After D-Day – The Battle for Normandy:

The landings of 6th June were, of course, ‘just’ the beginning of the campaign to liberate Western Europe from the occupation of the Third Reich. Having got into the fields behind the beaches, the Americans, in particular, were dismayed to find themselves among the bocage, the thick, high and wide hedgerows that provided ideal cover for defence. From the German perspective, General Blumentritt wrote to a correspondent in 1965, saying that the German soldier had bled to death through wrong politics and dilettante leadership of Hitler. In particular, Normandy had been lost, he claimed, because Hitler ordered a rigid defence of the coasts. That was not possible over two thousand kilometres, especially when considering the Allied mastery of the air, the Allied masses of ‘matérial’, and the weakened German potential after five years of war. General Rundstedt wanted to give up the whole of France south of the Loire in order to  concentrate on fighting a fast-moving tank battle around Paris instead, but he was prevented from doing this by Hitler and Rommel who intended to carry out the defence with all forces on the beach and to use all tank-corps right in front, at the coast.

Timetables were vital to the Germans, and in reinforcing Normandy as quickly as possible they were severely hampered by the destruction of road and rail routes by the bombing campaigns and by heroic acts of resistance by the French Maquis, who attacked the Germans and destroyed bridges and railways in the path of the Panzers. This led to horrific reprisals, the best known of which were carried out by the fifteen-thousand-strong 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, frustrated by losses and delays as it attempted to drive from Montauban in southern France to repel the invader in Normandy. The 450-mile journey lasted three weeks after they had set out on 8 June, as opposed to the few days it would have taken had they been left unharried. In retaliation for the killing of forty German soldiers in one incident, Das Reich exacted widespread reprisals in the town of Tulle in the Corréze. One woman recalled how…

I came home from shopping on 9 June 1944 to find my husband and son hanging from the balcony of our house. They were just two of a hundred men seized at random and killed in cold blood by the SS. The children and wives were forced to watch while they strung them up to the lamp-posts and balconies outside their own homes. What is there for me to say?

Yet worse was to come the following morning, 10 June, at the small village of Oradour-Sur-Glane, where Major Adolf Dickmann’s unit murdered 642 people, including 190 schoolchildren; the men were shot, the women and children were burnt alive in the church and the village was razed. The village can be visited today, left deserted and destroyed as a memorial and a stark reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. This was featured in a special episode of ITV’s ground-breaking documentary series, The World at War in the 1970s. Yet, as Max Hastings has pointed out…

It is important to remember that if Oradour was an exceptionally dreadful occurrence during the war in the West, it was a trifling sample of what the German Army had been doing on a national scale in the East, since 1941. 

It was, however, a stark reminder, if one were needed, of exactly what the Allied troops were fighting both for and against if one were needed. It also showed the lengths and depths the Nazis were prepared to go in resisting the Allied advance. Hardly surprising then that German resistance around Carentan on 13 June and Caen on 18 June prevented Montgomery from taking either town, although the US VII Corps under Major-General J. Lawton Collins took Cherbourg on 27 June after five days of heavy fighting and the destruction of the harbour by the Germans, which the Allies could not then use until 7 August. The Germans in Caen, which Montgomery called the ‘crucible’ of the battle, held out until 9 July, and the town was little more than rubble when it finally fell. Despite this fierce fighting continuing until more than a month after the initial landings, the London Evening News was not prevented from claiming its capture on the day after D-Day, perhaps an example of how ‘fake news’ was already part of war-time propaganda campaigns. Basil Liddell Hart was proved right in his description of Overlord as having gone according to the plan, but not according to the timetable.

The Coup Attempt Against Hitler:

Years after the war, Dönitz stated that it was the defeat of the German U-Boat which had enabled the success of the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy in July 1944. That was the point at which the German High Command knew they had no chance of winning the war. Some in that High Command, though not the ultra-loyal Dönitz, decided that they had to try to assassinate Hitler. Far from acting out of any kind of democratic conscience, the vast majority of the plotters were simply determined to remove, as they secretly saw him, an incompetent upstart corporal who had by then become the major obstacle to a negotiated peace which was the only objective alternative to accepting, sooner or later, a Soviet occupation of Germany.

So it was that on Thursday 20 July a two-pound bomb planted by the Swabian aristocratic war hero Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg ripped through one of the conference huts at ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in East Prussia (now Poland), only six feet from where Hitler was studying an air-reconnaissance report through his magnifying glass. Despite extensive minor injuries, he survived. Churchill described the July Plotters as the bravest of the best, but in reality, they were extreme German nationalists, if not Nazis, and very far from the idealist democrats depicted by Hollywood.

The hope of the Plotters that they could make peace with Britain and America was flawed since the war was now being fought by an Anglo-Russian-American coalition so that it was unthinkable that Britain could enter into negotiations with Germany and/or its axis allies behind her allies’ backs. As one of the senior officials in the German Department of the Foreign Office, Frank Roberts, put it in his autobiography:

If Stalin got the impression we were in contact with the German generals, whose main aim was to protect Germany against Russia, he might well have been tempted to see whether he could not again come to terms with Hitler.

Re-balancing the Record – The Russian Contribution:

Following the collapse of the ‘Eastern Bloc’, historians such as Laurence Rees have been able to re-balance our understanding of the final year of the Second World War. When he was taught the history of the War in the early 1970s, his teachers got around the moral and political complexities of the Soviet Union’s part in the war by the simple expedient of largely ignoring it. My teachers taught us nothing at all about the Second World War; nor even very much about the First World War. At the time, in the depths of the Cold War, that was how most people dealt with the awkward legacy of the West’s relationship with Stalin. The focus was on the heroism of the Western Allies – on Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day. None of this, of course, is forgotten, and neither should it be. But it is not the whole story. Before the fall of Communism, the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War was, to a large extent, denied a proper place in our culture because it was easier than facing up to a variety of unpalatable truths. The D-Day commemorations we have just been through, important as they were for both the veterans who took part and for the western leaders, reverted to a self-conscious western triumphalism, failing to involve contemporary Russian leaders and almost completely ignoring the ‘Russian’ contribution, however controversial it may remain. Neither has there (yet) been any reference to the role of Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe in resisting and ultimately defeating the Reich.

The Western Allies had agreed to launch Operation Overlord, the long-awaited ‘second front’ in the spring of 1944, following the first Anglo-American Conference in Quebec in August 1943 (pictured right). But because of the slow progress of the Italian Campaign, Churchill had wanted to revisit the whole schedule in October 1943. He had on several previous occasions announced that despite agreeing with the second front in principle, in practice there was always one more operation that needed to take precedence; the Americans had at last run out of patience with him. It was a matter that Roosevelt and the American military leadership, including Eisenhower, did not want to reopen.

Besides which, there were precious few landing craft in Europe that were not already committed for D-Day. At a meeting on 24 November in Cairo, Churchill had finally seized his opportunity to plead with Roosevelt and the American generals for more resources for the Mediterranean. But, predictably, the Americans would not countenance a delay to Overlord.

Towards the end of the meeting, Roosevelt had reminded Churchill of the relative troop numbers now committed to the overall conflict: very soon more Americans would be involved in the war than troops under British command. On 26 November, Roosevelt and Churchill left for Tehran. In the plane, Churchill had gloomily confided to his doctor, Charles Wilson, that the campaign in Italy had been put ‘in jeopardy’ by the US President’s desire to invade France on the schedule drawn up in Quebec. Wilson (later Lord Moran) had a revealing conversation just before the conference in which Roosevelt’s close advisor, Harry Hopkins, told him that…

The President is convinced that even if he cannot convert Stalin into a good democrat he will be able to come to a working arrangement with him. After all, he had spent his life managing men. And Stalin at bottom could not be so very different from other people. Anyway, he has come to Tehran determined… to come to terms with Stalin, and he is not going to allow anything to interfere with that purpose.

Above: The three Allies at the Tehran Conference.

On the Eastern Front – Operation Bagration:

As the soldiers of the Western Allies battled to establish a foothold in Normandy, the Red Army prepared to launch a massive attack on German Army Group Centre in an attempt to recapture Minsk and push the Wehrmacht back out of the Soviet Union. This operation, which had been agreed at Tehran, dwarfed D-Day in scale. The Germans had thirty divisions in the West to face the Allied onslaught following D-Day but concentrated 165 divisions against the Red Army in the East. Over two million Red Army soldiers took part in their June offensive, codenamed Operation Bagration after the Georgian military hero who had fought against Napoleon. Veniamin Fyodorov, a (then) twenty-year-old soldier with the Soviet 77th Guards infantry regiment recalled his experiences in this assault on 22 June, as he watched the initial bombardment from his own side:

For Bagration we were preparing very carefully. Whatever resources the Soviet Union had were concentrated in this direction. Big numbers of artillery, tanks and ammunition. And big numbers of infantry. … When you look ahead, you see bits of earth flying up into the air and you see explosions. As if you light a match. Flashes, flashes. One flash, another flash. And bits of land are thrown up in the air. After the bombardment, planes came, flying low. We felt more cheerful because we had a lot of military equipment. 

For the Germans, by contrast, the Operation marked the lowest point in their military fortunes on the Eastern Front to date – lower even than Stalingrad in terms of military losses. Seventeen divisions were completely destroyed, with another fifty enduring losses of fifty per cent. And it was Hitler who was largely to blame for this defeat since he no longer trusted his generals to take the initiative on the battlefield as he had done during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He now gave direct tactical orders to the commanders of the 9th Army who faced Operation Bagration, orders which were increasingly disconnected from the realities of the modern battlefield. On the eve of Bagration, General Jordan, commander of the 9th Army, wrote these words:

… The Army believes that even under the present conditions, it would be possible to stop the enemy offensive, but not under the present directives which require an absolutely rigid defence. … The Army considers the orders establishing “Feste Platze” (Fortified Places) particularly dangerous. The army looks ahead to the coming battle with bitterness, knowing that it is bound by order to tactical measures which it cannot in good conscience accept as correct and which in our earlier victorious campaigns were the cause of enemy defeats.

This sense that the Germans were contributing to their own defeat now pervaded even the most junior ranks. A twenty-two-year-old private with the 9th Army, Heinz Fielder, recalled the demoralising effects of these nonsensical orders received from the division or the army corps:

I remember once that one position had definitely to be taken back again, and the young second lieutenant had refused to attack again because more than half his men had already died and they were all just sacrificed. They attacked again and again until the very last one died and that of course makes you wonder. But those were the men of the General Staff. They had their little flags and they put them on the map and then they say, this absolutely has to be restored, no what the sacrifices are.

Fielder was one of the Germans ordered to defend the Feste Platz of Bobruisk in the wake of the Red Army attack. He recalled:

Everywhere dead bodies are lying. Dead bodies, wounded people, people screaming, medical orderlies, and then there were those who were completely covered, who were not taken out at all, who were buried there straight away by the bunkers and trenches that collapsed. You don’t have any feeling any more for warmth or coldness or light or darkness or thirst or hunger. You don’t need to go to the loo. I can’t explain it. It’s such a tension you’re under … Everything was simply shit. Everything was shit.

Only after the Feste Platz was completely encircled and had been subjected to continuous bombardment was Fielder’s unit, at last, told it could try to escape.

And then the last command arrived. Destroy vehicles, shoot horses, take as much hand ammunition and rations with you as you can carry. Every man for himself. Well, now go on and rescue yourself.

Fielder joined a group of other German soldiers who were trying to fight their way through the Red Army troops ahead of them and reach the retreating German line. He headed West – towards the setting sun, and saw sites which continued to haunt him sixty years later:

There was a private, a young boy, who sat at a very big birch tree … from his tummy his intestines were streaming  and he was crying, “Shoot me! Shoot me!” and everybody just ran past him. I had to stop – but I could not shoot him. And then a young lieutenant from the sappers came. He took off his headgear and gave him the ‘coup de gráce with a 7.65 into the temple. And that’s when I had to cry bitterly. I thought if his mother knew how her boy ended, and instead she gets a letter from the squadron saying, “Your son fell on the field for great Germany”.

In July 1944, the German Army on the Eastern Front lost nearly two hundred thousand men killed or wounded; in August it was nearly three hundred thousand.  In total, German losses as a result of Operation Bagration would be calculated at around 1.5 million. This was an unprecedented defeat for Hitler and his generals and was unparalleled by anything occurring in the same period on the Western Front. By comparison with the Western Allies, the Red Army had made rapid progress against the Wehrmacht, retaking Minsk, capital of Belarus, on 3 July. Fyodor Bubenchikov, a twenty-eight-year-old Red Army officer, remembered that…

… gradually the Germans were losing morale and losing their belief in victory; Germans no longer cried “Heil Hitler!” On the contrary, they were surrendering. They were crying: “Hitler kaputt!”

That summer, Bubenchikov said he felt as if he were “flying”, as did all the Red Army units engaged in the action, from the ordinary soldier to the commander. Operation Bagration, still not known as well in the West as it should be, marked the end of a transformation in the fortunes of the Red Army. The Soviets had managed to increase their manufacture of military equipment and were now out-performing the Germans. In both 1943 and 1944, they produced more tanks and self-propelled guns than their enemy. Added to the increased Soviet output, of course, were the benefits of aid from the Western Allies, the bulk of which came from the USA. Although this remained only a small percentage of the total equipment of the Red Army, it was important because of the superior technology it contributed. For example, the Studebaker US6 truck was used by the Red Army for launching of Katyusha rockets.

The Polish Dimension & Dilemma:

But elsewhere in Eastern Europe, as the Red Army moved forward at speed, some of the people whose lives had been changed for the worse by this reoccupation of ‘Soviet territory’ were just beginning their new and bitter existence under an army which, for them at least, was far from being one of liberation. In the wake of the attack on German Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, the Red Army moved forward into eastern Poland and mounted the Lwów-Sandomierz assault. This powerful thrust involved over a million Soviet soldiers of the first Ukranian front under Michael Konev. In July 1944, the Red Army approached Lwów, a city they had first seized in September 1939 in agreement with the Nazis. Anna Levitska, then a teenager living in the city recalled:

In 1944, when the Red Army came for a second time, it was, of course, worse, because we already had an idea of what the consequences might be, because of all the arrests there had been in 1939 and 1940. … So of course it was terrifying.

Anna also recalled one old man coming up to her and her family in 1944 saying, this is the second time. It was better the first time. When they asked him why, he replied: Because the first time, they came and they went. But this time when they come, there is no way they will be leaving. Vyacheslav Yablonsky was part of the great Soviet assault on Lwów that summer. But he was in no sense an ordinary soldier: as a member of an élite NKVD squad, he had a very specific role. Together with two dozen other members of the secret police, and a squad of Red Army soldiers, he entered Lwów just before the Germans retreated from the city. Travelling in American Studebaker trucks they plotted a route via the back streets of the city to the Gestapo headquarters. The location was familiar to them since the German Secret police had simply replaced the NKVD in the building, which had been used previously by the Austro-Hungarian intelligence agency.

The task facing Yablonsky and his comrades was straightforward but considered vital. They had to capture the headquarters before the Germans left, and steal intelligence information that their superiors hoped would reveal just who had been collaborating with the Nazis. They arrived just as the Nazis were packing their files into trucks. The Soviet force scaled the wall surrounding the Gestapo HQ, shot the German guards and prevented the trucks from leaving. Hurrying into the building, they made straight for the cellars, where they knew the intelligence files were stored. While the remaining Germans, panic-stricken, sought to escape, the NKVD swiftly made the building secure and started examining the files they had found. They then immediately sought out anyone whom the German documents had named as an informer. Yablonsky also relied on pro-Soviet informers to tell him who had been collaborating with the Germans or was simply ‘anti-Soviet’. Once arrested for making comments against the Soviet occupation, like that of the old man above, the ‘normal’ sentence was fifteen years hard labour. Looking back over sixty years later, he commented:

Now I think it was cruel, but at that time, when I was young, … twenty-three years old, I didn’t. … Now I understand that it’s cruel because I’m older. I don’t think it was a very democratic time. Now you can say anything, but at that time you couldn’t. At that time most things were censored and nobody could say anything bad about the Soviet Union and I’m proud I was part of it and brave enough to go through the war and not let my country down.

Soldiers like Yablonsky believed they were reclaiming Lwów as a part of Soviet territory, which should never be surrendered again. It was members of the underground Polish Home Army who were some of the first to comprehend this dispiriting truth. These were the volunteer soldiers who had remained hidden under the Nazi occupation, waiting for the moment to strike back, and they played an important part in the battle for Lwów. Around three thousand soldiers led by Colonel Wladyslaw Filipowski had supported the Red Army during the fierce fighting that had lasted from 23 to 27 July. But once the battle was won the Soviets arrested the officers and forced the ordinary soldiers to join units of the Red Army. In parallel with the elimination of the underground Polish Home Army, the Soviet authorities immediately sought to re-establish the institutions of control that they had created during their first occupation. Anna Levitska remembered how…

They organised schools according to their own system. It was obligatory that every student belonged to the Young Communists. And, of course, there were no religious classes. Just those lectures on atheism. And studying the history of the Communist Party was obligatory. The fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism – those were the main subjects. We felt betrayed because we had hoped that the West would react differently. … We were even hoping that England and France (would help us), but that didn’t happen.

On 26 July 1944, while the battle for Lwów still raged, at Perugia in Italy Lieutenant General Anders (above) was presented to King George VI. Wladyslaw Anders was the commander of the Polish II Corps in the British Army. He had successfully negotiated the release of thousands of his fellow Polish soldiers from the Soviet Union. The British monarch had flown to Italy under the pseudonym, ‘General Collingwood’ in order to congratulate Allied forces on their progress there. During dinner, he listened to the regimental band of the II Polish Army Corps and remarked that he found one song particularly attractive. He was told that the song was called, And if I ever have to be born again, then let it happen only in Lwów. But two days later, on 28 July, the Soviets transferred to Chem in Poland a collection of little-known Polish politicians from exile in the Soviet Union. They were to form a puppet government in western Poland, a territory that he had never claimed as belonging to the Soviet Union. This group of collaborators, officially called the Polish Committee of National Liberation, later known as the Lublin Poles after the city they moved to in early August 1945, had declared in a ‘manifesto’ issued in Moscow on 2 July that they were in favour of leftist policies such as nationalisation, as well as a ‘fair’ border with the Soviet Union, which actually meant the ‘Curzon Line’. As far as they, and their Soviet masters were concerned, they were now the ‘de facto’ government of ‘liberated’ Poland. Nikolai Bulganin, a leading member of the Soviet State Committee of Defence, was sent from Moscow to be Stalin’s representative to the puppet Polish government, which effectively reported to him.

Of course, the imposition on Poland of a régime controlled by Stalin was not something that either the Western Allies or the official Polish government in exile could accept. The situation was further complicated by the presence of four hundred thousand members of the Polish underground, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) who, though disarmed by the Red Army, owed their allegiance to the government in exile in London. Also that July, the Home Army units that had helped the Soviets to capture Vilnius were disbanded, the officers arrested and the men sent off to join collaborating Polish units within the Red Army. It was against this background that the focus of all the various competing parties turned to the fate of the capital, Warsaw, which rose up against the German occupiers in the summer and early autumn of 1944, exposing to the world the tensions and conflicts within the Allied ‘camp’ which Churchill, Roosevelt and their respective propaganda machines tried so hard to hide.

As Andrew Roberts has written, the war had to be won by the Allies, of course, but it also needed to be lost, as it was, comprehensively and personally, by Hitler himself, both in the West and the East. It is doubtful, however, if the death of Hitler in the summer of 1944, would have shortened the war. Before June 1944, Germany had wreaked far more damage on the Allies than they had inflicted on Germany. If Himmler had taken over and not made the many strategic blunders perpetrated by Hitler in the final months, Germany might even have fought on for longer. A negotiated peace would have let the German people off the hook, although it would have saved millions of lives in Europe, including those who fell victim to the Nazis ‘Final Solution’ conducted by Hitler and Eichmann right up to the very final months of the war, drawing vital troops and resources away from the front lines. Besides, to have concluded an armistice on the demonstrable fallacy that the war was begun and carried on by one man’s will, rather than through the wholehearted support and enthusiasm of the German people, would hardly have produced the most durable and profound period of peace Europe has ever known.

The Race Against the Rockets & Operation Cobra:

Above: The Liberation of Europe, January 1944-March 1945.

On 24 July 1944, Churchill had warned his War Cabinet that Rockets may start any minute, referring to the Germans’ wonder-weapon, the supersonic V-2 missile. Its sister-weapon, the V-1 flying bomb, had been terrorising southern England for six weeks, even though fifty-eight of the ninety-two V-1 launching sites had been damaged. After receiving an encouraging report on the Normandy campaign, Churchill also reported on his trip to Cherbourg, Arromanches and Caen during the previous three days, saying that he…

Saw great many troops – never seen such a happy army – magnificent looking army – only want good weather. Had long talks with M (Montgomery) … frightful bombing of Caen … remarkable clearing of mines in Cherbourg harbour. 

Admiral Cunningham wrote in his diary that Churchill was full of his visit to France and was more inclined to talk than to listen. But, in contrast with Hitler, the British PM was capable of listening to, and even asking for, news and advice which was unpalatable. After the Bomb Plot, Hitler became highly suspicious of the veracity of what his generals told him, suspecting that many more had actually been involved than those discovered, and than in fact had been. By 24 July, the Allies had lost 112,000 men killed, wounded or captured in France, to the Germans’ losses of 114,000, including forty-one thousand taken prisoner. The more competent and aggressive General Günther von Kluge, who had recovered from injuries sustained in Russia, took over from Rundstedt and Rommel on 17 July.

‘Overlord’ having ended, the next phase of the invasion was known as Operation Cobra and was intended to break out from the linked beach-heads and strike south and east into central France. The ‘hinge’ was to be the British Second and Canadian First Armies in the area east of Caen, which kept the main weight of the German Army occupied while bold thrusts were made cross-country by Omar Bradley’s US First Army and General Patton’s US Third Army. The Allied offensive began with the carpet bombing of Saint-Ló and areas to the west of it in which 4,200 tons of high explosive were dropped by Spaatz’s heavy bombers. Despite Hitler giving Kluge some of the Fifteenth Army’s divisions on 27 July, the Americans poured forward through gaps in the German defences created by the bombing, and by the end of the month, Collins’ VII Corps had taken Avranches. This allowed US forces to attack westwards into Brittany and eastwards towards Le Mans, proving the value of Patton’s eve-of-battle observation to his Third Army that flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not us.

The Warsaw Conundrum:

Of all the myths that would grow up around the Warsaw Uprising, the most prevalent was that the Poles had been lured into insurrection by direct blandishments and promises of assistance from the Soviets. But although it’s certainly true that radio broadcasts were made at the end of July under Soviet auspices that encouraged the people of Warsaw to believe that liberation was near, it is not true that this was a direct attempt by the Soviet military to agree on a joint attack on the Polish capital with the Home Army. The appeals were much less specific. On 29 July, for instance, Radio Moscow announced that, for Warsaw…

… the hour of action has already arrived… those who have never bowed their heads to the Hitlerite power will again, as in 1939, join the struggle against the Germans, this time for a decisive action.

In addition, a broadcast from a Soviet-authorised radio station the following day announced that Soviet forces were approaching and were coming ‘to bring you freedom’. But this fell far short of a direct instruction to the Home Army to rise up in Warsaw in a coordinated way in order to link up with the advancing Red Army. So far, it was all just encouraging rhetoric. The Home Army in Warsaw, together with the Polish government in exile in London, faced a difficult political dilemma. They knew that if they did nothing, and the Red Army liberated Warsaw before they could rise up, then the Soviets would be in a far stronger position to dictate the terms of a post-war settlement. On the other hand, if the Home Army rose up long before the Soviets arrived, then they would be annihilated by the Germans. The timing of any rising was therefore crucial. Obviously, it was critically important to try to coordinate any rising with the imminent arrival of the Red Army. But the distrust between the two sides was so great that this was the one thing that the Polish government in exile did not feel able to do. On 26 July, the leader of the Poles in London, Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, authorised the Home Army in Warsaw to pronounce the Rising at a time to be determined by you. But this was an instruction which went directly against the advice of the Polish commander-in-chief in London who had argued that:

Insurrection without a fair understanding with the USSR and honest and real cooperation with the Red Army would be politically unjustified and militarily nothing more than an act of despair.

Mikolajczyk knew better than most that the Warsaw Uprising could not succeed without the practical assistance of the Allies, but he decided that it was best to approve the insurrection first and then, effectively as a ‘fait accompli’, to push for cooperation. He ought to have known beforehand that this was a strategy which was doomed to failure with Stalin. Mikolajczyk was only forty-three, though he had been active in the Polish Peasants’ Party since the 1920s. He travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin after authorising the uprising on 30 July before it had been launched. Nonetheless, the commander of the Home Army in Warsaw had already ordered ‘W’ hour, the launch of the uprising, to take place (without notifying the Soviets beforehand) at 5 p.m. on 1 August. He was aware that not only were the Red Army closing on Warsaw but that on 27 July the Germans had called for a hundred thousand Polish civilians to surrender themselves to help build the capital’s defences. The Home Army was, quite naturally, suspicious of this German order and urged people not to come forward. It thus made sense to the leaders of the Polish resistance to start the uprising at this moment. It was a huge gamble, of course. In Moscow, Mikolajczyk urgently needed to obtain an agreement from Stalin that the Red Army would help the insurgents in Warsaw. Unfortunately, both for him personally and the Home Army generally, Stalin did not see it that way. Besides the fact that he did not recognise the government-in-exile, his commanders were trying to break the power of the Home Army in the sections of Poland that the Red Army had ‘liberated’ so far.

Although the Marshal realised that it would be seen as offensive by his Allies for him to refuse to meet the London Poles, he also knew that he was under no obligation to be accommodating when he did meet them. They were treated with great rudeness from the moment of their arrival, snubbed at the airport, and then told that Stalin was ‘too busy’ to see them. Meanwhile, Churchill was giving a relatively upbeat assessment of the situation in the House of Commons. He talked of having done ‘our best’ to get Stalin to receive the Polish PM, pointing out that the Russian Armies… bring the liberation of Poland in their hands while we have several gallant Polish divisions fighting the Germans in our Armies. Now, he said, Let them come together. But a necessary precondition of this togetherness, he went on to say, was the old proviso that there should be a Poland friendly to Russia. Given the gulf between the Polish government in exile, who regarded the Lublin Poles as Stalin’s stooges, and Stalin himself, who had asserted that the London Poles were Nazi collaborators, Churchill’s Commons statement was wishful thinking to say the very least. When Molotov met the London Poles on 31 July he simply asked, Why have you come? He suggested that they should meet with the Lublin Poles instead. They didn’t manage to get an audience with the Soviet leader until the evening of 3 August, by which time, of course, the rising was already in progress and lightly armed Poles were dying on the streets of Warsaw, desperately in need of help.

(to be continued… )

Sources:

Andrew Roberts (2009), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin Books.

Laurence Rees (2008), Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. London: BBC Books (Ebury Publishing).

Documenting D-Day:

This Thursday, 6th June, many of the world’s leaders will be gathering on the beaches in Normandy to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. Those veterans who survived the landings and the rest of the war are now well into their nineties, but many will make the crossing of the English Channel once more to commemorate their fallen comrades and recall the events of June 1944. But what exactly was ‘Operation Overlord’, what happened along the coast of Normandy seventy-five years ago, and what was the significance of those events in the war itself and over the following period? To gain a true understanding, we should not simply rely on Hollywood films or even documentaries. We also need to consult the documents and other primary, eye-witness testimonies from the time, with the help of serious historians. Otherwise, there is a danger that the sacrifice of those who took part, whether they died or survived, will be trivialised and turned into a military comic-book.

One of the joint commanders of the Operation, Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, wrote an account as a Supplement to the London Gazette in September 1946:

I arrived in England on 2nd January, 1944, after handing over command of the Eighth Army, and immediately started a detailed study of the plans for the assault of the Continent – Operation OVERLORD. …

The intention was to assault, simultaneously, beaches on the Normandy coast. … The Normandy beaches were selected because they offered a better shelter for shipping and were less heavily defended than other possible beach areas along the Channel coast. …

The absence of major ports was overcome by the gigantic engineering feat of constructing two artificial ports in the United Kingdom; these were towed across the Channel in sections and erected, one in the United States sector and one in the British sector. …

My plan of assault, as approved by the Supreme Commander, provided for simultaneous landings by eight equivalent brigades – of which three were British and two were Canadian brigades, and three were American combat teams. … The total initial lift in the assault and follow-up naval forces was of the order of 130,000 personnel and 20,000 vehicles, all of which were to be landed on the first three tides. …

The Assault:

At 02.00 hours 6 June (1944) a ‘coup de main’ party of 6 Airborne Division was dropped near Benouville, to seize the bridges over the Canal de Caen and the River Orne. Surprise was complete, both bridges were captured intact and a close bridgehead was established. …

Meanwhile, the Allied sea armada drew in towards the coast of France, preceded by its flotillas of minesweepers. Not until the leading ships had reached their lowering positions, some seven to eleven miles offshore, and the naval bombardment squadrons had opened fire on the shore defences, was there any appreciable enemy activity. …

The Airborne and Seaborne Assault:

The Ninety men from D Company of the 2nd Battalion, the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry who, under the command of Major John Howard, had debouched from the gliders and captured Pegasus Bridge without difficulty earlier that morning, held it until they were relieved by Lord Lovat’s Commandos at 13.00 hours. Lovat’s had marched from the beach up to the canal towpath to the sound of bagpipes played by piper Bill Millin (pictured disembarking below), blowing away for all he was worth. The Americans were less accurate in finding their landing zones, some units landing as much as thirty-five miles off target. But this added to the practice of dropping dummy parachutists, so confusing German intelligence that it estimated a hundred thousand Allied troops had landed by air, more than four times the actual number. The majority of the paratroopers landed in the correct drop-zones, however, and were to play an invaluable part in attacking the beaches from the rear and holding back the inevitable German counter-attack.

The French Resistance had been ordered to ready itself for the invasion by the BBC broadcast on 1 June of the first line of the poem Autumn Song by Paul Verlaine, which went Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automme (‘The long sobs of the autumn violins’). The Abwehr had tortured a ‘Maquis’ leader and learnt that when the second line – Blessent mon coeur d’une langeur monotone (‘wound my heart with monotonous languour’) – was broadcast, it meant that the invasion was imminent. So when it was duly broadcast on 5 June at 23.15, the commander of the German Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais put his troops on alert, but no one warned the Seventh Army in Normandy. At Army Group B’s chateau headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, it was assumed that it must be more disinformation, as they could not believe that the Allies would have announced the invasion over the BBC. Certainly, the Germans were not expecting the offensive when it came. Shortly before 05.00, the Seventh Army’s chief of staff warned Army Group B that the attack was indeed taking place, Rommel was unavailable as he was in Germany celebrating his wife’s birthday. He only made it back to La Roche-Guyon at six o’clock that evening. His chief of staff, General Hans Speidel, ordered the Twelfth SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division to counter-attack at Caen at first light, but some of the 4,500 bombers that the Allies fielded that day severely blunted this attack. As Rommel later pointed out:

Even the movement of the most minor formations on the battlefield – artillery going into position, tanks forming up, etc. – is instantly attacked from the air with devastating effect. During the day fighting troops and headquarters alike are forced to seek cover in wooded and close country in order to escape the constant pounding of the air. Up to 640 (naval) guns have been used. The effect is so immense that no operation of any kind is possible in the area commanded by this rapid fire artillery, either by infantry or tanks.

The German Reactions to the Assault:

Interrogated after the war, Speidel quoted Rommel as having said, very perceptively:

Elements which are not in contact with the enemy at the moment of invasion will never get into action, because of the enormous air superiority of the enemy … If we do not succeed in carrying out our combat mission of warding off the Allies or hurling them from the mainland in the first forty-eight hours, the invasion has succeeded and the war is lost for lack of strategic reserves and lack of Luftwaffe in the west.

Although Hitler was not woken at Berchtesgaden with the news of the Normandy landings – he had been up with Goebbels until three o’clock the previous night, exchanging reminiscences, taking pleasure in the many fine days and weeks we have had together, as Goebbels recorded. Even by the lunchtime conference, the High Command was unsure that this was a true attack rather than a diversion. By the time the two Panzer divisions were sent against the beaches a hundred miles away, much valuable time had been lost. Rommel felt that the Allies had to be stopped from getting ashore, telling his Staff that the first twenty-four hours will be decisive. In all, there were fifty-nine German divisions in the west at the time of D-day, of which eight were in Holland and Belgium. More than half the overall totals were mere coastal-defence or training divisions, and of the twenty-seven field divisions only ten were armoured, with three of these in the south and one near Antwerp. Six divisions, four of them coastal defence were stationed along the two hundred miles of Normandy coast west of the Seine where the Allies attacked. The commanders later admitted that all of these divisions were better described as coastal protection forces rather than as true defence.

The Beaches – Utah & Omaha:

It was 05.50 that a massive naval bombardment opened up on the German beach fortifications and the villages along the Normandy coast. The troop crossings had taken several hours in some cases and, as it had been feared that the Germans would use gas on the beaches, the anti-gas chemical with which uniforms were sprinkled smelt so disgusting that, once added to the landing crafts’ tossing about on the waves, it induced vomiting in the many troops who had not already been seasick. At H-hour, 06.30, the main American landings took place on Utah beach, followed by those on Omaha beach, with the British and Canadians arriving on their three beaches an hour later, as Montgomery himself later recorded:

On Utah beach, VII United States Corps assaulted on a front of one regimental combat team. … On Omaha beach, H Hour for the assault had been fixed for 06.45 hours. V United States Corps assaulted on a broad front. … By nightfall V United States Corps had secured a beach head about a mile in depth.

At Utah, 23,000 men got ashore with only 210 killed or wounded, partly because the current had swept the US Fourth Division’s landing craft some two thousand yards south of the original area designated for the attack, on to a relatively lightly defended part of the coastline, and twenty-eight of the thirty-two amphibious Duplex Drive (DD)  Sherman tanks got ashore. The one regiment facing them from the German 709th Division surrendered in large numbers once the 101st Airborne had secured at least four exits from the beaches.

On Omaha beach, however, where two-thirds of the American effort that day was to land, it was a very different state of affairs. The veteran US 1st Division (known as the Big Red One from its shoulder flash) and the 29th Division, which had never seen combat before, were to suffer tenfold the losses as did the 4th Division at Utah. Despite all the meticulous preparation, the ground had been ill-chosen for the attack. However, once the decision had been taken to expand the area to be secured by Overlord from which further operations could be conducted to take in Utah beach to the west, Omaha was the only feasible landing area between Utah and the British and Canadian beaches. The cliffs and bluffs at Omaha were, in some places, more than a hundred and fifty feet above the sea wall at the end of the dunes and the inward curvature of the bay at that stretch helped the German fields of fire to overlap.  Underwater sand bars and ridges snagged the landing craft, and the well-placed fortifications, which can still be seen today, were not silenced by the naval shelling; the anti-personnel mines, barbed wire and huge steel anti-tank ‘hedgehogs’ proved murderous obstacles; accurate German artillery fire and crack infantry troops caused havoc. Rather than the four battalions of defenders that had been planned for, there were eight, but by the time this was discovered it was too late to alter the plan of attack. These battalions provided, according to the military historian Max Hastings, by far the greatest concentration of German fire on the entire invasion front.

After a truly extraordinary opening – probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed – everything changes and becomes formulaic. The opening scenes of the movie, Saving Private Ryan (pictured right) give the best cinematographic representation of those first monstrous minutes of the Omaha landings, but even that cannot begin to show the extent of the chaos and carnage on the beaches. It would have been even worse had Rommel been right about the Allies arriving at high tide, as every gun had been fixed for this eventuality. As it was they chose low tide in order to make the obstacles more visible. The six thousand yards of Omaha beach along which the Americans landed was soon a scene of utter destruction and confusion. The American soldiers, who aged on average twenty and a half, far younger than the British, at twenty-four, and the Canadians, at twenty-nine, had to leap out of their landing craft into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire loaded down with sixty-eight pounds of equipment, including a gas-mask, grenades, TNT blocks, two bandoliers of ammunition, rations, water-bottles and related kit. Many simply drowned when the water proved deeper than they had expected.

Although the ‘British’ beaches were in part cleared of German killing apparatus by a series of specialized tank-based gadgets, Generals Bradley and Gerow preferred a massive frontal assault. Because of heavy seas and being transferred to their landing vessels eleven and a half miles out, ten landing craft and twenty-six artillery pieces sank on their way to the beaches. The British transferred at six and a half miles out and suffered fewer sinkings as a result of less turbulent water. The loss of twenty-seven of the twenty-nine DD ‘floating tanks’, launched six thousand yards from the Omaha shore, denied the Americans the necessary firepower to get off the beach early. The RAF support planes observed a shambles … on the beach … burning tanks, jeeps, abandoned vehicles, a terrific crossfire. The official account of what happened to Able Company of 116th Infantry, 29th Division, after its landing craft hit Omaha beach at 06.36 gives a sense of the horror of those next few minutes:

Ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man’s head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine gun fire from both ends of the beach. … The first men out … are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning , doomed by the water-logging of of their overloaded packs. … Already the sea runs red. … A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upwards, so that their nostrils are out of the water, they creep towards the land  at the same rate as the tide. This is how most of the survivors make it. … Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless.

It was not until 13.30, after seven hours being pinned down on the beaches, that Gerow could signal to Omar Bradley, who was on board a ship trying to make out what was going on through binoculars, that troops were finally advancing up heights behind beaches. Although there were two thousand Americans killed on Omaha beach, by nightfall a total of 34,000 men had made it ashore, including two Ranger battalions that had silenced the German coastal battery at Pointe du Hoc to the west after scaling cliffs with rope ladders. At one point the 5th Rangers had to don gas masks in order to charge through the dense smoke coming from the undergrowth of a hillside that suddenly caught fire. In Saving Private Ryan, after its truly extraordinary opening – probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed – everything changes and becomes formulaic. Eight US rangers under the command of a captain, having survived the initial D-day bloodbath, are detailed to seek out and save a single man, Private Ryan. Although continually voted the best war movie ever, in a recent article for The Guardian, the historian Antony Beevor has repeated his balanced criticism of Spielberg’s claims for the movie:  

Steven Spielberg’s storyline rightly dramatises the clash between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival. Those mutually contradictory values are, in many ways, the essence of war. Spielberg said at the time that he sees the second world war as the “defining moment” in history. One also suspects that he wanted this film to be seen as the defining movie of the war. If so, it is a uniquely American definition of history, with no reference to the British let alone the Soviet role.

Gold, Juno and Sword Beaches:

The conditions faced by British and Canadian forces prior to reaching the beaches were no less harsh than those which the US soldiers had to contend with, but they met with far less resistance in their sectors and, as Montgomery later recorded, were able to establish control far more quickly, though still sustaining significant casualties:

… Second British Army assaulted on the right in the Gold sector. … H Hour for 3 British Division was fixed for 07.25 hours and the assault waves reached the beaches well on time. The leading brigade was soon a mile inland … by nightfall the Division was well-established. … 

John Watney’s eye-witness account in The Enemy Within (1946), describes in more detail the ‘order from chaos’ which was made on the ‘British’ beaches, due to the closer range of the fleet to the shore and the steady progress made by the soldiers under the cover provided by the Royal Navy’s assault:

On the beaches themselves all was feverish activity. Invasion craft of every kind and description lay at all angles in the sand; most had gone in head foremost and now lay a little off keel, half way up the beach or just in the water; others had been swung sideways and lay like rowing boats flung up by the breakers; others were still afloat, moored in the shallow waters that rippled over the grey sands, while dark splotches, which turned at close sight into tanks, carriers, guns and trucks, poured out of all these ships and crawled away in long queues across the sands, to disappear against the green of the fields. …

All around us lay the immense fleet that had brought us to this Normandy bay. There were ships of every kind, from the clear outlines of cruisers to the tubby fussiness of tugs. … Away to our left a cruiser was firing in spaced, steady salvos; to our right a second cruiser accompanied her, while behind me, out at sea, through the mist could be seen the orange flashes from what appeared to be a battleship. …

The tide left us dry at last and on the glassy stretches of the sands the ships lay in line, their bows open, spilling their cargoes on to the grey sands, in the grey light. The air was full of the roar of vehicles, the decks shook as the tanks clanked over them and nosed on to the ramps; then, rushing down the steep slopes, grasped the water-logged sand in their tracks and, with a jerking roar, heaved themselves inland. Clouds of steam accompanied these exertions, and, as I watched the tanks crawl out of the bellies of the line of the waiting ships, I was reminded of some fearsome tale of interplanetary warfare. …

Into this colourless nightmare arena of sands and tanks there came at last a touch of humanity; the first marching troops were landing now; like pony gladiators, weighed down with kit, they scrambled down the ramps and on to the wet sands; then, hunching up their packs and tightening their blankets (rolled Spanish-ways across their shoulders), they straggled off in the resisting sand, towards the land that now looked strong and real; their voices floated back, high and thin, against the din, like the muttering of a radio set tuned low in a room full of chattering people. 

There were no high cliffs at Gold, Juno and Sword beaches, and more time for the naval bombardment to soften up the German defences; however, by late afternoon part of the 21st Panzer Division attacked in the gap between Juno and Sword beaches and almost made it to the Channel before being turned back by naval fire. The British suffered over three thousand casualties, but by the end of the day, the Canadians who suffered over a thousand themselves, got the furthest inland, with their 9th Brigade advancing to within three miles of the outskirts of Caen. Montgomery concluded:

As a result of our D-Day operations a foothold had been gained on the Continent of Europe.

Surprise had been achieved, the troops had fought magnificently, and our losses had been much lower than had ever seemed possible.

Successes, Errors & Sacrifices:

At 16.00 hour Hitler, who had dithered about the best way to react to what he still suspected was a diversionary attack, finally agreed to his Chief of Staff’s request to send two Panzer Divisions into the battle in addition to the 12th SS and 21st Panzer Divisions already committed. But as the German historian Gerhard Weinberg has pointed out,

The reinforcements dribbled into the invasion front were never enough, and the Allied air forces as well as the sabotage effort of the French resistance and Allied special teams slowed down whatever was sent. The German armoured divisions, therefore, arrived one at a time and quite slowly, were never able to punch through, and ended up being mired in positional warfare because they continued to be needed at the front in the absence of infantry divisions.

Allied aerial supremacy over the battlefield made it impossible for the German tanks to be better deployed than in piecemeal fashion in daylight. Yet five armoured divisions of the reserve in France, and no fewer than nineteen divisions of the Fifteenth Army a hundred and twenty miles to the south, simply stayed in place waiting for the ‘real’ attack in the Pas de Calais. Meanwhile, Runstedt and Rommel became more and more convinced that Normandy was indeed the true Schwerpunkt, whereas the Führer continued to doubt it. The German troops were critically under-reinforced in Normandy, partly because of the success of the Allies’ elaborate though never conspicuously uniform deception plans. A determined German ground counter-offensive had once again been staved off by Allied air power. The 7th Army had thrown into battle every available unit in the Coastal defence forces, and bringing units from Brittany would take time. That was a commodity of which they had very little since they had failed in their initial objective of flinging the invasion forces back into the English Channel immediately. Both the capacity and willingness of the Wehrmacht to push the Allies back into the sea were still there, but they were overwhelmed by the ability of the RAF and the USAAF to attack the unprotected armour from above, where it was weakest. The bombing campaigns against the Luftwaffe factories and the attritional war against the German fighters once they had been built had paid off spectacularly. Such were the forces alighting from the Arromanches Mulberry Harbour, even though the second harbour off Omaha was rendered inoperable by a storm on 19 June, that by 1 July they exceeded a million men, 150,000 vehicles and 500,000 tons of supplies.

In total, D-Day itself saw around nine thousand Allied casualties, of whom more than half were killed, a high proportion for combat in the Second World War. The Allied dead comprised 2,500 Americans, and 2,000 British and Canadians. In addition, fifteen ANZAC soldiers and fifty-seven Norwegians, Free French and Belgian soldiers were killed, making 4,572 Allied troops in total. Although expected to lose eighty per cent of their numbers, the actual figure was fifteen per cent. The American cemetery at Collesville-sur-Mer above Omaha beach bears testimony to the sacrifice of the US servicemen. The news of D-day gave sudden, soaring hope to Occupied Europe. Ann Frank, the German-Jewish author who was about to celebrate her fourteenth birthday in hiding in the hidden attic of her father’s warehouse in Amsterdam, wrote poignantly in her now well-known Diary, of her excitement at the news and of her renewed hopes for her future:

The invasion has begun! Great commotion in the Secret Annexe! Would the long-awaited liberation that has been talked of so much but still seems too wonderful, too much like a fairy-tale, ever come true? Could we be granted victory this year, 1944? We don’t know yet, but hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.

A Fallen Poet:

One of those who did not survive the Normandy campaign was Keith Castellain Douglas (24 January 1920 – 9 June 1944, pictured below right), an English poet noted for his war poetry during the Second World War and his wry memoir of the Western Desert campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. Like so many others who fell in Normandy, Douglas had lived a short life but fought a long war. He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, the son of Capt. Keith Sholto Douglas, MC (retired) and Marie Josephine Castellain. Marie Douglas faced persistent ill-health, the collapse of her marriage and extreme financial distress, so much so that only the generosity of the Edgeborough Prep School headmaster Mr James permitted Douglas to attend school in 1930–1931, his last year there. Douglas sat in 1931 for the entrance examination to Christ’s Hospital, where education was free and there was monetary assistance to cover all other costs. He was accepted, and joined Christ’s Hospital, near Horsham, in September 1931, studying there till 1938. It was at this school that his considerable poetic talent and artistic ability were recognised.

After a bruising brush with authority in 1935, Douglas settled down to a less troubled and more productive period at school, during which he excelled both at studies and games, and at the end of which he won an open exhibition to Merton College, Oxford in 1938 to read History and English. The First World War-veteran and well-known poet Edmund Blunden was his tutor at Merton and regarded his poetic talent highly. Blunden sent his poems to T. S. Eliot, the doyen of English poetry, who found Douglas’s verses ‘impressive’.

Within days of the declaration of war he reported to an army recruiting centre with the intention of joining a cavalry regiment, but like many others keen to serve he had to wait, and it was not until July 1940 that he started his training. After attending the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he was commissioned on 1 February 1941 into the 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry at Ripon. He was posted to the Middle East in July 1941 and transferred to the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry. Posted initially at Cairo and Palestine, he found himself stuck at headquarters twenty miles behind El Alamein as a camouflage officer as the Second Battle of El Alamein began.

At dawn on 24 October 1942, the Regiment advanced, and suffered numerous casualties from enemy anti-tank guns. Chafing at inactivity, Douglas took off against orders on 27 October, drove to the Regimental HQ in a truck, and reported to the C.O., Colonel E. O. Kellett, lying that he had been instructed to go to the front. Luckily this escapade did not land him in serious trouble and he got off with an apology. Desperately needing officer replacements, the Colonel posted him to A Squadron and gave him the opportunity to take part as a fighting tanker in the Eighth Army’s victorious sweep through North Africa vividly recounted in his memoir Alamein to Zem Zem, illustrated with his own drawings.

Captain Douglas returned from North Africa to England in December 1943 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. He survived the Allied landings but was killed by enemy mortar fire on 9 June, while his regiment was advancing from Bayeux. The regimental chaplain Captain Leslie Skinner buried him by a hedge, close to where he had died on forward slopes point 102. Shortly after the war, his remains were reburied at Tilly-Sur-Seulles War Cemetery (14 km south of Bayeux).

Douglas described his poetic style as “extrospective”; that is, he focused on external impressions rather than inner emotions. The result is poetry which, according to his detractors, can be callous in the midst of war’s atrocities. For others, Douglas’s work is powerful and unsettling because its exact descriptions eschew egotism and shift the burden of emotion from the poet to the reader. His best poetry is generally considered to rank alongside the 20th century’s finest soldier-poetry.

Douglas’ poems were published in The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas by Faber & Faber (1978). Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, has written that while Douglas’ north-African poems may take a seemingly insouciant attitude towards battles, they leave us in no doubt about war’s misery and waste. In Vergissmeinnicht, he juxtaposes the roles of lover and killer in the rotting corpse of a German soldier:

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone

returning over the nightmare ground

we found the place again, and found

the soldier sprawling in the sun.

 

The frowning barrel of his gun

overshadowing. As we came on

that day, he hit my tank with one

like the entry of a demon.

 

Look. Here in the same gun-pit spoil

the dishonoured picture of his girl

who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht

in a copybook gothic script.

 

We see him almost with content,

abased, and seeming to have paid

and mocked at by his own equipment

that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

 

But she would weep to see today

how on his skin the swart flies move;

the dust upon the paper eye

and the burst stomach like a cave.

 

For here the lover and the killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart.

And death who had the soldier singled

has done the lover mortal hurt. 

Sources:

Andrew Roberts (2010), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin Books.

The Guardian History of the Second World War (2009).

Andrew Motion (ed.) (2003), 101 Poems Against War. Faber & Faber.

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (eds.) (1972), Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hitchinson Educational.