Time at War (15 page)

It was not, of course, always like this. Once a neighbouring Kangaroo was hit by an anti-tank shell and the people in my carrier were showered with bits of blood and bone. Then there were the times when we were on foot again and doing our training-ground attacks – ‘One and two sections round on the right, three section give covering fire!' But more often than not, yes, when we got to our objective the enemy had disappeared. With us gaining in confidence I could even try out a more democratic form of leadership, about the feasibility of which I had wondered. Once, when the tanks had been held up by some
anti-tank fire from a farmstead and I had ordered – ‘Dismount! We'll go round by that ditch', a voice from my platoon piped up – ‘Sir, wouldn't it be better if we went round in the carriers as far as that clump of trees and then dismounted?' And I saw the sense of this, so I shouted – ‘You're absolutely right! Everyone back in the carriers!' And by the time we eventually got to our objective the enemy was indeed pulling out. My platoon seemed to appreciate this readiness to change one's mind, though it would probably only have worked in a war as good as won.

There was a constant problem with prisoners. As we advanced from Argenta towards Ferrara, more and more Germans were waiting for us with their hands up. We could not easily spare the men to escort them back, yet the time had not come when we could leave them to their own devices. On the second or third day of our advance the tank major who was nominally in command of our infantry platoon told us, when given out his daily orders, that we were taking too many prisoners. He repeated – Did we understand? We were taking too many prisoners. One of us, probably Desmond Fay, quietly spat on the ground. And we went on taking too many prisoners.

In Richard Doherty's
History of the Irish Brigade
the story of this advance is one of strategies and deployments of forces: this many regiments of field artillery here; that number of specially equipped tanks for crossing ditches and clearing mines there; such and such squadrons of planes on call overhead in what was called a ‘cab-rank'. The plans and orders were precise; also what could be said to have succeeded and what could not. But there was not
much need to talk of failure. Instead, there were statistics: the Irish Brigade had taken prisoner ‘twenty-two officers and 2,000 other ranks'; casualties inflicted had been ‘far greater'; ‘seven mark IV German tanks were knocked out by the 9th Lancers for the loss of only one of their own'. From what I could see I did not think that there were many casualties on either side: certainly not on ours, apart from those in the carrier that had been hit. But what stays in my memory, as at Cassino, was the impression that no individual could know much of what was going on; one had to wait and see when it was over. But here it could indeed be felt that things were going well, and I began to think I understood something of what those ghastly Nazi armies must have felt as they bludgeoned their way smiling across Poland, France, Russia; until nemesis caught up with them and the homes they had left behind were utterly flattened, and there was no heroic ideology for them to come back to. I wrote to my father –

It is a happier form of warfare than any we have done before, but I find it exhibits the most unfortunate characteristics of one's nature. I actually find this conquest and pursuit faintly enjoyable – and at last understand the fatal temptation of aggression. But nevertheless it is for the most part tedious, and I am irked by the feeling that the end ever remains the same distance from us even as we advance.

However, there came a day early in May when we were on the outskirts of Ferrara and the crowds coming out
with flowers were even more ebullient than usual, and the bangs and whooshes that could be heard were of fireworks rather than grenades or Moaning Minnies; and the German trenches we were occupying were deserted except for a litter of old love letters and a smell of stale bread. And the German radio was playing Wagner – the ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla', I think– and it dawned on us that our war was over. Some of those I was with said later that they almost immediately began to feel strangely at a loss: for so long the war had provided a structure for their lives; a means of getting on with things in spite of doubts and fears. This feeling seemed to persist. However, I took the opportunity to borrow a jeep and drive into Ferrara to have a look at its fourteenth-century castle – a massive turreted building with reddish walls and a moat with drawbridges. This was a monument to war now to be preserved for tourists. And as an adjunct to triumphalism, there was the promise of loot.

When the Germans began to surrender en masse on 2 May, and were rounded up and carted off to prison camps, they had to leave behind … everything. The sides of the roads were littered with both the large-scale and the personal detritus of war – tanks, trucks, heavy guns; but also, in piles, abandoned personal weapons and possessions. We searched through these for what trophies we might pick out – in particular the prized Luger pistol. I took my fill of pistols and even a shotgun or two; and then I came cross a small and pretty piano accordion – on which quite soon I learned to play the rousing and sentimental Neapolitan songs that had seemed so much part of our
war. Also one's platoon could now be fitted out with its own means of transport. I wrote to my sister –

Kennen Sie
what victory means? It means I am at the moment the tempestuous possessor of three cars – a Mercedes which goes at such a horrific speed that I am terrified to take it beyond second gear; an Adler saloon which cruises at 60 without the slightest indication that it is moving; an Opel which streaks hither and thither to the desperate confusion of stray pedestrians. It means that we dine on champagne each night except when we feel leery enough to start on the brandy with the soup. It means – oh well, so much really beyond cars and wine that I suppose they are of infinitesimal significance.

The army was tolerant about such loot. Someone had to clear up the personal stuff by the road, and for a time we were allowed to keep the cars because transport was needed to get us to Austria – or to Yugoslavia, or wherever we were now heading. Rumours abounded; there were few official briefings. In Austria we might be needed to get to somewhere or other ahead of the Russians who were advancing apace from the east; for although the Russians had been our much-lauded Allies during the war, we didn't actually trust them, did we? (What – they might carry on marching west with their vast armies till they reached the Channel ports?) About Yugoslavia the briefings were as confusing as the rumours. We had been backing Marshal Tito who had been fighting a guerrilla war for years against the occupying Germans; but Tito was
a communist, and he would surely now be aligning himself with the Russians. Also he was a Serbian, and might well take the opportunity to annihilate his traditional enemies the Croatians, who had tended to side with the Germans. But the Croatians were trying to surrender to us, and so should we not prevent a massacre? But this might antagonise Tito and provoke Russia. And so on. One could begin to see how the simplicities of war might be easier to deal with than the complexities of peace.

We drove north in our motley convoy bypassing Venice and going through Udine into Austria at Villach. We hardly cared where we would end up; this was the sort of uncertainty to which we had become accustomed. The rumours gathered like dark clouds: Tito might be wanting to grab a chunk of Austria, but if we moved too many troops into Austria he might grab Trieste in Italy. There was a pro-German force somewhere in the hills which consisted of Russian anti-Bolshevik Cossacks who had been fighting for the Germans; they too said they would only surrender to the British because in the hands of anyone else they would be likely to be slaughtered. In the meantime the Irish Brigade had taken over a warehouse containing tens of thousands of bottles of the Austrian liqueur Schnapps; so that the political situation assumed an air of less importance. It was even said that someone somewhere had captured a Mint which was churning out a stream of paper money. Then a new and mythical-sounding threat was said to be on the horizon – the Bulgarians! But no one seemed quite to know on which side they had been or would be fighting.

The London Irish were sent off (though my memories of this are hazy) to make some sort of contact with the Russians. We made a dash to Wolfsberg in the eastern Austrian Alps; the Russians had got as far as Graz, some thirty miles further. We sent out scouting parties; what on earth were we supposed to do if we came across Russians? Offer them some Schnapps? I have a picture in my mind of myself and my platoon arriving in some small-town square and seeing across the road some men in strange uniforms whom we took to be Russians – unsmiling and bulging out of jackets that seemed too small for them. We eyed each other warily. Then, probably because none of us understood a word of each other's language, we wandered into the middle of the square and nodded and made friends. In
The History of the Irish Brigade
it is recorded that there was a conference held at Wolfsberg in the Officers' Mess of the London Irish Rifles, at which territorial boundaries were agreed between the British and Russian forces. This was facilitated, it is suggested, not so much by Schnapps, as by alarm about the intentions of the Bulgarians.

After a week in Wolfsberg during which some of all this must have been sorted out – or must have come to be considered not really necessary to be sorted out – we withdrew to Villach, and then to villages on the northern coast of the Ossiachersee, one of the most beautiful lakes in Carinthia, the Austrian province bordering on the frontier with Italy. And there the London Irish stayed for the rest of my time with them in Austria.

What had struck us all on our entry into Austria was not only the beauty of the place and people but the orderliness,
peacefulness, the lack of signs of war. The people were neither overtly friendly nor hostile; they were dignified and courteous, and paid attention to what we required. This was especially striking to the communist Desmond Fay, who on entering a recently Nazi-dominated country had expected … what? A people arrogant and savagely embittered? Desmond could laugh and shake his head about what he in fact found; but it was something that made us all wonder, even if we could not work out exactly what. We were at first billeted in an orphanage for children whose parents had been killed in the war: there were Germans and Poles as well as Austrians. The children all seemed to have fair hair and the most beautiful manners as well as looks. The women in charge of them herded them into outlying buildings to make room for us; we found ourselves treating the women as if they were our hostesses and we were their guests. When we first arrived there was an army rule that there should be no fraternisation with local people; later this was relaxed because it was unworkable as well as senseless. There were few men except the old left in the villages; the girls and our young soldiers began to flirt not indecorously.

We eventually had to hand over the cars we had taken as loot. Some officers came to arrangements with local farmers to keep and hide their cars until such a time as they could come and pick them up when they were out of the army.

There was still much to do with the huge number of German soldiers and officials who were keen to give themselves up – for the reason that they wanted to be fed,
as well as not to fall into the hands of the Russians. From the crowds of these there had to be weeded out and interrogated those who had been Nazis in positions of responsibility who might now be prosecuted as war criminals. In the early stages of this process I was sometimes called on to act as an interpreter with my primitive German. This attempt was apt to dissolve into farce. But there were other situations that became tragically serious.

The Russian Cossack Corps that had been fighting for the Germans against what they saw as an alien Bolshevik Russia had succeeded in surrendering to the British; many had their families with them; they knew that if they were sent or taken back to Russia they would all almost certainly be shot. The Russians demanded that they should be handed over; the British prevaricated. But there had been an agreement between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference earlier in the year that all such prisoners should be returned to the country they originally came from. The Cossacks could claim that they had been turned out of their country by the Bolsheviks and thus they had no country, but this carried no weight with the Russians. Orders came down from London that the Cossacks and their families, who had been camping in fields, were to be put forcibly into railway trucks and handed to the Russians. By good fortune the Irish Brigade were not required to do this. But we heard of it; and worried. What would we have done? There was a story that heartened us of a commanding officer of the 6th Armoured Division who went to the assembled Cossacks in their field and told them of the orders he had received, and that as a dutiful
soldier he would have to obey them; but he would not do so until morning, and in the meantime he would remove his soldiers who were guarding the field because they were tired. And so in the morning the Cossacks and their families had gone – to mingle presumably with the hordes of displaced and often unidentifiable persons throughout Europe.

There was a similar situation with the Croatians who had been hostile to Tito's partisans and in some cases sided with the Germans. Tito was demanding that they should be handed over to him because he was now de facto ruler of Yugoslavia, but if this happened it was likely that they too would be shot. Tito gave assurances they would be treated according to conventions. They were handed over, but there is evidence that most of them were shot.

Could anything have been done to prevent this? The world of politicians and top military authorities is dependent on words and bits of paper: there have been such and such discussions and agreements; out of the boundless chaos of five years of war such people have to try to produce order. On the ground, individuals face a different kind of obligation; one should not be responsible for sending off persons to be needlessly murdered. Perhaps, indeed, the individual soldiers on the spot have a duty to try to save politicians from the sins of their terrible calling (this was a view voiced at the Nuremberg trials). The politicians may be faced with unavoidable choices of evils; soldiers may have to risk covering for them and suffering the cost.