All Hell Let Loose (57 page)

Men’s obsessive ambition to return to where they belonged became more emphatic when such ‘physical agony’ came. US Army nurse Dorothy Beavers wrote a letter for ‘a beautiful young man, a captain, who had lost both arms and legs. Yet he still seemed thrilled that he could say: “I’m going home.”’ When American machine-gunner Donald Schoo’s driver had a hand blown off, the man ran in circles yelling hysterically, ‘I’m going home! Thank you, God! I’m going home!’ A soldier who received a ‘Dear John’ letter from his spouse told a reporter: ‘Any guy overseas who says he’s in love with his wife tells a damn lie … He’s in love with a memory – the memory of a moonlit night, a lovely gown, the scent of a perfume or the lilt of a song.’

Isolation was a towering sensation, even for men serving amid legions of their compatriots. ‘I see all these thousands of lonely soldiers here,’ John Steinbeck wrote from the British capital in 1943 about the GIs on its streets. ‘There’s a kind of walk they have in London, an apathetic shuffle. They’re looking for something. They’ll say it’s a girl – any girl, but it isn’t that at all.’ Although soldiers often talk about women, under the stress and unyielding discomfort of a battlefield most crave simple pleasures, among which sex scarcely features. A US Marine Corps lieutenant colonel in the South Pacific fantasised about his ambitions on returning home: ‘I’m going to start wearing pyjamas again … I’m going to polish off a few eggs and several quarts of milk … A few hot baths are also in order … But I’m saving the best for last – I’m going to spend a whole day flushing a toilet, just to hear the water run.’

It is striking to contrast such modest ambitions, common to most soldiers of the democracies, with the martial enthusiasm of some of Hitler’s men, especially those of the Waffen SS, which persisted in surprising degree until the last months of the war. An American-born Italian woman wrote with mingled bewilderment, repugnance and fascination about two German officers she met in 1943: ‘They are the most highly specialized human beings that I have ever encountered: the “fighting man”. Both of them are under twenty-five; both have taken part in the campaigns of Poland, France, Russia – and now Italy. One of them, risen from ranks, commanded for six months a company of Russian deserters … It is impossible to convey the depth of conviction in his voice, while he expounded to us the familiar doctrines which had been taught him: the needs of
Gross Deutschland
, Nordic racial superiority, the inevitability of Germany’s entry into the war (in spite of all Hitler’s efforts to make peace with England), his pride in his country and his men, and above all his unshakeable certainty, even now, of victory.’

It is an enduring enigma, how a German army overwhelmingly composed of conscripts, as much citizen soldiers as were their Allied counterparts, should have shown itself consistently their superior. Part of the answer must lie in the supreme professionalism of the officer corps and its combat doctrine; through the ages Germany had produced formidable soldiers, and under Hitler their performance attained its zenith, albeit in an unspeakable cause. Beyond this, the role of compulsion became almost as important as it was in Stalin’s armies. German soldiers who fled a battlefield or deserted knew they were liable to execution, a sanction imposed with increasing frequency as the Nazi empire crumbled. The Wehrmacht shot nothing like as many of its own men as did the Russians, but by 1945 penal executions ran into tens of thousands. Allied commanders, desperate to persuade their own men to try harder, often lamented their inability to impose deterrent capital sentences on deserters.

But more important to residual German resistance was the contribution of a core of fanatics, notably Waffen SS formations. A decade of Nazi indoctrination moulded excellent junior leaders. Even when it was plain that the tide of war had turned irreversibly against Hitler, many Germans made extraordinary sacrifices to preserve their homeland from Russian retribution. Not every member of the Wehrmacht was a hero: in 1944–45, a growing number showed themselves willing and even eager to surrender. But the ethos of Hitler’s army – like those of Russia and Japan – differed importantly from that of the British and American forces. The price of allowing men to retain some civil liberties and freedom of choice, and of forgoing brutal sanctions upon the weak, was that the Western armies were obliged to compensate by firepower and patience for their soldiers’ lesser willingness to accept sacrifice.

2
HOME FRONTS

Nikolai Belov of the Red Army wrote in his diary at the end of 1942: ‘Yesterday I received a whole bunch of letters from Lidochka. I sense that she isn’t having an easy time back there with the little ones.’ Captain Belov understated his wife’s predicament. In many societies, civilians suffered more than soldiers. Romanian Mihail Sebastian never saw a battlefield, but wrote in December 1943: ‘Any personal balance sheet gets lost in the shadow of war. Its terrible presence is the first reality. Then somewhere, far away, forgotten by us, are we ourselves, with our faded, diminished, lethargic life, as we wait to emerge from sleep and start living again.’ Although statistics are drastically distorted by the mortality in Russia and China, it is notable that globally more non-combatants perished between 1939 and 1945 than uniformed participants. It is hard to use the phrase ‘home front’ without irony in the context of Russia’s war, in which tens of millions found themselves in the condition described by Ukraine partisan Commissar Pavel Kalitov in September 1942, at the hamlet of Klimovo: ‘A pale, thin woman sits on a bench with a baby in her arms and a girl of about seven. She is weeping, poor wretch. What are her tears about? I would do anything to be able to help these miserable human beings, to ease their pain.’

Three weeks later, he described a similar scene in Budnitsa: ‘What is left of it? Heaps of ruins, chimneys sticking out, scorched chairs. Where there were roads and paths, there are thorns and weeds. No sign of life. The village is under constant artillery fire.’ Shortly afterwards, Kalitov’s unit received an army order to clear all civilians from a fifteen-mile zone behind the front; they were to be permitted to take their belongings, but no forage or potatoes. Kalitov wrote unhappily: ‘We’ve got to work with the civilians, to prepare them so that they do this without resisting. It’s a tough business: many people are living almost entirely off potatoes. To demand that they leave these for the troops means sentencing them to terrible hardships, even death. A family of refugees stands in front of me now. They are so thin and gaunt, one can see through them. It is especially hard to look at the little ones – three of them, one a baby, the others a little older. There is no milk. These people have suffered as much as us, the soldiers, or even more. Bombs, shells and mines no longer scare them.’ He marvelled at what human beings showed themselves able to endure.

Even those Russians who did not suffer siege or bombardment spent the war labouring in conditions of extreme privation: they received five hundred calories a day less nourishment than their British or German counterparts, a thousand fewer than Americans. Some two million perished of hunger in territories under Soviet control, while a further thirteen million died under bombardment or in German-occupied regions; prisoners in the gulag’s labour camps occupied the lowest place in the hierarchy of priority for rations, and one in four of them died in each of the war years. Russians suffered widespread scurvy as a consequence of vitamin deficiency, together with many other conditions associated with hunger and overwork. ‘We had no life of our own outside the factory,’ said Moscow woman Klavdiya Leonova, who worked in a textile plant making army tunics and camouflage netting.

Throughout the war, her production line operated around the clock, its workers organised in two twelve-hour shifts. They were fed badly baked bread and
kasha
– a porridge made with burned wheat – distributed at the work benches. ‘We did not starve, but we were always very hungry and often ate potato peelings … Sunday was in theory a day off, but the factory Party Committee often called on us for outside work, such as digging trenches or bringing in timber from the forests around Moscow. We had to load lorries with pitprops which were so heavy they would have been a burden even for a professional weightlifter … We lived with the peasants … the women regularly abused the regime. They abused us too, because we collected berries and mushrooms in the woods which they had hoped to sell to us.’

In the unoccupied Western nations, some people prospered: criminals exploited demand for prostitution, black-market goods, stolen military fuel and supplies; industrialists made enormous profits, many of which somehow evaded windfall taxes; farmers, especially in the United States, where incomes rose by 156 per cent, experienced greater prosperity than they had ever known. ‘Farm times became good times,’ said Laura Briggs, daughter of an Idaho smallholder. ‘Dad started having his land improved … We and most other farmers went from a tarpaper shack to a new frame house with indoor plumbing. Now we had an electric stove instead of a woodburning one, and running water at the sink where we could do the dishes; and a hot water heater; and nice linoleum.’

But far more people hated it all. Lt. David Fraser, a Grenadier Guardsman, identified an important truth about the circumstances of millions, soldiers and civilians alike: ‘People were not where they belonged, so that the effect was of a dream from which one hoped one day to awake.’ In April 1941, Edward McCormick wrote to his son David, who had enlisted with his brother Anthony, and now embarked with an artillery regiment for the Middle East. ‘To Mummy, in particular,’ their father said,

It would be more than four years before the McCormick family was reunited, a separation common to scores of millions. And although enlistment in uniform was the commonest cause of displacement and the sundering of families, these things also took many other forms. Half the population of Britain moved home in the course of the war, some because they were evicted to make way for servicemen, some because their houses were destroyed, most because wartime duties demanded it. A significant part of the Belgian fishing fleet adopted a new life at the port of Brixham in Devon, while some Danish fishermen worked from Grimsby in Lincolnshire. Elsewhere in Europe, more brutal imperatives intervened. In January 1943, for instance, a British nurse named Gladys Skillett found herself giving birth to a child not in the British Channel Islands that were her rightful home, but in the maternity ward of a small German hospital at Biberach. She was one of 834 civilians on occupied Guernsey deported to the Reich in September 1943 to spend the rest of the war in an internment camp, as hostages; there should have been 836 of them, but an elderly major and his wife from Sark slashed their wrists before embarkation. Mrs Skillett forged a lifelong friendship with the wife of a Wehrmacht soldier who shared her hospital room in Biberach, and who gave birth to a healthy son on the same day as her own arrived.

Bianca Zagari was a mother of two in a prosperous Italian family, who fled from their home city of Naples in December 1942, when American bombing began. A party of fourteen including in-laws, nephews and nieces, maid and governess, they settled in the remote and impoverished Abruzzo region, renting two houses in a village in the Sangro valley, accessible only on foot. There, they eked out an uncomfortable existence until, to their horror, in October 1943 once again bombs began to fall around them; they were only eighteen miles from Monte Cassino, in an area bitterly contested between the German and Allied armies. Zagari and her children fled with the villagers; as they clambered into the hills, a peasant told her, in local dialect she could barely comprehend, that the bombing had claimed most of her relations: ‘Signora, the ten dead are yours.’ She wrote: ‘Now it is dawn and others are climbing up from Scontrone, terrified. Each one gives me a horrific detail: a hand, a little foot, two plaits with red bows, a body without a head.’

Her husband Raffaele survived, but most of his family perished. The survivors existed for weeks in caves in the mountains, learning skills such as Zagari had never known – lighting fires and building rough shelters with scant help from the unsympathetic local people, who cared only for their own. ‘I have to ask for everything from everyone – it is like begging for alms.’ When the Germans found them, all the men were conscripted for forced labour: ‘They took one while he was digging under ruins for his mother.’ After months of misery, one day she fled across the mountains with her two children and her jewel case. Eventually a pitying German lorry-driver gave them a lift to Rome. ‘We arrive via the Porta San Giovanni. I feel I am dreaming – I see nannies with children playing calmly. The war seems a distant rumour. Everyone asks where we have come from. No one understands the answer that we have come from Scontrone where nine members of the family have been killed. At the Corso hotel, where the concierge knows us and tries to help, we hear another guest threatening that he will refuse to patronise the establishment again if it admits such vagabonds as ourselves.’