After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (21 page)

‘And now,’ he said at last, ‘we will attend the last act. These German officers have arrived back. We will go and see what their answer is.’ He led the way to his caravan on the hill-top.

In the night, Montgomery’s officers had managed to get hold of a copy of the surrender drawn up for Field Marshal Alexander in Italy. Based upon this, a similar instrument had been written up to meet the present situation. Friedeburg, cigarette in hand, slowly led his delegation across the heath to Montgomery’s caravan, where he saluted, mounted the steps and went inside. There followed some discussion as to whether Dunkirk and the Channel Islands might be included in the surrender, but the subject was dropped as it might cause too much delay. The four other envoys, tight-waisted, rigid and silent, stood nervously in a semicircle at the steps of the caravan. Inside, Friedeburg had asked for a German copy of the terms, but he scarcely glanced at them.

Presently he came out, nodded to the others, said something along the lines of, ‘It’s just as we thought’, and the five men walked slowly past us to the conference tent. Its sides had been rolled up and six chairs had been placed at a trestle table covered with a plain army blanket. The Germans took their place at the table. Never have I seen Montgomery more sure of himself than at this moment. As he came past us he murmured pleasantly, ‘this is a great occasion’, and he proceeded calmly to the tent, the terms of the surrender in his hand. He conducted proceedings rather like a schoolmaster taking an oral examination.

As he went into the tent the Germans rose and saluted. Then, sitting at the head of the table, spectacles on his nose, Montgomery read the terms slowly, precisely and deliberately in English. The Germans, who spoke hardly a syllable of English, sat there without a word, for the most part staring vacantly at the grey army blanket. Camera lights flicked on and off. The reading took a full three minutes.

At the end Montgomery picked up an unpainted post office pen, dipped it in the ink-pot and said: ‘You will now sign the document. First, Admiral Friedeburg …’, and he handed the pen across.

‘Next, General Kinzel.’ Each man leaned over Montgomery’s chair to affix his signature. ‘Next, Rear Admiral Wagner …’

And so it went on.

‘Finally: “I will now sign for General Eisenhower, the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces”, and the Field Marshal added his own signature with the same pen.’

Cameraman Paul Wyand and soundman Martin Gray recorded the ceremony. As the tent was only 20 feet square, Wyand had to film proceedings through a flap in the tent wall. ‘Lighting was my big problem,’ Wyand recalled. ‘I scrounged around for photoflood bulbs … borrowed an army generator and by 4.30pm the tent was lit like a Hollywood film set.’

Montgomery inspected the set-up and approved. He asked where he should stand and Wyand pointed out the ideal position. A flustered ADC said, ‘The Field Marshal cannot do that, he must meet them,’ but Montgomery was delighted. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘they will come to me.’ When Wyand suggested a pause after the preliminaries, to allow him to change lenses, Monty replied: ‘There will be no preliminaries. If they don’t sign we fight on.’

An hour before the signing it began to pour with rain. Wyand started to shoot as the Germans came into the tent, met Montgomery and sat around the two tables covered with grey army blankets. ‘Crushed and defeated representatives of a crushed and defeated nation,’ Wyand wrote happily, ‘they took up the cheap pens and signed.’

The instrument of surrender was signed with what Montgomery called ‘a post office pen that you could buy in a shop for two-pence’. The document itself was typed on ordinary army foolscap and Montgomery defied orders to send it to Supreme Headquarters, adding it instead to his private archive; Eisenhower had to be content with a photostat copy.

Wyand continued:

Inside the tent was warmth, light and a moment of history, while outside my clothes clung to me as the rain beat down and the generator – exposed to the downpour – spluttered and spat as the sparking plugs shorted in the rain. I prayed that the generator would not fail and plunge the tent into darkness.

The signing over, the Germans stood up and filed from the tent. All save Friedeburg, who sat reading the terms over again, a picture of misery and despair. It made superb picture material. I had just finished shooting and was about to signal to Gray to pack up when one of the photoflood bulbs slipped from its socket, fell upon the Admiral’s balding head, and exploded with a loud bang. The poor man jumped from his chair as though he had been shot.

The original surrender document showed that Montgomery had made a small slip, at first getting the date wrong; being forced to cross out the ‘fifth’, the date the surrender took effect, and substitute it with that of the actual signing, the fourth.

Montgomery later recalled one other small incident at that historic ceremony. One of the Germans wanted to smoke to calm his nerves and took out a cigarette. ‘I looked at him,’ Montgomery related, ‘and he put the cigarette away.’

After the signing, Montgomery spent the evening composing first a signal of thanks to his senior commanders and then ‘My last message to the armies’, which ended on a characteristic note: ‘It has been a privilege and an honour to command this great British Empire team in Western Europe … Good luck to you all, wherever you may be.’ Finally, the field marshal drafted a piece for the following day’s
Sunday Express.
With the crucial negotiations at Rheims still in progress, it was entitled simply ‘The German surrender’.

It was Montgomery’s triumph – and one that seemed to leave the hapless Germans utterly routed. ‘He absolutely humiliated them,’ Colonel Trumbull Warren said. Captain Derek Knee, Montgomery’s interpreter on the first day, remembered the look of schoolboy relish on the field marshal’s face when he gave the following instructions to his staff: ‘The German delegation is to be lined up under the Union Jack [flying outside Monty’s caravan] and kept waiting.’ ‘And when he barked out “Who are you?” to the astonished Friedeburg,’ Knee continued, ‘I thought he was talking to a vacuum-cleaner salesman.’

There was another moment to savour. Montgomery reeled off a list of demands. If they were not accepted, Montgomery said he would go on fighting. And then Captain Knee recalled, Montgomery returned to the phrase and embellished it, ‘and be
delighted
to go on fighting’ – the relish of a master chef.

The Germans were to have lunch. But first they would be left alone, among the silver birch trees, observed from a distance. Then they would eat on their own.

Captain Knee remembered Monty’s instruction: ‘a good lunch, with a glass of cognac’. After lunch there was the map room. In the version fostered by Montgomery, and relayed to the waiting journalists the following day, the Germans were shocked to see how desperate their plight was. The intelligence summaries of the British 2nd Army reveal Friedeburg’s response to be more sanguine: ‘I am well aware of the present battle situation,’ he responded tartly. In the Montgomery script a shaken Friedeburg shed a few more tears. The intelligence summary showed him impatient to get back to Flensburg. He knew a deal could be done.

That night General Eberhard Kinzel stayed on Lüneburg Heath as Montgomery’s guest. The notes of Monty’s chief of staff, General Freddie de Guingand, showed the conversation to be cordial and wide-ranging. They discussed the balance of power within the German military. Field Marshal Busch was the main player now, Kinzel said. The German general then gave Montgomery information on food stocks in Schleswig-Holstein. There was a little horse trading. The field marshal assured Kinzel that most of the German troops fleeing the Russians across the Mecklenburg Plain had already surrendered to British or American forces within his army group. The general suggested ways Montgomery’s soldiers could speedily enter Denmark after the surrender had been signed.

The following day, General Kinzel was retained as a liaison officer at TAC HQ. He was to have a staff of twelve officers. The British supplied the rations for this group; the Germans the cooks. Kinzel was put in direct communication with Busch’s North-West Army Group. As administrative tasks were shared out with Busch’s force, Kinzel asked whether German officers could remain armed ‘for disciplinary reasons’ and German soldiers for sentry duty. ‘Agreed in principle,’ De Guingand noted.

Beneath the humour and theatrics, Field Marshal Montgomery had presided over a genuine triumph. He had retained his keen instinct for lifting the morale of his troops, making them feel part of the bigger picture – and used it to considerable effect. The massive surrender of German forces accelerated the end of the war and gave British soldiers and civilians an abiding pride in their achievement. In this, Montgomery understood both the mood of his army group and press and public at home. But – always political – he was also looking ahead, to the post of military governor of Germany. Montgomery had been told that Churchill was considering Field Marshal Alexander for the position. By proclaiming his achievement at Lüneburg and showing he could work well with the Germans, in a way in which his prime minister approved, Monty was hoping to land the job himself.

Montgomery’s willingness to strike a deal with the German military commander in the region, Field Marshal Busch, held many practical advantages – but maintaining strong links with the Wehrmacht was not putting an unconditional surrender into effect. He did not take account of the politics of the Grand Alliance and the likely reaction of Russia. Nor did he consider how the Dönitz regime would portray the surrender to its soldiers still fighting in the east. He was not dishonest – but vanity blinded him to these possibilities. They would bequeath a most difficult situation to his supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower.

That Friday evening Kay Summersby, General Eisenhower’s driver, described the atmosphere at Supreme Headquarters at Rheims:

All afternoon we waited tensely for Monty’s call. Air-Chief-Marshal Tedder [the deputy supreme commander] joined the general in his tiny office; Butch [Eisenhower’s naval aide, Captain Harry Butcher] joined me in my office. We waited and waited. Finally General Ike declared he was going home and could be reached there. Afraid of missing the big surrender, I succeeded in urging him to wait just another five minutes. The phone rang exactly five minutes later, at about 7.00 pm. I answered it – it was Monty. Butch and I eavesdropped shamelessly through the open door. The ceremony had gone through … Although dead tired, the General sat down and dictated a special message to the Prime Minister praising the courage and determination of the British people … Then he and Butch went off to dinner.

After dinner another message came in from Montgomery. ‘The Germans were flying to Rheims the following day, due in about noon, to discuss the general surrender of all German forces.’

A Tory MP, Henry Channon, wrote in his diary that evening:

After dinner I went along the corridor of the Ritz, being, like everyone else, in a restless mood – all London had been on edge these last few days, waiting for the final announcement – and went to read the latest news on the tape machine. There I read that at 9.13 a communique had been issued at SHAEF that the Germans had capitulated in Holland, Western Germany and Denmark … We were all immensely relieved and celebrated with champagne.

Ordinary British families learned the news in a report following the nine o’clock BBC news bulletin. They were then able to hear the surrender as it had been recorded earlier that evening. It had a most powerful impact.

‘I am listening now to the broadcast of Field Marshal Montgomery in Germany,’ wrote Maggie Blunt, a publicity officer from a metal factory in Slough. ‘My emotions at this moment are indescribable: enormous pride in the fact that I am British, wonder and excitement. Tomorrow morning the war in Europe will to all effect be over. It is a tremendous moment.’

The following day units of the 21st Army Group began to enforce the surrender on the ground. Sometimes conditions were chaotic. According to the combat diary of the Canadian Argyll and Sutherlanders:

Hundreds of German soldiers, some of them unarmed, were streaming along the roads, completely disorganised and without any sign of supervision. Some were going north and others south. Some were moving on foot, others on bicycles and horse carts. We now could see for ourselves that the once super-efficient German Wehrmacht was in a state of collapse. Every soldier in this procession seemed to belong to a different division and unit. Their parent formations had been cut to pieces and scattered over northern Germany. Their vehicles were either destroyed or out of fuel, their officers left for undisclosed destinations. The men are simply waiting for this nightmare to end.

The Canadian 8th Infantry Brigade tried to ascertain who the German commander of the area around Emden was. At first they were told it was Admiral Weyher, then a General Erich von Straube, who had his headquarters near Wilhelmshaven. After much confused telephoning and driving around, this officer was finally contacted and brought to the Canadian HQ in a jeep by the Infantry Brigade’s commander, Brigadier Jim Roberts. In conditions of disorder, Von Straube complained vehemently that military protocol was not being followed and that he should have been met by a corps commander. ‘There was no time to cater to his whims,’ Roberts remarked, ‘we had to get him to headquarters immediately.’

Once arrived, Von Straube said plaintively that he had only recently taken up his command. The Canadians recorded bluntly that he demonstrated a ‘noticeable ignorance of his force’s composition, much to the embarrassment of his own staff officers, and seemed appalled by the number of detailed instructions involved in the surrender terms’. The Canadians directed his attention to paragraph three of the surrender, which prescribed ‘strict and immediate execution of orders by the German command’. They observed that such clear direction seemed to accord with the man’s mind-set and that he ‘rallied magnificently’ – after which all the documents were quickly signed.