MILITARY
The final slog
TAYLOR DOWNING salutes an account of the often overlooked last days of the Second World War in Europe, when Allied troops faced stubborn resistance from German forces
1945: Victory in the West
by Peter Caddick-Adams
Hutchinson Heinemann, 652 pages, £30
February 1945. For many, the war in Europe is pretty well over. But Major Bill Deedes of the 12th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (later Telegraph editor) saw it differently. Writing home, he railed against “the damned papers, which are full of propaganda and pretend the war is as good as won. By golly it’s not. Lots of 16-year-olds are keen to die for Hitler.”
This comment sets up military historian Dr Peter Caddick-Adams’s excellent latest book. Many accounts of the war concentrate on the great set-piece actions such as D-Day or the battle of the Bulge and gloss over the final stages of combat. 1945 focuses on the last 100 days of the war in Europe, and the advance into Germany where many towns and villages were bitterly defended – and recent events in Ukraine have shown how determined and resourceful defenders can make it immensely difficult for an advancing army.
Two key elements impress in Caddick-Adams’s account. First is the sheer scale of the Allied advance. As supreme commander, Dwight D Eisenhower had command of seven Allied armies, a total of 4 million men and women. But that did not prevent Hitler’s diehards from fiercely defending many towns. This is the second factor determining the final stages of the war. While many professional soldiers realised the game was up, Hitler-Jugend boys fought with obsessive determination. And almost everywhere the SS were equally fanatical. Houses that displayed a white flag as Allied troops approached were destroyed by the diehards. Old Nazis wanted the defenders to fight to the death, like Cologne gauleiter, Joseph Grohé, who demanded that the city be contested metre by metre in unerbittliche Verteidigung (unrelenting defence). Grohé himself then fled across the Rhine.
The first few chapters of 1945 look at the delay in the Allied advance in the winter of 1944–45 caused by the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes. But from February 1945 onwards, the advance rapidly got into gear. After the Colmar pocket was finally encircled in the south, Montgomery’s 21st Army Group started a slow advance in the north.
By the end of March, progress through the Saar-Palatinate broke the back of the Wehrmacht. More than 100,000 prisoners were taken in this one area. General Patton’s rapid advance soon led to the capture of Trier. Army Group commander Bradley was anxious to avoid a major fight to seize the city and radioed Patton: “Bypass Trier.” Patton replied: “Have already taken Trier. Should I give it back?”
The events of March and April provide a thrilling narrative with the surprise capture of the only intact bridge over the Rhine, at Remagen; Patton’s determination to cross the Rhine before Monty; and the major river crossings late in March using flotillas of landing craft, DUKWs and floating tanks. In the north, there was Operation Varsity, the biggest airborne drop of the war. Then thousands of engineers built a variety of pontoon and Bailey bridges. The fastest went up in seven hours. Some of these temporary assault bridges remained in use until the 1950s. Hundreds of thousands of men, tens of thousands of vehicles and vast stores of supplies began to cross the mighty Rhine. As his men crossed, Monty sent a message wishing them “good hunting”.
“One American armoured battalion advanced 59 miles in a day, but German resistance did not end until the signing of the last surrender agreements ”
In the “Ruhr pocket”, five US corps surrounded 400,000 Wehrmacht soldiers. Hitler wanted a fanatical, Stalingrad-type defence. But after just two weeks Field Marshal Model ordered his youngest and oldest soldiers to return home. The rest surrendered. Model walked into a wood and shot himself.
As the Allied armies rolled across the Reich, they witnessed the aftermath of Gestapo executions of “defeatists”. Bodies were strung up with signs hanging from their necks saying “Ich bin ein Reichsverrater” (“I’m a national traitor”). The roads filled with “Displaced Persons”, escaped slave labourers or camp inmates, of whom 12.5 million were counted at the end of the war. Journalist Alan Moorehead noted how the entire Nazi state had relied on “millions upon millions of slave workers”. He described “a vast moving human frieze” pouring down every road like “the breaking up of a medieval slave state”.
Then of course came the liberation of the concentration camps. First Ohrdruf, visited by Eisenhower himself. Then Buchenwald and Dachau by the Americans. And Bergen-Belsen by the British. More followed. Few who saw the barely living survivors ever forgot what they had witnessed. And both armies called in film cameramen to record the horrors.
By the last days, the Allies were advancing apidly against collapsing opposition. One By the last days, the Allies were advancing American armoured battalion advanced 59 miles in a day, but resistance did not end until the signing of the last surrender agreements.
Peter Caddick-Adams has spent years studying the campaigns that ended the war in Europe. He has lectured to military academies, taken groups of officers across the battlefields, and has read immensely in the vast literature of official histories and personal memoirs. His narrative is peppered with first-person accounts of the landscape of battle.
A key strength of 1945 is that Caddick-Adams knows the qualities that make a good combat leader. On almost every page is the story of a commanding officer, often of a division or a corps, showing a can-do spirit, inspiring his men and making good tactical choices – from the unflappable Troy Middleton, commander of US VIII Corps, to Richard Hull who at 37 was the youngest divisional commander in the British Army. He is particularly impressed with those commanders who displayed an aggressive spirit and led from the front, such as Maj Gen Maurice Rose of the US 3rd Armored Division.
But Caddick-Adams is much weaker on the strategic level. For instance, he devotes only a couple of pages to one of the most momentous decisions of April 1945: when Eisenhower decided to leave the capture of Berlin to the Soviets, sending a direct message to Stalin to inform him. Militarily this might have been wise, but politically the consequences helped shape the Cold War. Churchill, who had a clearer sense of what lay in the future, was furious and appealed to Washington, but General Marshall backed his field commander.
Most accounts of the Second World War in Europe devote only a few pages to the last 100 days. 1945 corrects this balance and makes an important contribution to military history. It is also a great read and powerful reminder of how the Second World War in Europe was definitely not over until the final surrender.
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