year, minus five days had passed since Mussolini's Grand Council had had him arrested on July 25, 1943. Some months after that event, Hitler told the German nation: "Hope of finding traitors here, rests on complete ignorance of the character of the National Socialist State; a belief that they can bring about a July 25 in Germany rests on a fundamental illusion as to my personal position as well as to the attitude of my political collaborators and my field marshals, admirals and generals."
By a strange coincidence Hitler had arranged for Mussolini to meet him at Rastenberg on that very afternoon of July 20. Mussolini could see for himself the "fundamental illusion" on which Hitler's conception of his "personal position" rested. But not Hitler. He had a task imposed upon him by Providence. He had those qualities combined within himself, which he stated in Mein Kampf, elevate a person to the "rarest being on earth". He was inexorably bent on destroying himself as well as his "German Comrades". He heeded no advice, he admitted no mistakes. He was a human god, admitting mortality for himself, but not for the movement he had set afoot in Germany.
Of all those connected with the attempt on Hitler's life, Rommel received the most humane treatment, if one stretched the meaning of the word a little. It would have been thoroughly bad publicity for it to become known that even the highly esteemed Rommel had become so disillusioned with Hitler that he, too, was associated with the conspiracy. It would therefore not be wise to bring him to the public trial in a People's Court.
Rommel was recuperating from his wounds at his home near lovely Ulm. What the German people knew about Rommel's death, was that the doctor at the Ulm hospital had reported that, "two generals had brought in the body of the field marshal who died of a cerebral embolism, apparently as a result of his previous skull fractures." The Germans also knew of an official announcement "mourning the loss of one of the greatest commanders of the nation". Hitler wired Rommel's wife: "Accept my sincere sympathy for the heavy loss you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name of Field Marshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in North Africa." No lies in that cunningly worded telegram, concealing a murder. Goering wired: "The fact that your husband died a hero's death as a result of his wounds, after we all hoped that he would remain to the German people, has deeply touched me." Bunkum, unless not even Goering knew the facts. The people also knew that Hitler had ordered a state funeral and that Field Marshal von Rundstedt delivered the funeral oration. No more Schluss. That was what the German people would know officially.
They did not know that Rundstedt probably did not know at that stage the circumstances of Rommel's death. They did not know that Hitler had ordered Keitel to send two generals who arrived half-inebriated at Rommel's home. They had advised him in advance that they were coming to see him in connection with a new appointment since he had now recovered from his wounds. Rommel could have had no illusions. His house was already surrounded by Security Police and SS units. The two generals arrived bringing with them the poison, which Rommel was to take if he were guilty and should prefer to commit suicide rather than be hauled before the people's court. If he preferred the former, he would be given a state funeral and no steps would be taken against his family. Rommel was admitted to see his wife and fifteen year old son Manfred. He told them that they would receive a message from Ulm in fifteen minutes time that he had died of "a brain seizure on the way to the conference". The people did not know that Rommel accompanied the two generals into the nearby forest; that he took the poison; that it was all over in a few seconds. It was not known by the people that the message received from the hospital was a trumped-up lie. It was not known that no autopsy was allowed. The body was urgently required for the state funeral.
One other field marshal, Kluge, who was always lukewarm in his support of the plotters, was nevertheless, suspected by Hitler. Hitler blamed him for setbacks in the West and suspected that he "might surrender to Eisenhower. On August 17, Field Marshal Walther Model, arrived to replace Kluge. Kluge was told that Hitler was to be informed of his whereabouts in Germany. He did inform Hitler by letter. By the time Hitler received it, Kluge was dead. He swallowed poison near Metz.
A third field marshal. Erwin von Witzleben, was caught in the net in Berlin. Together with seven other conspirators, he appeared in the first trial held in Berlin in August. By that time "they were already pretty well broken by their treatment in the Gestapo cellars". On August 8, they were, according to Hitler's orders "hanged like cattle". "One by one, after being stripped to the waist, they were strung up, a noose of piano wire being placed round their necks and attached to the meat hooks from the ceiling."
One of Hitler's orders was that no long speeches were to be allowed from the accused at the trial. Perhaps he remembered the impact he made on the court and the foreign journalists, when he addressed the court for hours on end during his trial after the Beer Hall Putsch. Perhaps others could defend themselves equally eloquently and convincingly. This was not allowed under Hitler's regime.
General Karl von Stuelpnagel had taken the most effective action during the attempted coup. He had ordered the arrest of all the SS men in Paris. For this he had to die, of course. He was ordered to Berlin. On the way he tried to commit suicide but only managed to shoot away one of his eyes and damage the other. He was taken to Berlin, appeared before the People's Court and "strangled to death on August 30".
General Hans Speidel, Rommel's Chief of Staff was arrested on September 7. He was not brought to trial but for seven months the Gestapo held him for incessant questioning. "Under his ordeal he became neither broken nor bewildered ... admitting nothing and betraying no one." He escaped when the Americans advanced into Southern Germany.
General Henning von Tresckow was another "pillar of strength" to the plotters. He believed that "Hitler was not only the arch-enemy of Germany; he is the archenemy of the world". He, too, escaped being tried by a People's Court. He preferred to use a hand grenade to blow his own head off.
Carl Goerdeler, civilian and former mayor of Leipzig, had been a conspirator since the late thirties. He now had to go into hiding three days before the attempt on the 20th. The Gestapo was hot on his trail. He was to be the Chancellor in the new regime if the plot succeeded. After the attempted coup, his photo appeared in all the papers. Hitler had put a price of one million marks on his head. Weary and hungry, after wandering for weeks and at times being assisted by friends and relatives to escape arrest, he was forced on August 12, to look for food at a small inn. There, an acquaintance of the Goerdeler family, Helene Schwaerzel, recognised him and informed some Luftwaffe officers. He was arrested in the woods nearby. He was sentenced to death on September 8, but was not executed until February 2, 1945. Himmler thought he could extract information from him about foreign contacts he had made during the thirties. I doubt whether Helene received her one million marks.
Goerdeler's close associate through all the years since Hitler accepted his resignation as General Staff Chief over the Czechoslovakian affair, was General Ludwig Beck. He shot himself but aimed badly. He tried again and while unconscious from his second wound, was shot by a sergeant to relieve him of his misery.
Stauffenberg was wounded in his only sound arm during the shooting at Fromm's headquarters in Berlin after his return from the mission, which had failed so miserably. He, and three other officers, died facing a firing squad as night was falling. The story is becoming as monotonous as it is gruesome. Enough of it.
Mild repercussions of the plot reached our camp on July 24. The Nazi salute had been made compulsory in place of the old Wehrmacht salute, "as a sign of the army's unshakeable allegiance to the Führer and of the closest unity between Army and Party". When we assembled for roll call, the German Camp Commandant confronted our Senior Officer for the first time with the Nazi salute. After being temporarily nonplussed, he responded with the ordinary military salute. Had we guffawed that morning at the spectacle at the Nazi salute, we would have died. To give the Nazi salute was a serious and solemn act of showing allegiance to a mighty warlord, not something to be scoffed at.
In another way we were reminded of the seriousness of the situation. There was talk that no more prisoners would be taken on the Western Front. Some of the top Nazis did not care a damn it that led to reprisals, resulting in the Allies adopting the same methods. They suspected that too many German troops were surrendering too easily. It might stop the rot if the Allies were to adopt these methods. Somehow, the Western Front had to be stiffened. Any thoughts that the attempted coup might have created, that Germany was tottering, had to be stamped out. An order was issued in language that someone thought would appeal to us as being really soldier-like. Copies appeared on all notice boards in the camp. It warned that attempts to escape had now become "a damn dangerous game". Escaped prisoners would be shot on sight.
Conditions were getting more and more grim as the Allies closed in on Germany from all sides. The greater the demand for soldiers on the various fronts, the fewer were available for subduing resistance movements in German-occupied territories. Germany depended on an uninterrupted flow of raw materials and food from these countries. Resistance had to be stamped out. How could this possibly be done? It was by no means an insurmountable problem for small units of SS men and Gestapo, steeped in methods of dealing with opponents. They could shoot fifty, a hundred or more unarmed inhabitants for every one German who came to harm in occupied territories. They could exercise control by striking terror into the people.
They could easily repeat the massacres that followed in the wake of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague two years before. He was known in occupied countries as "Hangman" Heydrich. On May 29, 1942, two Czechs had parachuted from an RAF plane, had slung a bomb at Heydrich's car and injured his spine. He died on June 4. "According to one Gestapo report, 1331 Czechs, including 201 women were immediately executed". Jews were once more rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the east.
"But of all the consequences of Heydrich's death, the fate of the little village of Lidice ... not far from Prague, will perhaps be longest remembered by the civilised world. For no reason except to serve as an example to a conquered people ... a terrible savagery was carried out in this peaceful little rural place." Its male inhabitants, men and boys, were shot in relays. The women and girls were scattered to concentration camps. Lidice ceased to exist.
Two years later, in June 1944, much the same thing happened in France at Oradour, near Limoges, because explosives were supposed to have been stored in the village. "Nine years later, in 1953, a French Military Court established that 642 inhabitants ... had perished in the massacre of Oradour."
Now, after the attempt on Hitler's life, those who were suspected of anti-Nazi activities could, once more, easily disappear into "Nacht und Nebel" that is into the Night and Fog of complete oblivion, never to be heard of again by their relatives. This practice had worked well since 1941 in dealing with anti-Nazi Germans. It could be applied further afield and to an even greater extent. In Poland, resistance movements were, of course, stamped out early. Resettlement bodies, "EinsatzgrOppen" started their work immediately after the collapse of Poland. Those in charge of these groups vied with one another in their eagerness to inform Himmler that their areas were now free of Jews "Judenfrei", every one of them having been exterminated - starved, shot, gassed, often incinerated so as to leave no mass graves to be discovered. Truly, there was no lack of methods by means of which people could be subdued without the assistance of soldiers needed at the various battlefronts.
It is not my intention in this story to provide details of the diabolic gruesomeness of the treatment meted out to human beings purely on the grounds that they were sub-humans - "untermenschen" who occupied territories that prevented Germans from having the lebensraum, which Hitler considered necessary for his master race. Obtaining this lebensraum regardless of the methods employed was implicit in Hitler's concept of the "New Order" for Europe.
On rare occasions, when Himmler ventured too near the scenes where his orders were being executed, he had to turn away or be sick. This was worse than killing chickens which he often witnessed as a chicken farmer before the war. Goebbels had to close his eyes when he was shown a film of the treatment of the eight plotters who were "hanged like cattle". He ordered the photos to be taken and the film made.
If it is the task of a War Propaganda Minister, never to be at a loss to bend the minds of people to his way of thinking, regardless of the consequences, then Goebbels was a great success. He had a new lease of life after the events of June/July 1944, the Allied invasion and the attempted coup. He found it in the theme: "Wir Deutschen Mussen Hassen Lernen". I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry when I saw the headlines in the press urging Germans to learn to hate. Unless they learned to hate more intensely, their hatred of the enemy would never measure up to the enemy's hatred of Germany. If Germans hated adequately, they would lynch airmen who were shot down while they rained destruction on German cities - no matter that the German people "had been buoyed up ... by lurid reports of what Luftwaffe bombing had done to the enemy, especially the British". Goebbels saw that Jews and warmongers in America were the authors of pamphlets being rained on Germany. One of these pamphlets urged German railwaymen to sabotage, to slow down, to stop the flow of supplies to the war fronts. The kith and kin of the very people who were urged to do this, were daily giving their lives to save Germany. Could the German people not see this clearly? Germans should know at whom their hatred should be directed and with what degree of intensity.
The attempt on Hitler's life could never have happened if hatred of the enemies of Germany had been implanted in the military leaders of the Wehrmacht as thoroughly as it had been implanted in the political leaders of the SS troops.
An obviously well trained collaborator of Goebbels, wrote a lengthy article in the Völkischer Beobachter, early in 1945, which I translated. He wrote inter alia:
"The National Socialist Army Command will not again experience a November 1918, because they have smothered the first attempt at revolution at its inception. The incidents of 20 July have strengthened our vow that the German army of the twentieth century would be either National Socialist or it would not exist at all. The idea, belonging to a bygone age of such a thing as a non-political army was buried forever on that day. The whole of the armed forces has now embraced the National Socialist idea. The spirit of the SS, which has proved itself on all fronts in Europe, has now penetrated all sections of the army. The principle, that the German officer in this war, is not only the military leader of his men but also the personification of their social and national ideals, is now generally accepted. For that reason it is demanded that only fanatical National Socialists can be called upon to assume command as officers over German soldiers. When German power rests upon the two strongest pillars, namely the Army and the Party, then we shall remain masters of our fate in the face of all the storms of the times."
If it is the task of a War Production Minister to prolong a war by means of keeping the wheels of industry turning when victory is no longer in sight, then Albert Speer was a genius. Of his ability and thoroughness there was never any doubt. It was a source of amazement to friend and foe that Germany could continue to produce what she did. Germany had neither the natural resources nor the air manpower within her borders to keep up with the devouring demands of army, air force and navy. When German factories could operate comparatively undisturbed by enemy bombing, material was brought from occupied countries to Germany's highly developed industrial complexes for processing and manufacturing. When this was no longer possible, the necessary facilities were established elsewhere. Production went ahead.
Birthday card for a fourth birthday - front
and back
The time had come when it must have been quite clear to a man of Speer's intelligence that the end of the road was in sight and that he might as well stop being the highly efficient Production Minister. Towards the end of 1944 he was still only concerned about his production programmes. He was annoyed that Hitler had started drafting boys between 15 and 18 and men between 50 and 60 into the Volksturm that he obtained recruits for this unit from the factories. The Volksturm was to make the last stand in Berlin. Instead of seeing that this was a futile attempt on Hitler's part to avoid the inevitable, he was concerned that this would seriously affect the output of arms.
In January 1945, after the loss of Silesia to the Russians, he had no alternative but to inform Hitler that the war was lost. Rundstedt and Rommel and many others had known that for some time. Speer became concerned about the future of the German people, instead of German arms, only after Hitler had ordered his "scorched earth" policy to be carried out. This was in March 1945. All industrial plant, electrical facilities, transport installations, locomotives and ships had to be destroyed. Speer quarrelled with Hitler for ordering the destruction of assets, which the Germans would need for rebuilding, after the war. Hitler told Speer: "If the war is lost the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue. Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones for the good ones have been killed."
"It must be said," writes Shirer, "aside from the rapid advances of the Allied troops, which made the carrying out of such a gigantic demolition impossible - the super-human efforts of Speer and a number of army officers, who in direct disobedience (finally) of Hitler's orders, raced about the country to make sure that vital communications, plants and stores were not blown up by zealously obedient army officers and Party hacks."
The world did not know at the time that Hitler infuriated Speer to the extent that he planned to have poison gas pumped through a vent into Hitler's bunker on an occasion when he would be having a conference with all his chiefs. Unbeknown to Speer, Hitler had this vent protected by a chimney, which extended high up into the sky. It was now impossible to carry out the task without it being discovered by the numerous guards surrounding the place. Providence was on Hitler's side again.
At Weinsberg, we had a fairly good idea of the progress of the war on the Western Front, thanks to the fact that the Gestapo raids had not tracked down our source of information from the BBC. After the upheavals of July 20, the war dragged on. All our hopes of being released during the summer had evaporated. Autumn had arrived and, adjustable creatures as we had been forced to become, we tried to resign ourselves to spending yet another winter "in the bag". It was not easy.
"Declaration of parole" for walks outside camp
August to October, 1944. Front.
and back.
Utterly down in the dumps we heard of the setbacks on the Western Front, which became known as the "Battle of the Bulge". We could not bear the thought that there could possibly be another Dunkirk as Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht suggested to its listeners. It seemed a stupefying miracle that Germany at this late stage could muster the men and the material to strike back at the Allies so forcibly that it sent them, not exactly reeling, but very nearly so, back to where they had come from.
I suffered during the months of December/January. The weather was particularly foul when the Germans launched their counterattack in December. It prevented the Allied air forces from striking effectively at the advancing German forces. The winter was miserable for me because I was far too cold to fall asleep at night. I lay listening to the wind and the rain. I felt miserable at being miserable because I was cold. What was my discomfort in comparison with the hardships which those out there had to endure in the frozen mud and the ever-present likelihood of being blown to pieces?
A gloom had descended on the camp. Hope once more gave way to despair. The end was not in sight. People were irritable. They behaved differently towards each other. We saw the first fights amongst the men after all those years in captivity. Air-raids were increasing. We refused to go into rather deep, cold and wet slit trenches in the camp - let come what will. Rollcalls were held at irregular and unpredictable times, not until all-clears had sounded. The Battle of the Bulge was responsible for our depression. Did the Allies not have years of preparation for the invasion? Were they ill prepared after all, for what they had undertaken? Feelings of guilt about being concerned about ourselves; fury at our being critical and at not being able to do anything about it; disgruntled at the Germans for continuing a lost war. Was it lost? All these things added up to produce the state of mind that disturbed relationships amongst us. We were fast becoming a bunch of bastards. Would we stay a coherent body of men as we had been under other adverse conditions?
By mid January a feeling of elation once more dispelled the fits of depression. The "Bulge" was being straightened out. Then it bulged in the opposite direction. The "Bulge" stretched like skin over a deep-seated abscess. Then it stretched almost to bursting point, but not quite. Then it did burst. Relief from pain. The Allies were on the move again. Hitler could not last much longer. He had willed it that Germans should never surrender. He had driven them to the end of the road. There was now no more chance of a comeback. This was the very last heave. That compressed spring about which Rommel spoke in the desert, building up a thrusting power, which when released, hurled the Eighth Army back across the plateau of Cyrenaica, was now again being compressed. This time there was no thrust left in it.
What did the Germans think of it? One could sense a feeling of depression now in the enemy camp. The civic authorities in Weinsberg presented us with badges of the town, depicting the hill Weibertreu in the background, a close-up view of a vine with its supportive stake and an army helmet. On it appeared the inscription, Errinnerung an Weinsberg - Memories of Weinsberg. Why did they think we would want to be reminded of Weinsberg? They were obviously used to better times when tourists and visitors made their way to Weinsberg because it was a place not without its charm for poets, writers and many others. Here lived long ago, according to the article mentioned earlier, the hospitable poet Justinus Kerner and his "beloved and honoured wife Friederika, affectionately known as Rickele". Here they lie buried in a common grave. On the tombstone one reads what Justinus had requested should appear there; Friederika Kerner and her Justinus, indicative of the regard he had for her.
Badge of Weinsberg "a rather sad and incongruous gesture of goodwill"
Perhaps we were given these badges as a rather sad and incongruous gesture of goodwill towards us; that they would rather have had us in their midst as friends and not as enemies. Who knows?
The feldwebel in the camp with whom I became vaguely acquainted, often made me wonder what he was thinking. He was a schoolmaster before the war. He gave me the impression that he was unhappy teaching in Nazi Germany. He disliked the banning of works of certain poets, writers, composers and artists. He thought Germany was the poorer for having done so. I had a feeling that I could not easily dispel that he looked upon himself as a victim caught up in the Nazi net, not a collaborator. Who would ever know how many Germans felt that way or with how many it was merely a pretence towards the end?
How many were now regretting the day when they put absolute power in the hands of Hitler? What were they thinking about the military setbacks that were now being experienced on all fronts? The people on the home front knew all about victories, real or imagined. By some queer kink in his reasoning, Goering actually turned the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad, into victory. In a radio broadcast he told the people that in the end it would be known that "in spite of everything, Germany's ultimate victory was decided there". The result of this type of propaganda was that what Germans at home knew about setbacks in the earlier stages at any rate, only served to inspire them to make still further sacrifices. They would accept blame, if blame there were, attached to their ignoring Allied appeals in leaflets dropped from the skies, to revolt against Hitler, to strike back at him, to force him to surrender. After all did Churchill not enumerate where and how the British would fight if ever the British Isles were to be invaded and did he not declare that they would never surrender? Why should Germans? But conditions were not remotely parallel. Churchill could say they would fight "with growing confidence" and "growing strength", something which no German could say at this stage with any conviction.
For a warlord to order from afar that no withdrawal of troops is to take place, that fighting is to continue to victory or death, is different from being on the spot where such orders are enforced and where the consequences can be observed, firsthand. And yet, it is altogether within the realm of conventional warfare to obey such orders, regardless of the consequences.
For a warlord to order from afar the mass killing of unarmed, emaciated men, women and children, is one thing. It is a different thing to be on the spot where such orders, to murder, are enforced and the consequences, in their stark realities, are to be faced. It lies no longer within the bounds of conventional warfare for such orders to be given to and to be obeyed by officers and men of the army. Knowledge about these things was not for the home front, not even for the army itself. It could lead to revulsion and revolt at the horror of it all. Consequently, these orders had to be given in secret, to people handpicked for the purpose, to sadistic automatons, devoid of all feeling - a type of which no nation has an abundant supply, unless they are manufactured as they were in Germany, from raw material which could be moulded into shape. When the war against Russia started, Hitler entrusted Himmler with "secret tasks" to be carried out in Russia. He had to act "independently of the army" and under his own responsibility. Not even the "highest personalities of the Government and the Party" were to know what Himmler's secret tasks were.
Shirer writes in the foreword of his book: "It is quite remarkable how little those of us who were stationed in Germany during the Nazi time, journalists and diplomats, really knew what was going on behind the façade of the Third Reich. A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders."
If this were true of people in his position, one could imagine that the ordinary German, fully occupied in whatever tasks there were to be done, could tell a fair amount of what was going on in the army in regard to conventional warfare. These matters are reported somehow, slanted or otherwise, and news filters through.
One could well believe that the ordinary German could tell almost nothing about the secret orders to handpicked sadists. What was happening in concentration camps, labour camps, extermination camps and gas chambers, was hidden, camouflaged, side-tracked, explained away so effectively that reports about them were not believed until the proofs started to roll in overwhelmingly and irrefutably, often not until well after the war. How many knew of mobile gas chambers camouflaged to resemble big furniture removal vans or that stationary gas chambers gave the appearance of being ordinary crematoriums, set in well-kept surroundings? Some will deny these reports to this day. Could millions of Germans not honestly plead ignorance of these, the most abominable aspects of Hitler's regime? How foolish of them to have put absolute power in his hands.
Numerous people, during and after those years, have pondered over the uncertainties in their minds as to the attitude to adopt, the frame of mind to cultivate, towards the German people who were destined to experience Hitler's years in Germany.
Have considerations, similar to those that influenced the Jew Salomon Tauber in Frederick Forsyth's book, The Odessa File, perhaps influenced many others to resolve the doubts that filled their minds over this issue?
In this book the story is told of a particularly brutal and sadistic SS Camp Commandant. Under this sadist, Salomon Tauber endured the tortures of hell, both physically and mentally, together with thousands of others, the majority of whom did not survive. Tauber, after his release, grotesquely disfigured physically, decided that he had come to the end of his road and gassed himself. Amongst the papers he left behind there is a testimony concerning this very issue. It is a testimony at which he could not have arrived easily. The conclusion at which he arrived was distilled out of the doubts, agonies and conflicting passions which ravaged his soul for many a long, long day. It amounted to this: "I bear no hatred or bitterness towards the German people, for they are good people. Peoples are not evil, only individuals are evil. The English philosopher, Burke was right when he said, 'I do not know the means for drawing up the indictment of an entire nation.' There is no collective guilt ... guilt is individual, like salvation."
The spring of 1945 was upon us. Once again the vines on the slopes of Weibertreu were staked in an upright position, once again they burst into leaf in no time. Neither the German radio nor the press had been very enlightening about the war front since the days of the "Bulge". There was not much of an encouraging nature to tell the Germans. We knew, however, that towards the end of March the Allies crossed the Rhine at several places.
Of all the unexpected things in the world, we received orders to be ready to move on March 31. Why on earth? Where would we be going now? Why at this late hour of the war, should we move? What purpose would it serve? Were we not going to be released at this camp by the Allies, after all? Were we going to be victims of indescribable chaos right at the end?
We did leave on the 31st. We spent four days in a train, which was apparently, going nowhere. Had we known at this time precisely, how perilous the situation had become for the Germans, it would have surprised us greatly that we did arrive somewhere, eventually and had not disappeared into Nacht und Nebel.
What happened on that journey nobody seemed to know. My recollections are vague but I remember being hungry, thirsty, uncomfortable, bored stiff, deadbeat, uncertain of the future, caring not a damn what was to happen next. We travelled for hours during the night, only to find the train standing on the same station the next morning that it had left the night before. Could it not get to its destination because of damaged lines? Did it come back the way it went or was it diverted along another line?
The train stood for hours at times at lonely sidings, sometimes inside tunnels - to obviate being bombed, I supposed. At one of these sidings we were let out into a large paddock in which there was a ganger's cottage. Two or three of us soon sat in the cottage eating bread and drinking niilk. The milk came from a cow that shared the cottage with the owners. She moo-ed at us through a trellis that separated her abode from the living room. I liked the aroma of hay coming from her compartment, which was spotlessly clean, unlike the compartments in our train. We left some items from our Red Cross parcels with the ganger's wife. We did not see any children. The guards watched us. They had no objection. I don't think they could care a hoot about what was happening. Did we wait there for train movements, which had to receive priority? We did not know. The guards did not know. The ganger did not know. Nobody knew. The names of the stations through which we passed did not mean much to us. There was Schwabhalle, Steinbach, Tulau. Then came Carlsheim, Windsfield and Drittenheim. On April 4, we reached Augsburg, a distance from Weinsberg, which I should think would normally be covered in much less than a day, but times were far from normal as any nit-wit could see.
What did it matter when we discovered that we were back at Moosberg, where we had once spent a few days, happy to be out of the cattle trucks. This time it was equally pleasant to be out of that ghastly train.
I don't know how it happened that one of the camp kitchens in this vast camp, which, I believe, held ten thousand prisoners, managed to provide us, after our arrival, with the best stew we had ever had in all our days as prisoners. I suspected that as the end seemed to be so near, everything that had been hoarded by the kitchen staff of the prisoners in the camp, to provide for a rainy day, had now been released. Hence the feast. It had distressing effects on many of us. After four days of near starvation, this was our undoing. Seldom had I heard such groans from people who had tackled their helpings too ravenously. We had been told to occupy empty bungalows some distance away when we had finished our meal. We spent much time reserving places for our half-sections by carrying their belongings and placing their paliasses on the floor, near our own, while they were writhing in agony, not caring whether they ever saw their belongings again.
Another "treat" came our way the day after our meal. We all had to go to a delousing centre. While our clothes were being deloused in hot decontaminating drying ovens or some other launderingcontraption, we were herded into an ablution block where we had a glorious time under hot and cold showers. The place was crowded and steamy and ... then I knew no more until I found myself with several others sitting stark naked in an adjoining room. These "luxury" conditions were more than we could bear. After identifying our deloused and dried clothes, we dressed ourselves and went to our bungalows utterly exhausted.
It was April 5. We did not know that while we passed out under the showers, the American First Army was surrounding 100 000 Germans in the Rühr Valley and that the Russians were about to enter Vienna. We had no way of finding out what was happening in the world.No stowed-away radio on which to get the BBC news. The guards whom we tried to prod did not appear to know anything either. In the process of trying to find out something from them, I made a contact. One of the guards was prepared to throw a small bag of potatoes over the fence at a pre-arranged time and place, after dark, in exchange for sugar or chocolate or some other delicacy. It worked well for some nights but then he backed out.
A rather substantial fence ran between our bungalows and those of the Russian prisoners in the camp. We were not allowed to mix. We had requested the Camp Commandant to allow us to send some of our Red Cross accumulations to the Russians. On no account could this be allowed. Russia was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention. Fair enough. I had not seen a Russian soldier until then. They too, walked on their hind legs, not on all-fours. One of them had a wooden peg-leg with which he scratched about in the garbage that he had tilted out of the bins at the kitchen. He found nothing worth retrieving. The story also circulated here as it seems to have circulated everywhere, that the German guards once sent a vicious Alsatian dog into a Russian bungalow to chase them out for roll call. Instead of it having that effect, the Russians threw the dog's skin to the guards. They had devoured the dog.
The days went by. It was April 12, 1945. As far as I can recall, we did not hear then that on that day, President Roosevelt had died. The world also did not know then about the hysteria, which this news item had sparked off in the doomed headquarters of Hitler, in Berlin. His horoscope, it was discovered previously, predicted that something favourable for Germany would happen in April, 1945. Here it was. Roosevelt's death was sure to throw the Allies into confusion. Great jubilations and slappings on the back in Hitler's bunker. Victory was in sight despite the fact that the Allied armies in the west were within 60 miles of Berlin, and that reports of collapse on all fronts were streaming in. There was every reason for staking everything on this last battle for Berlin. The old men and the boys and youngsters in the Volksturm would now get their chance to be bespattered with blood in the fight to victory or death.
Once more it was to be in vain. This time it was not because Germany was betrayed or stabbed in the back. The fact that some of Hitler's loyal supporters preferred not to be trapped with him in his bunker, did in no way add to the final collapse. They were doing what rats will do when the ship is 99.9% sunk and there is still a possible escape route open. This time it was Hitler's fault entirely. He had insisted unwaveringly that Germany should exist as a state based on his Weltanschauung or not at all.
Few had a glimpse of the stage while the final scene of this grisly drama was being played. "Der Führer", whom his followers, in their extremity, had trusted to lead them to a better life, had betrayed them. His boundless fanaticism and his insatiable lust for power, brought disaster not only on himself and his "German Comrades" but to numerous other millions as well.
What happened in Hitler's bunker in Berlin was investigated in great detail by H.R. Trever-Roper and reported in his book The Last Days of Hitler. In this book, says a reviewer, is traced the "macabre ending of the Third Reich".
It was clear that Hitler's regime was soon to end in what is termed the twilight of the gods, that Götterdammerung, that Gagnarok, according to Scandinavian mythology when the gods are forced to battle it out with the evil powers within them, leading to their mutual destruction and opening the way for something better to supersede them.
Hitler still had some tasks to fulfil. "Before my death," said his political testament, "I expel former Reich Marshal Herman Goering from the party ... In his place I appoint Admiral Doenitz as President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces ... I expel the former Reichsführer of the SS and the Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler from the Party and from all his state offices." During his last days Hitler had discovered that each of the above-mentioned men had conspired to take over the dictatorship of the Third Reich even before he was dead. Both these men were soon to end their lives themselves by swallowing poison.
At Moosberg we knew that something was going to happen soon, How soon? In what shape would it come? Patience, oh, patience that was wearing so thin from having waited so long!
One of the many events, which took place without our knowing anything about it, was the surrender of the German army in Northern Italy on April 29, 1945. We had expected it to happen shortly after our cattle trucks had rumbled through that area such a long time before that it seemed to belong to a different life. It was only one of our many miscalculations. We did not know that Mussolini was captured on April 26, by the anti-Fascists, that he and his mistress Claretta Pettaci were shot while she attempted to rush to him facing a machine gun. We did not know that their bodies were brought to Milan where they were strung up by their heels, with others, for the populace to see and revile.
Hitler received the news about Mussolini on the 29th, the day on which he and Eva Braun were married in his bunker. The day after, on the 30th, they died together; Hitler by shooting himself and doing it thoroughly; Eva, by taking poison, Their bodies were to be devoured by petrol flames. The enemy was to have, "not their live selves or their bodies" said his last will and testament.
The day after Hitler's death, Goebbels went into the courtyard at Hitler's headquarters, where he and his wife and six children had been staying after their house had been badly damaged by bombs. His six children were to play no more. He had given instructions to have them lethally injected, Hela (12), Hilda (11), Helmut (9), Holda (7), Hedda (5) and Heida (3).
Soon after disposing of their children, an SS orderly, as arranged by Goebbels, shot him and his wife in the nape of their necks as they passed through a doorway. Their bodies, too, were to be devoured by flames but there was not enough petrol on the premises for it to be done adequately.
The treatment meted out to these children baffles understanding unless one shared absolutely and fanatically the belief that no German could ever reach fulfilment in a way of life other than that which National Socialism had prescribed and sanctified and which Goebbels had propagandised and glorified, Hitler's Weltanschuung.
It was on April 28, that something happened. We heard gunfire in the distance. What could it be? On the 29th, there was no mistake about it: gunfire, once more, on the distant hills. Clouds of smoke rose above the trees. Tanks appeared on the horizon. We had heard rumours that General Patton was advancing rather more rapidly even that the Allied High Command had sanctioned. Could this be he? German troops were retreating past the camp. They had mounted machine guns in the steeple of a church nearby. Then the steeple collapsed in a cloud of dust and smoke, hit by an enemy shell. The Germans retaliated from the hilltops on the opposite side of the camp. For a short while, shells screamed overhead, bullets ricocheted off the ground between the bungalows. How safe were we during these last few minutes when a feeling of release bubbled up uncontrollably in the camp? Then the shooting stopped. A huge American tank, larger than we had ever seen, arrived at the main gate to the camp. It was too large to enter between the two stone gateposts. More formidable obstacles than gateposts had been encountered and overcome. The tank moved forward. The pillars collapsed. Patton stood on the tank. Uncontrolled exuberance seized the men. Like bees they swarmed on to the tank. They clung to its sides. Others clung to those who had found precarious footholds. Still others held on with their feet dangling. Something invisible moved a mass of human bodies forward to an open space in the camp. The tank halted. Prisoners tumbled down in confusion, liking it immensely. Amidst all this somebody had noticed that the American flag was hoisted over Moosberg camp at 12,42 hours on April 29, 1945. Free at last after having waited for this moment for one full thousand days and more.
What was to happen to us? The Americans could look after us for a while but they were on the move. The war was not yet over. Our guards had fled or were captured. We had arranged to post our own guards round the camp, but could we control this mass of humanity full of pent-up emotions? There were already rumours that some prisoners had escaped and had looted stores in the vicinity. Would it end up with the Americans having to shoot unruly and uncontrolled crowds? We need not have worried about ourselves. Arrangements worked with clock-like precision. The Americans provided food and a contingent remained behind to guard the camp. We were told that on May 4, we would be taken to Landshut, some twenty miles to the north from where we would be evacuated by air within a week. We left on the 4th as arranged. What happened to the Russians and the other inmates of this camp - a motley crowd of many nationalities? I do not know.
To leave under such circumstances should be an easy matter. You should get up and go. Yet, it was not so easy. When we left Weinsberg, I had quite a collection of newspaper cuttings, pictures, a small collection of books and other necessities and valuables. I had packed everything in three Red Cross boxes. It was quite a load to carry to the station, but I took them. Now we were told to take only the barest necessities. I thought the material I had collected was irreplaceable. Then I thought there was nothing left in the world, which could be considered irreplaceable. Everybody had lost everything. Why should I want to take anything with me to remind me of things that I should forget as soon as possible? I acted in desperation. I printed my name on the boxes and addressed them, c/o Union Defence Force, Pretoria, South Africa. When nothing ever turned up, I appreciated that I must have been considerably round the bend for even hoping that there might be a remote possibility.
We arrived in Landshut in trucks in the early afternoon of May 14. It was a fairly large town. There was not a window in the place from which a white flag was not fluttering, in the form of towels, pillowslips, even foundation garments. They indicated that the town had surrendered. I was soon to learn that the town surrendered joyfully, thankful that the Americans had reached the town before the Russians. The River Iser was "flowing rapidly" through the town but the bridges connecting the two halves had been destroyed.
We arrived in time to witness the occupants of several blocks of flats being moved out by the Americans. Where they were accommodated I do not know but we were told to occupy the flats, in which the owners left everything apart from personal necessities. The fortunes and misfortunes of war.
Towards sunset, three of us strolled around the town, completely unaccustomed to such freedom. We could hardly believe it. We came across a middle-aged man in civilian clothes. He greeted us in a friendly manner. He lived in a block of flats, which was not evacuated. We asked him whether he could supply us with boiling water to make tea. Oh, yes, he would be pleased to do so. He invited us into his flat. There we met the grandmother of the family and her two grand-daughters. The man was their bachelor uncle. There were no father or mother. We had our dry tea with us, also some powdered milk, sugar and some chocolate. We would like to share our tea with them. Did they have any potatoes by any chance which they would like to share with us? Oh, yes, they had. They would cook them for us. How would we like them done? We all drank tea together with milk and sugar. We drank from real cups on real saucers, not from mugs. The cups felt strange to the touch. Heavens, we were fraternising with the enemy.
During the few days following, we spent much of our time with this family. We often had tea with them and on occasions shared meals with them that they prepared. We learned that the mother of the two girls had died some years before. Their father was killed on the Russian front. The grandmother turned out to be an invalid, paralysed from the waist down. The girls were late teenagers. The uncle had been released from the army. He was a sick man. He had been working in the municipal offices before the town surrendered. The Americans were now using him to assist in the task of creating order out of the chaos, which followed on Hitler's death. The grandmother's chair stood in a corner of the lounge, below an icon on a shelf. She assured us that had she not been paralysed, she would have refused to go into any Government office where it would be expected of her to greet the officials with "Heil Hitler" instead of the "Gruuml;ss Gott to which she was accustomed.
The elder daughter had to arrange for the members of the family to be registered with the Occupying Power, for rationing purposes. She stood in queues for hours. Her sister attended to the household chores. They seemed to be reasonably comfortably off.
I noticed a photo album and asked the younger daughter to show it to me. Quite a number of photos had been removed from the album, leaving only the photo corners. She explained that they had removed all the photos recording their days in the Hitler Youth Movement. They were afraid the Americans might see them. She said they were forced to join but admitted that they had great fun at times and did not dislike belonging to the movement. There were also some photos of Russian atrocities committed against the Germans. They did not remove them because it never entered their minds that the Americans might doubt whether they told the true story or the only story.
One afternoon, a young woman, a relation of theirs, came to the flat. Her husband had been taken prisoner by the Americans when some fighting took place in the vicinity of the town a few days before. They had not been married long. The prisoners were still in a temporary camp outside the town. She had tried to see her husband but had only caught a glimpse of him behind the barbed wire fence. She was a very distressed woman. She stood at the lounge window and pointed at an American tank milling round in a public garden down below. She started sobbing uncontrollably, saying: "They said this would never happen." Regaining control of herself she wanted to know from us how we were treated as prisoners of war. How would the Americans treat her husband? We told her that we had survived for nearly three years in Italian and German camps. She gasped at the thought. We assured her rather vaguely that her husband would survive the type of treatment he was likely to receive from the Americans, more especially as he was not likely to be a prisoner for long, seeing that the war in Europe had ended that very day, May 7. Yes, but Germany had lost the war, the Americans would take it out o[n] them. She wept. She wanted to know whether we were married. Had we any children? Yes, we were married and we had children. How terrible it must have been for us as prisoners all that time. How terrible for our families. We admitted it was terrible. Did we hear from them regularly? Were they well? What terrible things wars were. Yes, we admitted wars were terrible things. They were thankful that the Americans reached Landshut before the Russians. The Americans were responsible for prolonging the war. It could have ended years before in Germany's favour if they had not come in. But those, with whom they had to deal in Landshut, had treated them well. The Russians would have treated them brutally. There would have been no point in telling this poor distraught woman that the Russians would probably have done nothing worse to them than Hitler had ordered Germans to do to Russians.
We said goodbye to them the following day. They were sorry that the greeting "auf wiedersehen" did not seem to fit the occasion. They were not likely to see us again. We said we were sorry too. They hoped we would soon be united with our families. We said we hoped so too.
I shuddered at the thought of the enormous tasks, which would be facing the Occupying Powers.
At the airfield at Landshut the sky was alive with Dakotas. They landed, taxied in, stopped for a while for prinsoners to get in and then took off. Our turn came at about 12,00 hours on May 7. We flew fair1y low, at about 3 000 feet at a speed of 150 miles per hour, I was told. We saw several large shunting yards where trams stood in crazy confusion, crosswise over and alongside railway lines. I understood why our train did not have a smooth run from Weinsberg. We crossed the Rhine and landed at Metz at 14,00 hours. We stopped for a brief 45 minutes while we were supplied with delicious oranges from California. At 15,30 hours we landed at Brussels where we spent the night in army barracks. What happened in Brussels the previous day I do not know. On this night the town was dead .. The people we saw, revealed no emotion one way or the other, of joy or of anything else. Nothing to show that a war of six years duration had ended the previous day.
The next day, the RAF were our hosts. We crept into the bellies of bombers and flew over the Channel. I was close to the pilot who pointed out huge bomb craters under the sea, close to the shore. We landed at Horsham airfield. A bevy of WAAFs came out to meet us and insisted on carrying our meagre belongings. "Oh, my goodness gracious me," I protested, "no please it is not at all necessary." But one of them took my valise. I felt a complete spare part. We were given tea and sandwiches and spent the night in an air force camp. The next day, we left by train for Brighton where all South African prisoners were scattered in flats and houses that had been occupied by Americans and Canadians who had since left.
Brighton and Hove are fully fused into one whole. I never knew when I was in which place but it did not matter. Brighton beach disappointed me - fair-sized pebbles but no sand. Yet it fascinated me to the extent that I often found myself walking up and down the beach or sitting there, staring over the ocean. After three years of no escape from people huddled together, I enjoyed being "far from the madding crowd".
We had much money to our credit and could draw substantial amounts. We could, however, not obtain coupons to buy certain commodities unchecked. By the time I had bought a good raincoat and a good pair of shoes, I had run out of coupons for men's attire. I pooh-poohed the idea, which seems to prevail, that we had probably lost the ability to look after ourselves. Then something happened, which indicated that I was not quite "erby" as the Hollanders would say. I was not "with it", I was pleased with the overcoat I bought. I took it and started wandering from place to place, buying little odds and ends. When it came to buying my shoes, I found I had lost the main source of my funds, my purse. Pickpockets, thieves, robbers, rascals, the scum of the earth had congregated at Brighton. In desperation I traced my steps to the shop where I had bought my coat. Could I possibly have left it there? When I entered the shop, the lady behind the counter told me she was expecting me. Some of us, she thought, needed some looking after. I noticed particularly that she did not say we needed our grandmothers to look after us. Was I perhaps looking for my purse? There it was. How wrong I was about the scum of the earth. High up in the sky rose this lady in my estimation. I was to meet other people like her who still appeared to be about in a shattered world ..
We had to provide the authorities with information about ourselves lest we should swell the ranks of the "lost" people after the war. In return, the authorities had to provide items of equipment, which had to be recorded against our names. We were back in the army. I had rather forgotten that. I thought we had recorded enough. Were we not free yet?
We left Brighton on May 20, bound for Glasgow, where the passenger liner HMS Strathaird was waiting to take hundreds of prisoners back to South Africa. I wish I had seen Glasgow to better advantage. Although it was the month of May, it could easily have been a winter's day when we arrived there. It was grimy, drizzly, cold and miserable. We went on board. It took us two days before we left the Clyde for the open sea. After that the ship had to be blacked-out at night. Damn! Some U-boats were still about. Perhaps their commanders did not know or want to know that the war was over.
We entered Freetown harbour on June 2. Nobody was allowed ashore. We waited for two days for Allied troops from somewhere in the interior to join us. Waiting for things to happen was not yet over.
On June 5, "His Majesty, King Neptune, Lord of the Seas, Sovereign of all Oceans, Ruler of the Waves, certified that we were granted the Freedom of the Seas." We had crossed the equator. Excitement started to mount. We were approaching the Fairest Cape of all. One of my companions was morose, miserable and impossible. He eventually told me that he had not had a letter from his wife for months. It was only when he arrived at Brighton that there was a letter telling him that there would be no point whatsoever in his coming back to her after his arrival in Cape Town. I saw him disappear into the crowd after we had landed on June 12. Four years and two days had passed since we left Durban in the Mauretania. "Oh, my word!"
A few more days went by before I was to see my wife standing on the platform of a lonely little station where she had arranged to meet me. A little girl of four years and eight months was standing beside her mother. How can anybody know what goes on in the mind of a child of that age under such circumstances? I presumed that she was probably dreading meeting the strange man who was coming in that train. I decided to go about making her acquaintance gradually. I think it turned out to have been the correct approach. I hope so.
Some weeks after my return, I paid a visit to my mother in our hometown. Many of my old acquaintances and many life-long friends of the family turned their backs on me. I was not acceptable in their circles. Attitudes had not changed.
How far have we advanced on the Calendar of Years, since the beginning of World War II? Five-and-thirty years must be added to 1939, to find the answer. This period of time amounts to no time worth mentioning in the historical sense. In the lives of individuals it is of great significance. It means that an almost complete shift has taken place between what was and what is. A new generation has taken over or is in the process of doing so. When I come to think of it, our younger daughter was born a month after her elder sister's sixth birthday. Today, both of them are young mothers.
What does the future hold for them and their children? During those terrible war years, already almost forgotten, a period of darkness reigned of which the intensity and the extent are unparalleled in recorded history. It ended, but no one thought it ended all wars. It ended, not as a result of negotiations. It ended because the Allied powers were in a position to out-violence the violence of the Axis powers. It was proof once more that violence once started, tends to become uncontrollable. Is this to be the pattern for the future?
The air attacks on Warsaw, London, Rotterdam and others, had first to pale into minor incidents in comparison with those on Cologne, Hamburg and others. In the Far East the attacks on Pearl Harbour and other American and British bases, had first to become tame examples of those on Tokyo and other places.
The tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany, had to exceed by far the tonnage of those dropped on England. The bombing of military targets by both sides was ineffective. It had to be extended to indiscriminate bombing of cities, which killed in the region of 400 civilians in Coventry but which shortly afterwards killed about seven times that number in Wuppertal and they were puny efforts in comparison with what was to follow.
Releasing high-explosive bombs on cities caused insufficient damage and casualties to paralyse the countries at war with one another. Incendiary bombs had to be dropped. They set cities alight causing a sudden current of hot air to rise to great heights. Cooler air rushed in with tornado-like fury, to flatten what was left standing. Under such circumstances, bombproof shelters were transformed into incinerators in which no one could be identified.
Japan could not be subdued quickly enough by the Americans turning Tokyo into an inferno. Atom bombs had to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This marked more than the end of the war. It marked the beginning of the end of the world if the use of these, and worse, weapons were to continue. Oh, but how often has this not been said!
The horror of it all shocked the world, which had become almost immune to shock. It had experienced so much of it. It had become a way of life. This shock, however, had something new about it. It hurled man into a realm of experience not previously encountered. The consequences of using weapons of this nature meant that in the foreseeable future, no nation would experience that elation, which accompanied victories over miserable enemies. The violated would be destroyed but there would be no escape for the violator. Terror-stricken he would be gazing at his own body blistering all over and being gnawed at, mercilessly, by a silent and invisible enemy, a victim of his own doings. Nothing to be gained, everything to lose.
Robert Ardrey, in his book The Social Contract, suggests that if this shock, which man experienced at that time were to prevent the use of weapons of this order in future, then the terrible price Japan had to pay might prove to have been worth the purchase.
It might be appropriate at this stage to take a brief look at this work by Ardrey. In this book, according to one of its reviewers, Ardrey directs the spotlight "from every area of research" on the baffling problem of man's aggressive and violent ways and his apparent inability to avoid bringing about his own destruction in the end. The story is as baffling as ever. Man's apparent inability to learn from experience, passes all imagination and understanding. How else does one explain that the holocaust of six years duration had not resulted in peace? Or does the explanation lie in the very conditions caused by the disturbances of those years? The magma that was poured out over the world has not yet cooled down. It is still too hot. It still smoulders and boils and bubbles. Miniature explosions must inevitably occur in this molten mass. How long will it take to settle and become stabilised?
Is man's inability to deal with the conditions confronting him, due to his being a risen-ape, still struggling on his way up from a region enveloped in darkness of which he knows nothing, to a height which he hopes he will find bathed in glorious sunlight, or is it due to his being a fallen-angel, stili struggling desperately to return again to the lofty heights from which he was once pushed in disgrace, into the yawning abyss below? Omar Khayyam frequenting Doctor and Saint and apparently finding no answer as yet.
To the ordinary man all that matters is whether there is hope for more tranquillity and less turbulence in the world of the future. Or is tranquillity so very boring and turbulence so very exciting?
Ardrey sets himself the task of examining the needs of man, which if fulfilled could possibly bring about a more settled social order instead of perpetual social disorder. He stipulates three inborn needs of man, which could be accepted as the hypothesis from which to start in an attempt to discover how these needs could be satisfied.
These three needs are, the need for identity, the need for stimulation and the need for security. Their opposites or the denial of these needs, are anonymity, boredomanxiety. Amongst these the highest-ranking need is for identity. It is the need of the individual to be recognised by his social partners, irrespective of his status, as a somebody, a unique being, not to be a nonentity, not an anonymity.
The lowest-ranking need is security or freedom from want Of basic requirements. In between, in order of need, ranks stimulation. When the individual fails to achieve that identity, which is his due by virtue of it being his need in the highest category, he temporarily looks for stimulation, his next lower need. At the other end of the scale, the individual might succeed in finding security, which is his lowest and most basic need. Having found that, he seeks to fulfil his next higher need, in stimulation. Thus, from both sides, man is pressed into the middle road, looking for stimulation, for its opposite is unendurable boredom. He presses on along the road of stimulation, hoping to find a place in the sun, where, by virtue of his being a unique individual, he will not be overlooked, not be ignored, not be pushed aside, not be treated as an unidentifiable being.
Technological and scientific advances have aided man to an astonishing extent to meet the requirements for the security of large numbers - needs, largely of a material nature. But, even if by some unpredictable means at man's disposal, he succeeds in providing food and shelter for the millions who still live in poverty and deprivation, it will still remain true that man cannot live by bread alone. Social man still has a long and tortuous path ahead of him before he will be able to provide for the masses the other things besides bread. Their psychological needs will have to be fulfilled.
Ardrey suggests that we are likely to find the cause for much of the unrest of the world, not so much "in the hungry belly but in the hungry psyche". The hungry belly will grab the material resources of the world. The hungry psyche will grab the minds of people and throw them into confusion with far more serious consequences.
The hungry psyche and quite clearly the hungry belly as well, result from new conditions being experienced for the first time to the extent to which they are being experienced at present. World wars, localised wars, tribal clashes, climatic disasters, travel hazards, murders, suicides, still wipe millions of people off the face of the earth. On the other hand, a much more potent force is at work, which more than offsets these losses. Medical science and health services prevent millions from dying of pestilence, epidemics, diseases, wounds and injuries. This increases the population of the world to proportions not experienced hitherto - all the killings notwithstanding. What is the answer?
It is a common occurrence for people to discuss ways and means of preventing the large-scale pollution caused by overpopulation, which threatens to kill us; to discuss the need for keeping our air clean, our soil fertile, our water pure. We turn to the seas and the oceans to provide what the land cannot provide in the way of food for the millions. We discuss the dangers of high-density living, which is creating a new kind of neurosis. We discuss the prevention of traffic-jams and vehicle snarl-ups and provide at prodigious cost, freeways and byways to relieve the pressure only to find it building up elsewhere. We discuss the dangers of peoples of different tribes, different ethnic groups, different nations, spilling over the borders of their own territories because they must.
It is abundantly clear that, if need be, man has the means at his disposal to decrease the world population drastically and swiftly in ways both violent and brutal. He also has the means of preventing this increase and removing the necessity for killing those who were unfortunate to have been born. It can be done, says Ardrey, by means "both sane and humane". And we know it.
We discuss less openly, in some circles, almost apologetically the sane and humane methods lest we offend some of our social partners who are prevented or prevent themselves from choosing the only road to conditions in which the hunger of both the belly and the psyche, can be stilled. Let us look for a moment at the aggressive drive in man. It is not easily put off-course. His aggressiveness has been, and always will be, a powerful force to the good. Without it we would have crossed no mountain barriers, we would have penetrated into no parched deserts, we would have plunged into no seas and oceans to find out what lies beyond, we would not have sped through the skies above, we would not have protected the defenceless against the violator, we would have dared nothing, we would have broken no shackles, we would not have survived. Man's aggressive nature will oppose over-population if it threatens our very existence. Aggressiveness dictates that he must find identity. The individual who looks for it in an overpopulated world is likely to find that he is reaching for the "unreachable star".
Prompted by the aggressive drive, the psyche finds its nourishment and individuals find their identity in sub-groups, which thrive in smaller worlds of their own creation. These smaller worlds are as varied as the needs of their members dictate. They are homogeneous worlds, free from the strains and stresses of the heterogeneous worlds. In these worlds the members establish their own territories, they make, and abide by, their own rules. Within each little world there is cooperation, solidarity, singleness of purpose, understanding, ready communication. Points of friction are removed. They establish the necessary hierarchies for their existence within the group. They achieve identity.
These small worlds exist even amongst children. They have worlds of their own in which they make contact with like-minded individuals, pursuing common interests. Basically, these little worlds are as innocent as the day is long. It serves to prove the innate necessity even at this stage of the need of the individual for belonging to a group where he will be understood, where he is accepted, where he can communicate freely, where he can find identity.
Likewise, but on a far more diversified scale and perhaps more purposeful, adults establish smaller worlds of their own. They exist as clubs, unions, fraternities, parties and numerous other organisations. They operate within the bounds dictated by that aggressiveness in man, which is desirable, even necessary for his existence. They are a powerful force for the good of the social structure. Whereas they have in mind bringing about advantages for themselves, they also advocate improvements, advantages and better conditions in the community as a whole.
There is a delicate balance between acting within the bounds dictated by aggressiveness, which is a prerequisite for progress, even for survival, on the one hand and on the other hand, breaking out of these bounds into the realm of violence, which destroys the fruits of progress and threatens even survival.
If this delicate balance is to be maintained, we keep the psyche hungry at our peril. Then the small worlds will have precious little in common with what will then be regarded as the wide, ugly, unfriendly world. Outsiders will be strangers. They will be bent on their own pursuits no matter how detrimental to others. They will show antagonism towards the social order, which they consider refuses to cater for their needs - the hungry psyche. Constant frustrations imposed by an established order, which refuses to advance, to improve, to create opportunities for development, will turn the well-intentioned aggressiveness in these groups into something which scoffs at their previous pursuits. Aggressive man can be thwarted to a point where he changes for the worse. He will discard the overall in which he pursued peaceful and useful ends in workshop or laboratory. He will don the attire of the vandal and the destroyer. He will use different tools. He will break the rules of the social contract to which he formerly adhered. He will allow his laudable aggressiveness to break bounds. He will resort to violence. He will become a demon. He will lend a ready ear to the voices of demonstrators and revolutionaries. He will join secret societies, resistance and underground movements. He will fall in under the banners of rebels, freedom fighters and terrorists. He will clash openly with those who have to maintain law and order.
Disorder has replaced order. Violence holds sway. It gives rise to doubts whether man can survive under such circumstances.
If mere survival of man as a species is at stake, we, apparently, need have no fear. There is a powerful force, which will ensure the survival of the species. "Aggression", says Ardrey, "has as its main aim the balancing of order and disorder to preserve the species with a power far beyond human predilection. There is visible throughout all nature a bias in favour of order. We have no means to explain it... But it is there ... survival dictates aggression's limits ... As no population can survive without sufficient numbers being sufficiently aggressive, so no population could survive, were competitions customarily carried to deadly decision. We might not survive in accordance with the ways of our own making. Nature takes no notice of social contracts, which do not work, of social contracts, which harbour the germs of destruction within themselves. The question arises whether overpopulation of our own doing is not the root cause of much of the unrest in the world.
Man needs a world less preoccupied with the numerous problems, which are but by-products of a situation, which stems directly from people being forced to trample each other underfoot in massive, sprawling, congested, so-called conurbations - a word as ugly as the conditions which prevail in them.
"The new biology," says Ardrey, "provides no proposition more demonstrable than that of the self-regulation of animal numbers. Rare is the population that has ever expanded until it reached the limits of food supply. Rare are the individuals who directly compete for food. An infinite variety of self-regulating mechanisms, physiological and behavioural provide that animal numbers ... will never challenge the carrying capacity of an environment. Birth control is the law of the species."
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas R Malthus, a political economist warned the world that human populations tend to increase in geometrical progression as 3,9,27,81 ... whereas food supplies tend to increase in arithmetical progression as 3,6,9,12 .. He urged parents to raise smaller families in order to avert the disaster which stared them in the face.
Malthus did not know to what extent new scientific and technological advances would in due course wipe out this discrepancy. His theories were pooh-poohed. At present, however, there are numerous Malthuses who believe that man is at the end of the road towards finding adequate food supplies. He would have to return to the advice offered by Malthus, or perish.
Once we can no longer regulate our own affairs; once conditions develop within our social structure, which are beyond our control, "we may be well assured," says Ardrey, "that anarchy will not be the winner," This means that someone else will take over - a more powerful force than ourselves. By then we would have surrendered to some power beyond human predilection. We would have been forced to submit to violent impositions beyond our power to challenge. We would have allowed the laws of the jungle and the savannah to save us from chaos, disorder and eventual destruction of the species, in the same way that these laws prevent the destruction of the species in those regions untouched by man. We would have admitted that we had failed to use to our advantage that unique gift, the rational mind, which has been bestowed exclusively on man amongst all animals.
"How profound," Ardrey asks, "is our propensity for violence? To what extent is our capacity for foreseeing dependable? History will tell us, if the younger of those amongst us, live to read it. Will some quite unpredictable surge of common sense overcome Homo sapiens in his extremity? While it is improbable, it is not impossible. Such could be our evolutionary way."
At the time when I was busy with this part of the story, something happened which made all the fears and doubts about man's ability to curtail his violent ways, thrust themselves, once more, unmistakeably to the fore.
Fierce tank and air battles were raging. The war in the Middle East, in October 1973, was in progress. The use of ground-to-air missiles was being tested out on an unprecedented scale. It brought yet another new dimension into modern warfare. The highly developed big industrial powers had put a new toy of destruction on the market, the umpteenth improvement on the bow and arrow. Its acceptability, or otherwise, to the warring nations had to be tested. The world had taken not a single step towards taking weapons off the market because of their deadly potential to kill as it did with DDT because of its killer-qualities. On the contrary there was a rush to satisfy the demand for weapons. If there had been nothing of that nature on the market to supply, we might have witnessed warnng forces having nothing else but stones and rocks to hurl at each other and desert sand to throw into each other's eyes. It might have tired them out in a very short time.
Anxieties at the possibility of the major powers becoming involved themselves, increased by the day. The world was perilously near to a switch being thrown which could set the world alight. Feverish activities, once more, amongst diplomats, foreign ministers and heads of state. The ordinary man is baffled by arsonists who feign ignorance of how fires are started. The ordinary man was once again a pawn in the hands of the manipulators of the game. Once more he could only wait and see while others prayed fervently for intervention by God or Allah.
News media reported that the World War III was just round the corner. Then they reported that the possibility had receded. Then there was news of further flare-ups. Uncertainty once more. Then a ceasefire was ordered. Almost immediately it was reported that it was an extremely shaky truce - anything could happen. As always happens in major military campaigns, there were rumours, after the event, of quarrels and disagreements and recriminations amongst high-ups in military circles. There were grave issues at stake about which people in high places had known all the time but because of lack of communication had done nothing, or precious little, to ease the situation.
It was already clear that in the aftermath of the flare-up much would follow from which nobody would benefit. Its only value would be to prove that any benefits likely to follow from it, would be nothing that could not have been achieved by means of negotiations. But it seems that negotiation can only take place round a table first bespattered with blood - the blood of those who are always the first victims, the ordinary soldiers, not the blood of those whose business it was to prevent these things by means other than sophisticated weaponry.
After having refused for two decades and longer to talk to each other, talks were now being held at a reference point on the map somewhere between Suez and Cairo, an area with which we were not unfamiliar thirty years before. Could it possibly be that some quite unpredictable surge of common sense might still overcome the opposing forces and their collaborators, in their extremity? Or have they not reached anything that even remotely resembles extremity? Could it be true after all, that the atom bomb did have the effect of the Japanese price having been worth the purchase? Or would we have to purchase peace at a still higher price at some time in the future?
Could it be that we might hope that the major powers, at any rate, were heeding the inscription on the memorial to the victims of the incendiary bombs, which destroyed Hamburg and which reads: "May those generations that come after us be spared this. May this mass-grave be a warning and exhortation to humanity."? Or do memorials and inscriptions of this nature only serve to irritate us in that they attempt to deter us from doing what we are intent on doing over and over again?
Might there be hope that the nations will decide to manage their affairs better lest someone else steps in to do it for them? Ardrey warns us against that someone "beyond the broad dark river. He broods, he waits just as he has always waited. Neither tall nor short, neither broad nor lean, shadowy in outline, without distinction of feature, he wears an odd sort of hat and an old, old sword by his side. And if we do not act in time, he will." Or do we not fear anything as phantom-like as that and so little monstrous-looking?
Is there anything that gives us reason to hope that history will tell us and that the younger of those amongst us will live to read that the world had become a better place for them? Or will history tell them that that day has not yet dawned?
Have we any reason to believe that all the quests through the ages to discover what it is about and about has led man to come out not by the same door as in he went? Has he perhaps come out by one which reveals vistas different from and horizons wider than the ones at which he had been staring himself bleary-eyed for far too long? Or are we already witnessing being controlled from beyond the broad dark river because as rational beings we fail to prevent overpopulation of our domain? If we fail to do it by means sane and humane, some powerful source beyond our control, will do it by means violent and brutal - the only means it knows of first rectifying the position before it takes over to save the species from becoming extinct.
Can we hope that man might in his extremity decide to establish great opportunities to provide for both the basic and the highest needs of man to enable him to rise to loftier heights bathed in glorious sunlight, be the path be that of the fallen-angel or the risen-ape.
When our father returned from "the bag" in June 1945, he was filled with hope and enthusiasm for changes in South Africa. Those who fought in World War II and were imprisoned for so long, had to believe it had not been all for naught.
Dad returned to the teaching of History, at Port Natal Hoërskool in Umbilo, Durban, but this did not last long. He was restless and wanted to be part of the changes he envisaged. He joined Jan Smuts' United Party during the auspicious times before the 1948 elections. As a Party Organiser he fought that election in South West Africa (now Namibia). The result of the election was the coming to power for the first time, of the Nationalist Party, and it remained in power until 1994, when the ANC received a majority vote.
He must have been distraught at what was happening in the political arena in South Africa. What was to come was what he had fought so hard against in Germany - a regime that relentlessly dominated large parts of the population, stamping out many freedoms and passing laws through parliament that imposed strict controls over the lives of many.
Seeing no future in the United Party he returned to teaching, but this time in the private sector, as a teacher of Second Language Afrikaans at Michaelhouse. This again did not last long, in fact only a year (1951). The family moved back to Durban North and Dad taught Afrikaans again, at Durban High School (DHS). The teaching of Afrikaans language to boys who rarely used or even heard the language was soul-destroying and he did not enjoy his year there either. He was appointed to the Natal Education Department in Pietermaritzburg as an Organiser of Vocational Guidance in 1953.
He finally found his niche, here, in the Education Department. He was able to fulfil his ideals in education as part of the Inspectorate, until he retired in 1971. On his retirement he was Deputy Director of Education, a highly respected member of the Department and able supporter of the Director, Gerald Hosking.
A poem written by Philip Nel, June 4, 1971,
on Dad's retirement from the Natal Education Department
As a person Dad had travelled a long road from his exceptionally impoverished Afrikaner, Dutch Reformed, Nationalist roots, in the small Karroo town of Aberdeen. He embraced the English traditions of his wife; we grew up in a strongly English-speaking environment. He fought for Jannie Smuts, for whom he had great respect, rejected the politics and church of his parents, and stood for democracy, freedom of speech and the right of the individual to strive for betterment.
The Natal Witness photograph
"On the retirement of Mr CG van den Berg,
Deputy director of education."
And yet, in his last years he seemed displaced. Perhaps he yearned for his past - for his beloved Karroo, which he had rarely revisited, the open spaces, the dryness; for the sounds of his language; for his people. In the pathways he chose he must have left behind so much of himself.
The choices he made to reject everything that was important to his family could not have been easy. He always believed that he had broken his mother's heart by "defecting". He was ostracised by many in the Afrikaner community because he married an English girl and volunteered to fight in this war. But difficult as it must have been to reject what he knew, it must have been even more difficult for him to become what he wasn't. He WAS displaced in many ways - not one thing and yet not the other. He used to joke that he wasn't an in-law in Mom's family, but an "out-law". In spite of all this, he never gave us the feeling that he would have had it any different - that he would rather have been doing something else, somewhere else - not without us anyway!
He demonstrated again and again, during his lifetime, in his professional and in his private life, his exceptionally high ideals of personal integrity, his compassion, his insight and his intellectual excellence. He was a caring and loving husband, father and grandfather. He left us with wonderful memories and an example par excellance.
Adinda Hartopp, née van den Berg
Reinet Hart, née van den Berg
Editor's note
I have kept Dad's original manuscript as near as possible as he wrote it. However I altered some use of capitalisation and punctuation to make the text easier to read, in line with modern literary practices.
Thanks to the Red Cross Organisation, prisoners of war were provided with materials for various hobbies. Dad put these to good use in his "Sketches from Memory". I have included as many of these as possible and some photographs of that time.
Adinda Hartopp
May, 2005