The Collapse of the Reich:

The final year of the war in Germany saw state lawlessness and terror institutionalised within the Reich. The People’s Court set up in Berlin to try cases of political resistance, presided over by Roland Freisler, sat ‘in camera’, while the prosecutors bullied prisoners into confessing political crimes, as in the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. In February 1945 the courtroom was demolished in a bomb attack and Freisler killed. In the last weeks of the war, the SS and Party extremists took final revenge on prisoners and dissidents. Thousands were murdered as Allied armies approached. Thousands more died in the final bomb attacks against almost undefended cities, crammed with refugees and evacuees. Ordinary Germans became obsessed with sheer survival. There was no ‘stab in the back’ from the home front, which Hitler had always used to explain defeat in 1918. Soldiers and civilians alike became the victims of a final orgy of terror from a Party machine which had traded on intimidation and violence from its inception.

Above: Berlin, 1945

Crossing the Rhine:

By the beginning of March, Hitler must surely have known, as Göring had intimated to Albert Speer in February, that the Reich he had created was doomed. The German front in the west cracked. For the final assault on Germany, the western Allies had eighty-five divisions, twenty-three of which were armoured, against a defending force of twenty-six divisions. In the east, the Soviet forces fielded over fourteen thousand tanks against  4,800 German and put 15,500 aircraft in the air against just fifteen hundred. A series of carefully organised military punches brought Soviet armies to within thirty-five miles of Berlin. On the 2nd, criticising Rundstedt’s proposal to move men south from the sector occupied by the 21st Army Group, Hitler perceptively pointed out: It just means moving the catastrophe from one place to another. 

Five days later, an armoured unit under Brigadier-General William M. Hoge from the 9th Armored Division of Hodge’s US First Army captured the Ludendorff railway bridge over the Rhine at Remagen intact, and Eisenhower established a bridgehead on the east of the Rhine. Hitler’s response was to sack Rundstedt as commander-in-chief west and replace him with Kesselring. The latter was handed a poisoned chalice in this appointment, with American troops swarming over the bridge into Germany, and Patton crossing on 22 March, telegraphing Bradley to say, For God’s sake tell the world we’re across … I want the world to know the 3rd Army made it before Monty. 

Montgomery’s crossing of the Rhine, codenamed ‘Operation Plunder’, watched by Churchill and Brooke (above), established a six-mile-deep bridgehead within forty-eight hours.

Poland & The Red Army Marshals:

Also in March, having tricked them into attending a meeting, the Soviets arrested and then imprisoned former members of the Polish underground council. Both the American and the British governments found it hard to reconcile the oppressive Soviet actions with the business-like leader they had seen at Yalta. So they fell back once more on what had by now become their standard excuse. Stalin himself was trustworthy; it was the other powerful but shadowy figures in the Kremlin who were preventing the Yalta agreement being honoured. Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen, the prominent American diplomat and Soviet expert, recorded that by May 1945 the view of those in the State Department who had been at Yalta was that it was the ‘opposition’ that Stalin had encountered ‘inside the Soviet Government’ on his return from the conference that was responsible for the problems. Even those in Moscow deduced that it was ‘Red Army Marshals’ who were somehow trying to pull the strings in the Kremlin. But there was no-one behind Stalin pulling the strings. His occasional inconsistency of approach, including the tactic of sending a conciliatory telegram simultaneously with an accusatory one, was deliberately designed to keep the West guessing. In reality, his overall strategy was clear enough: He had always wanted the states neighbouring the Soviet Union to be ‘friendly’ according to his definition of the word, which meant eliminating anyone whom the Soviets considered a threat.

But neither Churchill nor Roosevelt would recognise that Stalin was simply being consistent. To begin with, each of them had had too much political capital wrapped up in the idea that they could deal with the Soviet leader. Laurence Rees has pointed out:

Each of the two Western leaders came to believe that they could form a ‘special’ bond with Stalin. Both were wrong. Stalin had no ‘special bond’ with anyone but in their attempts to charm him they had missed the fact that he had, in his individual way, charmed them instead. 

It was Churchill who felt most upset at the perceived Soviet breaches of Yalta, something that bemused Stalin. After all, Churchill had let the Soviets have a free hand in Romania without any problems, just as the Soviets had let the British use force to quash the revolution in Greece. For Stalin, that meant that Churchill supported the concept of ‘spheres of influence’. He thought that Churchill’s protest over Poland, regardless of the precise wording of the Yalta agreement, was a case of double standards on Churchill’s part. For the British PM, however, as he wrote in March, in a lengthy and emotional telegram to Roosevelt, Poland was the…

… test case between us and the Russians of the meaning which is attached to the such terms as Democracy, Sovereignty, Independence, Representative Government and free and unfettered elections. … He (Molotov) clearly wants to make a farce of consultations with the non-Lublin Poles, which means that the new government in Poland would be merely the present one dressed up to look more respectable to the ignorant, and also wants to prevent us from seeing the liquidations and deportations that are going on, and all the restof the game of setting up a totalitarian régime before elections are held, and even before a new government is set up. As to the upshoot of all this, if we do not get things right now it will soon be seen by the world that you and I, by putting our signatures to the Crimean settlement, have underwritten a fraudulent prospectus.

Roosevelt, whose telegrams were now being drafted by his advisers, Byrnes or Leahy, replied to Churchill’s message on 11 March, saying that the ‘only difference’ between the British and Americans on this key issue was ‘one of tactics’; Roosevelt’s ‘tactics’ were not to escalate their protests over the issue before diplomatic channels in Moscow had been exhausted. But this attempt to calm Churchill down failed, as he replied in even more emotional terms on 13 March:

Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom? That is the question which will undoubtedly have to be fought out in Parliament and in public here. I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States governments, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in the presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what was settled at Yalta, but that we British have not the necessary strength to carry the matter further and the limits of our capacity to act have been reached.

Roosevelt, convinced that Churchill was over-reacting, subsequently pointed out that the agreement at Yalta could be read in such a way that Stalin could deflect many complaints. So why was Churchill so upset? Churchill, unlike Roosevelt, re-elected the previous year, had an election coming up, and the British electorate would not take kindly to accusations that Poland, the country over which Britain had gone to war in September 1939, had finally been the victim of wholesale betrayal. Moreover, Churchill’s own expansive rhetoric about Poland and Stalin meant that this was no ordinary issue of foreign policy, but a principle that had come to define the latter part of his war-time premiership. Roosevelt, although gravely ill, was only just starting his new term in office for the Democratic Party, and so was unburdened by such electoral concerns. But Churchill had overplayed the emotional rhetoric, and on 15 March Roosevelt sent him a cold reply:

I cannot but be concerned at the views you expressed… we have been merely discussing the most effective tactics and I cannot agree that we are confronted with a breakdown of the Yalta agreement until we have made the effort to overcome the obstacles incurred in the negotiations at Moscow.

Retreat from the Oder & Roosevelt’s departure:

Hitler visited the Eastern Front on 12th March, at Castle Freienwalde on the River Oder, where he told his commanders that Each day and each hour is precious because he was about to unleash a new secret weapon, without disclosing its nature. This was just another morale-boosting lie, since he had run out of rockets, the last V-2 landing a fortnight later and the new U-boats were also far from seaworthy. By mid-March, he had found a new scapegoat to blame for the coming victory of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik hordes’; it was all the fault of the German ‘Volk’ who had betrayed him by losing the war. By that stage, he positively invited the retribution that the ‘Aryan race’ was about to undergo at the hands of the Russians, believing that it had been the people’s weakness as human beings that had led to the disaster, rather than his own strategic errors. He even said as much, at least according to Albert Speer’s subsequent testimony:

If the war should be lost, then the ‘Volk’ will also be lost. This fate is unavoidable. It is not necessary to take into consideration the bases the ‘Volk’ needs for the continuation of its most primitive existence. On the contrary, it is better to destroy these things yourself. After all, the ‘Volk’ would then have proved the weaker nation, and the future would exclusively belong to the stronger nation of the east. What would remain after this fight would in any event be inferior subjects, since all the good ones would have fallen. 

He thus repudiated his own people as being unworthy of him. The mere survival of the German people would, for Hitler, have conferred an unacceptable Untermensch status on them, and the utter destruction of them would, he believed, be preferable to this and to domination by Stalin. He had only ever referred to the Soviets as ‘barbarians’ and ‘primitives’ and on 19 March the Führer gave his orders that…

All military transport, communication facilities, industrial establishments, and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory that could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the forseeable future for the continuance of the war, be destroyed.

These orders included the destruction of all factories and food stores on all fronts. Fortunately, these orders were largely ignored by Speer and the other Nazi officials. If they had been carried out to the letter, the German people could hardly have survived the winter of 1945/6, which was harsh enough for them as it was. Yet, despite his decision not to act on this one particular order, it was Speer who had commanded the vast army of slave labourers that produced German armaments in barbarous conditions.

Meanwhile, Churchill realised that he had gone too far in his ‘quarrel’ with Roosevelt over Poland and tried to charm his way out of the situation. On 17 March, he wrote to the President:

I hope that the rather numerous telegrams I have to send you on on so many of our difficult and intertwined affairs are not becoming a bore to you. Our friendship is the rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders.

Roosevelt did not reply but later acknowledged in an interchange on the 30th that he had received Churchill’s ‘very pleasing’ private message. But Roosevelt did get angry with Stalin when the latter accused the Americans of deception by holding a meeting with German officers in Berne in Switzerland about a possible surrender in Italy. Stalin saw this as a reason for both the strengthening of German resistance against the Red Army in the East and the swift progress of the Western Allies through Germany. Roosevelt was furious that Stalin had effectively accused him of lying, writing to him on 4 April that I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment towards your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations. … In his reply, Stalin immediately moderated his attack. But even though he was prepared to give way on this issue, he would not move an inch over Poland. On 7 April, he wrote to Roosevelt, agreeing that matters on the Polish question have reached a dead end. But Stalin was clear that the reason for this was that the Western Allies had departed from the principles of the Crimea Conference. The whole debate about Poland between the Western Allies and Stalin for the last three years and more were now plain for all to see. Stalin stated not just that the Lublin Poles should make up the bulk of the new government, but also that any other Poles who were invited to take part should be really striving to establish friendly relations between Poland and the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviets themselves would vet all the applicants for such invitations. Stalin justified this in writing:

The Soviet Government insists on this because of the blood of the Soviet troops abundantly shed for the liberation of Poland and the fact that in the course of the last thirty years the territory of Poland has been used by the enemy twice for attack upon Russia – all this obliges the Soviet Government to strive that the relations between the Soviet Union and Poland be friendly.

Roosevelt recognised that, given the loose language of the Yalta agreement, there was little the Western Allies could do apart from to protest, and there were limits to that given the need for continued co-operation both in Europe and the Far East. Roosevelt left the White House on 30 March 1945 for the health resort of Warm Springs in Georgia, where his office was filled with documents about the forthcoming conference in San Francisco that would initiate the United Nations. Right to the end of his life, Roosevelt never lost his focus on his vision of the UN. Alongside this grand ideal, the detailed question of Soviet infractions in Poland must have seemed to him relatively unimportant. On 12 April he finally fell victim to a cerebral haemorrhage. Churchill paid tribute to the President in the House of Commons but chose not to attend his funeral, perhaps a final statement of disappointment that Roosevelt had not supported him in the last weeks over the protests to be made to Stalin.

The Exodus from the Baltic & the Berne talks:

Meanwhile, on 31 March, Stalin had ordered the assault on the capital. Both the planning and conduct of this final battle in the war in Europe demonstrate further signs of the disintegrating alliance with Stalin. The planning for the operation was conducted at the end of March and the beginning of April against the background of Stalin’s suspicion that the Western Allies were planning some kind of separate peace with Germany via the Berne talks. Stalin met Marshal Zhukov, the most prominent of the Soviet commanders, in the Kremlin late in the evening on 29 March and had handed an intelligence document which suggested that the Western Allies were in discussion with Nazi agents. The Soviet leader remarked that Roosevelt wouldn’t break the Yalta agreement but Churchill was capable of anything. Stalin had just received a telegram from General Eisenhower which, much to Churchill’s subsequent annoyance, confirmed that the Western Allies were not pushing forward immediately to Berlin. For Stalin, this was evidence of Allied deceit: if they had said that they were not moving to take Berlin, then they clearly were. In the spirit of saying the opposite of what one really intended, Stalin sent a telegram to Eisenhower on 1 April that stated that he agreed that the capture of Berlin should not be a priority since the city had lost its former strategic importance.

He may well also have written this because he still had other priorities since there was still fighting taking place across the broader front from the Baltic to the Balkans. It was extraordinary, considering that the war’s outcome had been in doubt since the destruction of Army Group Centre in the summer of 1944, that the Wehrmacht continued to operate as an efficient, disciplined fighting force well into 1945. As many as four hundred thousand Germans were killed in the first five months of 1945. General Schörner’s newly re-created Army Group Centre, for example, was still fighting around the town of Küstrin on the Oder in April 1945. Similarly, the 203,000 men representing the remains of Army Group North, renamed Army Group Kurland, kept fighting into May, showing astonishing resilience in the face of utter hopelessness and retaining military cohesion until the moment that they were marched off into a ten-year captivity spent rebuilding the infrastructure of the Soviet Union that they had destroyed.

Following their seizure of Budapest on 13 February, the Red Army advanced towards Vienna. The Sixth Panzer Army halted the Russian advance down the Hungarian valleys into Austria for as long as its fuel could last out during March 1945, but Vienna finally fell to Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front on 13 April. Hitler’s headquarters had by then adopted a policy of lying to the army group commanders, as the commander of Army Group South discovered when he received orders to hold Vienna at all costs. Rendulic was given to telling his troops:

When things look blackest and you don’t know what to do, beat your chest and say: “I’m a National Socialist; that moves mountains!”

Since, on that occasion, this didn’t seem to work, he asked the OKW how the continuation or termination of the war was envisaged, only to receive the answer that the war was to be ended by political measures. This was clearly untrue, and Rendulic surrendered near Vienna in May. In the first five months of 1945, he had commanded Army Group North in East Prussia and Army Group Centre in January, Army Group Kurland in March and Army Group South in Austria in April. After the fall of Vienna, the Soviet troops met up with American and British troops at the River Enns and in Styria. After that, the advance of the Red Army from Pressburg to Prague led to the Czech uprising against the German occupation of Prague on 5 May.

In the north on the Baltic coast, the Germans were in a dire situation because of Hitler’s refusal to countenance Guderian’s pleas to rescue Army Group Centre in East Prussia and Army Group Kurland (formerly Army Group North) in Latvia. Yet with both  Zhukov and Rokossovsky bearing down on more than half a million trapped on the Kurland peninsula, the German Navy – at tremendous cost – pulled off an evacuation that was far larger even than that at Dunkirk. No fewer than four army divisions and 1.5 million civilian refugees were taken from the Baltic ports of Danzig, Gotenhafen, Königsberg, Pillau, and Kolberg by the Kriegsmarine, and brought back to Germany. Under constant air attack, which claimed every major ship except the cruisers Prinz Eugen and Nürnberg, the German Navy had pulled off a tremendous coup. The Soviet Navy was, surprisingly, a grave disappointment throughout the second world war, though one of its submarines, the S-13, had managed to sink the German liner MV Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea on 31 January 1945, and around nine thousand people – almost half of them children – perished, representing the greatest loss of life on one ship in maritime history.

How the West was won (but almost lost to the V-I):

Nevertheless, in the west, when 325,000 men of Army Group B were caught in the Ruhr pocket and forced to surrender, Field Marshal Walther Model dissolved his army group and escaped into a forest. Having recently learnt that he was to be indicted for war crimes involving the deaths of 557,000 people in Latvian concentration camps, and after hearing an insanely optimistic radio broadcast by Goebbels on the Führer’s birthday, he shot himself on 21 April. A few days earlier, Churchill had proposed a triple proclamation from the Big Three, which now included the new US President, Harry S. Truman, …

… giving warning to Germany not to go on resisting. If (the Germans) carry on resistance past sowing time then there will be famine in Germany next winter … we take no responsibility for feeding Germany.

Churchill was advocating the most extreme measures, but like several others, he put forward this was not adopted. Despite encountering some fierce resistance, the Allied victory in the west was not in doubt in the minds of rational Germans. For the most optimistic Germans, however, Goebbels’ propaganda about the so-called ‘wonder weapons’ kept their hopes alive, but on 29 March, six days after Montgomery’s Second Army and the US Ninth Army had crossed the Rhine, anti-aircraft gunners in Suffolk shot down the last of the V-I flying bombs launched against Britain in the Second World War. Called the Vergeltungswaffe-Ein (Vengeance Weapon-I), they were nicknamed ‘doodle-bugs’ or ‘buzz bombs’ by the Britons at whom they were targetted. The V-I was certainly a horrific weapon, powered by a pulse-jet mechanism using petrol and compressed air, it was twenty-five feet four inches long with a sixteen-foot wingspan, and weighed 4,750 pounds. Its warhead was made up of 1,874 pounds of Amatol explosive, a fearsome mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate. Its sister-rocket, the V-2, was equally fiendish, but with the Luftwaffe unable to escort bombers over England due to British fighter protection, the rockets were a sign of Hitler’s desperation rather than his strength.

As the V-I’s maximum range was  130 miles, London and south-east England were its main targets, and they suffered heavily. Launched from 125-foot concrete ramps and flown by autopilot from a preset compass, the flying bomb contained in its nose propeller a log which measured the distance flown. Once it reached the correct range, the elevators in the wings were fully deflected and it dived, cutting out the engine as it did so. This created a sinister change in the noise created which signified that they were about to fall on those below, bringing a terrifying certainty of an imminent, devastating explosion. It has been estimated that eighty per cent of V-I’s landed within an eight-mile radius of their targets. Between 13 June 1944 and 29 March 1945, more than 13,000 V-I bombs were launched against Britain. They flew too low for heavy anti-aircraft guns to be able to hit them very often, but too high for the light guns to reach them. It was therefore left to the RAF’s radar-guided fighters to intercept them and bring them down. As the Normandy launch-sites were shut down by the invading British Army, some of the V-I’s were launched from the modified Heinkel bombers. In all, more than twenty-four thousand Britons were casualties of the vicious ‘secret weapon’, with 5,474 deaths. Whereas the Luftwaffe had long-since confined its raids to night-time when its bombers could be cloaked in darkness, the pilotless bombs came all through the day and night.

The V-I bombs could also devastate a huge area over a quarter of a square mile, but as more and more were brought down by a combination of barrage balloons, anti-aircraft fire and the fighters it soon became clear that Hitler, who had hoped that the V-I’s might destroy British morale and force Churchill’s government to sue for peace, was wrong about the weapon’s potential. He then transferred his hopes to the V-2, devised in Pomerania as a supersonic ballistic missile, flying faster than the speed of sound, which meant that the victims heard was the sound of its detonation. It was impossible to intercept as it flew at 3,600 mph, ten times faster than the Spitfire. With production at full capacity in the autumn of 1944, Hitler had hoped that London could be bombed into submission before the Allies could invade Germany. Yet it was largely his own fault that the V-2 came on stream so late, so that the first rocket to land on Britain didn’t do so until September 1944 in Chiswick, west London, having been fired from a converted lorry in the Hague. Over the five months of the campaign, 1,359 rockets were fired at London, killing 2,754 and injuring 6,523. Antwerp was also heavily hit by the weapons, resulting in thirty thousand casualties. It has also been estimated that up to twenty thousand people died in the horrific slave-labour conditions while manufacturing the rockets. Life in the factories, which were scattered all over Germany, was nasty, brutish and short: apart from the horrific accidents, there was mass starvation, disease and mistreatment. The concentration of labour, raw materials and technological research engaged in the production of the V-weapons was in no way justified by their results, and their deployment was too late to change the outcome of the war.

From mid-March, the military situation slipped completely out of Hitler’s control: The Rhine front had collapsed as soon as the Allies had challenged it, and they then swept forward to the Elbe. At the end of March, Hitler again dismissed perhaps the best of his battlefield commanders, Heinz Guderian, and replaced him with the utterly undistinguished General Hans Krebs. Other fanatical Nazi generals such as Schörner and Rendulic were promoted, not so much for their military competence as for their ideological loyalty.

Planning for Nuremberg:

How would the maniacal genocide of these dedicated Nazis be punished after the war? During the ‘lull’ in the fighting on the Western front, On 12 April, at 3.30 p.m. the British War Cabinet discussed how to deal with German war criminals. Antony Eden set out his policy for a large-scale trial. Preferring the summary execution without trial of the senior Nazis, Stafford Cripps argued that either the Allies would be criticised for not giving Hitler a real trial, or they would ‘give him a chance to harangue’ with the result being ‘neither proper trial nor political act’ but ‘the worst of both worlds’. Churchill suggested a ‘Trial of the Gestapo as a body first followed by proceedings against selected members. The Americans, however, had made it clear that they would not agree to ‘penalties without trial’ and Stalin also insisted on trials. The historian in Churchill was unconvinced, and he advanced a ‘Bill of Attainder, not impeachment’, such as that used to execute Charles I’s advisor the Earl of Strafford in 1640 without the need for a trial.

The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, believed that a ‘mock trial’ was objectionable, and it would be better to declare that they would put them all to death. Churchill agreed, saying that the trial would be a farce. Turning to the wording of the indictments and the defendants’ right to be given access to defence barristers, the PM argued:

All sorts of complications ensue as soon as you admit a fair trial. … they should be treated as outlaws. We should however seek agreement of our Allies … I would take no responsibility for a trial, even though the United States wants to do it. Execute the principal criminals as outlaws, if no Ally wants them.

Above: A scene from the Nuremberg Trials of the major war criminals held between November 1945 and October 1946. Twenty-two principal defendants were tried, and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, was tried ‘in absentia’. Göring (seated, left) kept up a rigorous defence and admitted his support for Hitler, but not his guilt. He committed suicide on the night of his execution when another nine were hanged. Bormann was condemned to death but never caught.  

But Field Marshal Smuts thought that Hitler’s summary execution might ‘set a dangerous precedent’ and that an ‘Act of State’ was needed to legalise Hitler’s execution. Churchill added that allowing Hitler to right to make judicial arguments against his own execution would ape judicial procedure but also bring it into contempt, and Morrison interjected that it would also ensure that he would become a martyr in Germany. Churchill concluded the discussion by saying that Lord Simon should liaise with the Americans and Russians to establish a list of grand criminals and get them to agree that these may be shot when taken in the field. In the end, this expedient was not adopted, and instead, the long process of putting the Senior Nazis on trial was established by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (featured above), which for all its drawbacks did lead to justice being seen to be done.

The Final Assault on Berlin:

On the Eastern front, the Russians didn’t move until mid-April. As he opened the last planning session for the capture of Berlin, Stalin said I have the impression that a very heavy battle lies ahead of us. Yet he had 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks and 7,500 aircraft to throw into this enormous final assault, and on Monday 16 April around twenty-two thousand guns and mortars rained 2,450 freight-car loads of shells at the German lines, which were also blinded by a mass of searchlights shone at them. Zhukov’s troops launched a massive attack on the Seelow Heights outside Berlin, and within four days they had broken through this last major defensive position in front of the capital. The Russian artillery gunners had to keep their mouths open when they fire, in order to stop their eardrums bursting. After a massive bombardment of the far bank, they crossed the Oder and advanced from the Neisse River. The leading Soviet columns joined at Nauen and encircled Berlin by 24 April. In a move calculated both to speed the advance and deny Zhukov the glory of overall command, Stalin had announced to his generals that he was splitting the task of capturing Berlin between two Soviet armies. It was to be a race for the capital between Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and Konyev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. Mahmud Gareev, then a major in the headquarters of Soviet 45 Infantry Corps, recalled:

Stalin encouraged an intrigue … When they were drawing the demarcation line between the two fronts in Berlin, Stalin crossed this demarcation line out and said: “Whoever comes to Berlin first, well, let him take Berlin.” This created friction. … You can only guess Stalin was do that no one gets stuck up and thinks he was the particular general who took Berlin. … At the same time he had already begun to think what would happen after the war if Zhukov’s authority grew too big.

By Hitler’s birthday, the 20th, the Red Army was shelling the German leader’s subterranean refuge, the Führerbunker. For Vladen Anschishkin, a captain in a mortar unit in Zhukov’s Belorussian Front, this was the culmination of years of fighting:

At last it was the end of the war, it was a triumph, and it was like a race, like a long-distance race, the end of the race. I felt really extreme – well, these words did not exist then – but I felt under psychological and emotional pressure. Naturally, I didn’t want to get killed,. This is natural. I didn’t want to be wounded. I wanted to live to the victory, but it was somewhere in the background, and in the foreground were things I had to do, and this state of stress that was in me.

He was sure that the years of brutal warfare had changed him and his comrades:

In the end, in the war itself, people go mad. They become like beasts. You shouldn’t consider a soldier an intellectual. Even when an intellectual becomes a soldier, and he sees the blood and the intestines and the brains, then the instinct of self-preservation begins to work. … And he loses all the humanitarian features inside himself. A soldier turns into a beast.

The battle for Berlin was one of the bloodiest and most desperate of the war. Within six days, the Red Army was inside Berlin, but desperate fighting in the streets and rubble there cut down their advantages and increased those of the Germans. The Wehrmacht’s lack of tanks mattered less in the built-up areas, and hundreds of Soviet tanks were destroyed in close fighting by the Panzerfaust, an anti-tank weapon that was very accurate at short range. Vladen Anchishkin recalled:

So many of our people died – a great many, a mass. … It was a real non-stop assault, day and night. The Germans also decided to hold out to the end. The houses were high and with very thick foundations and basements and very well fortified. … And our regiment found itself in terrible confusion and chaos, and in such a chaos it’s very easy to touch somebody else with your bayonet. Ground turns upside-down, shells and bombs explode. 

Above: The ruins of Berlin with the Brandenburg Gate in the background. The city was hit by twenty-four major bomb attacks which destroyed one-third of all housing and reduced the population from 4.3 to 2.6 million as the bombed-out families moved to safer parts of the country. The Soviet offensive in April reduced large stretches of central Berlin to rubble.

Within the chaos of the battle, the rivalry between Zhukov and Konyev was intense. Anatoly Mereshko, an officer with Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, was ordered to find out just which Soviet forces had captured a particular suburb of Berlin first:

I got into my car with machine gunners. Rode up there and talked to the people in the tanks. One said: “I am from the Belorussian Front”, another: “I am from the Ukrainian Front.” “Who came here first?” I asked. “I don’t know,” they replied. I asked civilians: “Whose tanks got here fist?” They just said: “Russian tanks.” It was difficult enough for a military enough for a military man to tell the difference between the tanks. So when I came back I reported that Zhukov’s tanks got their first and Konyev’s tanks came later. So the celebration fire-works in Moscow were in his name.

In the heat of the battle, it was also clear that the race between Zhukov and Konyev had not helped the soldiers to know just which forces were friendly and which were not. Vladen Anschishken recalled:

They were rivals… There was rivalry between two fronts. There was nothing criminal about it… But this rivalry in Berlin did not always have the positive effect because sometimes soldiers didn’t know who was where. … This was on the borders between the fronts, and a lot of people died only because of rivalry between two fronts.

Despite the difficulties, the Red Army fought with immense conviction in Berlin, fuelled by the sense that they were on a mission of retribution. We are proud to have made it to the beast’s lair, one soldier wrote home: We will take revenge, revenge for all our sufferings. Taking overall command of the great final offensive against Berlin itself, Marshal Zhukov gave up his 1st Belorussian Front to Vasily Sokolovsky and took over an army group combining both that and Konev’s front, reaching Berlin on 22 April 1945 and encircling it three days later.

The Capture & Capitulation of the Capital:

On Wednesday 25 April, units from the US First Army, part of Bradley’s 12th Army Group, and from the 1st Ukrainian Front met up at Torgau on the Elbe.

Although criticised since for his desire to leave the fight to the Soviets, Eisenhower was correct in the assumption that there would be heavy losses in the struggle. It is perfectly possible that Simpson’s US Ninth Army, which was on the Elbe only sixty miles west of Berlin on 11 April, eleven days before the Russians reached it, could have attacked the city first. It had crossed a hundred and twenty miles in the previous ten days, and the Germans were not putting up the level of resistance in the west that they were in the east. But, despite the complaints of Montgomery and Patton that the Western Allies should be taking Berlin ahead of the Russians, the Western Allies did not have to suffer the vast number of casualties in the final desperate struggle, though they would probably have fought it in a less costly manner. Bradley’s assessment, made for Eisenhower, was that a Western attack on Berlin would cost a hundred thousand casualties, which he considered a pretty stiff price for a prestige objective. Konyev later stated that the Red Army lost eight hundred tanks in the battle for Berlin, and Russian casualties amounted to 78,291 killed and 274,184 wounded. These figures could have been smaller had Stalin not insisted on taking Berlin as soon as possible, regardless of the human cost involved. They also include all the casualties incurred in the fighting from the Baltic to the Czech border. It has been estimated that twenty-five thousand died within the capital itself.

Despair, Suicide & Resistance:

Meanwhile, in his bunker beneath the Old Chancellery in the Wilhelmstrasse, Hitler continued to indulge himself in fantasies about the Allies falling out with each other once their armies met. Although he has often been described as moving phantom armies around on maps in the bunker and making hollow declarations of coming victory, this was in part the fault of the sub-standard communications centre. Unlike the well-appointed Wolfschanze, his Berlin bunker had only a one-man switchboard, one radio transmitter and one radio-telephone which depended on a balloon suspended over the Old Chancellery. Officers were reduced to telephoning numbers taken at random from the Berlin telephone directory, the Soviet advance being plotted by how many times the calls were answered in Russian rather than German. Hitler decided to stay where he was. He held his mid-day conferences, as usual, charting the progress of the Russians across the city block by block. He also composed his political testament, denouncing his oldest friends as traitors all and railed against the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ that he believed had brought him down.

The last time Hitler appeared in semi-public was on his fifty-sixth and last birthday on 20 April, when he congratulated a line-up of Hitler Youth who had distinguished themselves as fighters. One of these children, Arnim Lehmann, recalls the Führer’s weak voice and rheumy eyes as he squeezed their ears and told them how brave they were being. The German Ninth Army under General Theodor Busse in the south of Berlin and the Eleventh Army under General Felix Steiner in the north would now try to defend a city with no gas, water, electricity or sanitation. When Steiner, who was outnumbered ten to one, failed to counter-attack to prevent Berlin’s encirclement, he was subjected to a tirade from Hitler. The last direct order to be personally signed by the Führer in the bunker was transmitted to Field Marshal Schörner at 04:50 on 24 April and reads:

I shall remain in Berlin, so as to play a part, in honorouble fashion, in the decisive battle for Germany, and to set a good example to all the rest. I believe that in this way I shall be rendering Germany the best service. Fot the rest, every effort must be made to win the struggle for Berlin. You can therefore help decisively, by pushing northwards as early as possible. With kind regards, Yours, Adolf Hitler.

The signature, in red pencil, looks remarkably normal, considering the circumstances. Schörner, who had large numbers of men shot for cowardice, was named in Hitler’s will as the new head of the Wehrmacht, but nine days later he deserted his army group and flew off in a small aircraft in civilian clothes to surrender to the Americans. He was handed over to the Russians and kept in captivity until 1954. In all about thirty thousand death sentences for cowardice and desertion were handed down by the Germans on the Eastern Front in the last year of the war, two-thirds of which were carried out.

The Red Army had long been shooting anyone captured in SS uniform, and those SS men who had discarded it nonetheless could not escape the fact that their blood group was tattoed on their left arms. It is thought that it was this knowledge of certain death which kept many formations at their post during the dark days of the battles for Berlin, but, just in case, the military police remained vigilant to the last, ready to hang or shoot suspected deserters. Spreading defeatism was also a capital offence; after a short mockery of a trial by the SS or Gestapo, those suspected of it for whatever reason were hanged from the nearest lamp-post, with signs around their necks stating I have hanged because I was too much of a coward to defend the Reich’s capital, or I am a deserter; because of this I will not see the change in destiny or All traitors die like this one. It is thought that at least ten thousand people died in this manner in Berlin – the same as the number of women who died (often by suicide) after having been raped by the Red Army there.

Above: Two women lie dead after taking cyanide in Leipzig at the end of the war.

Because of this horror, the Germans fought on with an efficiency that was utterly remarkable given the hopelessness of the situation. Yet at Berlin, as at Stalingrad, the indiscriminate artillery and aerial bombardment created fine opportunities for the defenders, of whom the city had eighty-five thousand of all kinds. As well as the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and Gestapo contingents, there were several foreign volunteer forces, including French Fascists, and the desperately under-armed ‘Volkssturm’ (home guard) battalions made up of men over forty-five and children under seventeen. Many of the three thousand Hitler Youth who fought were as young as fourteen, and some were unable to see the enemy from under their adult-sized coal-scuttle helmets. The looting, drunkenness, murder and despoilation indulged in by the Red Army in East Prussia, Silesia and elsewhere in the Reich, but especially in Berlin, were responses of soldiers who had marched through devastated Russian towns and cities over the previous twenty months. Max Egremont has written of how…

Red Army troops loathed the neatness they found on the farms and in the towns of East Prussia: the china lined up on the dressers, the spotless housekeeping, the well-fenced fields and sleek cattle.

The Red Army’s ‘Retribution’:

Above and Below: A Russian photographer captures the smiles of German women at the Brandenburg Gate in defeated Berlin. The Soviet soldiers were ready to claim the spoils of war and seek retribution for Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. There were widespread acts of looting and rape, and the latest research shows that as many as two million German women were raped. The other half of the photo (below) shows a Soviet tank.

The women of Germany were also about to pay a high personal price for the Wehrmacht’s four-year ravaging of Mother Russia. Antony Beevor, the historian of Berlin’s downfall, at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rapes. In Berlin alone, ninety thousand women were raped in the last few days before the city surrendered. As one Red Army veteran joked, he and his comrades raped ‘on a collective basis’. When the Red Army arrived in Dresden, the Soviets committed atrocities in direct view of the house where twenty-two-year-old American, John Noble, lived with his father, who owned a camera factory, and the rest of his family, all of whom were American citizens. Although not imprisoned by the Nazis, they were effectively interned, reporting regularly to the police. Noble recalled how:

In the house next to ours, Soviet troops went in and pulled the women out on the street, had mattresses that they pulled out, and raped the women. The men had to watch, and then the men were shot. Right at the end of our street a woman was tied onto a wagon wheel and was terribly misused. … Of course you had the feeling that you just wanted to stop it, but there was no possibility to do that.

The open abuse of women and the general looting of the city continued for at least three weeks before a semblance of order returned. Even after this period, the Nobles regularly heard reports that women who worked in their camera factory had been assaulted on their journey to and from work. Far from seeking to stop or even discourage rapes and assaults of German women, the Soviet authorities encouraged them as a legitimate and appropriate form of retribution. This was articulated by Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet propagandist, who wrote: Soldiers of the Red Army. German women are yours! The rapes in Germany were on a massive scale, even more so than in Hungary. Around two million were assaulted. In one of the worst examples of atrocity, a Berlin lawyer who had protected his Jewish wife through all the years of Nazi persecution tried to stop Red Army soldiers raped her, but was then shot. As he lay dying, he watched as his wife was gang-raped. Potsdam, just outside Berlin, was devastated and much of it lay in ruins. Ingrid Schüler, who lived in an apartment block within a mile of the proposed site of the forthcoming conference, was seventeen years old when the Red Army arrived in April. She recalled:

My parents hid me. … we were extremely lucky because my mother was not raped. … women were of huge importance to them (the Soviets). That was the worst thing: the rapes. … I can tell you about a baker’s family in our street. The Russians had gone into their house intending to rape the baker’s wife. Her husband, who happened to be at home, stood in front of her trying to protect her and was immediately shot dead. With their passage to the woman clear, she was raped.

The scale of the atrocities perpetrated by the Red Army in Germany in the first six months of 1945 was clearly immense. And the motivational factors were obvious as well. Vladen Anchishkin put it this somewhat incomprehensible way:

When you see this German beauty sitting and weeping about the savage Russians who were hurting her, why did she not cry when she was receiving parcels from the Eastern Front?

Only very occasionally, in their letters home, did the soldiers admit what was happening. One Red Army soldier, writing home in February 1945, commented that the fact that the German women did not speak a word of Russian, made the act of rape easier:

You don’t have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan (a type of revolver) and tell them to lie down. Then you do your stuff and go away.

It was not only German women who suffered in these last few days before the city capitulated and the Reich finally surrendered. Polish women, Jewish concentration-camp survivors, even released Soviet female POWs were raped at gunpoint, often by up to a dozen soldiers. Because Order No. 227 had decreed that Russians who had surrendered to the Germans were traitors, gang-rapes of Russian female POWs were permitted, even actually arranged. Age, desirability or any other criteria made virtually no difference. In Dahlem, for instance, Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were raped without pity. The documentary and anecdotal evidence is overwhelming and indisputable. The Red Army, having behaved so heroically on the battlefield, raped the women of Germany as part of their reward, with the active collusion of their officers up to and including Beria and even Stalin himself. Indeed, he explicitly excused their conduct on more than one occasion, seeing it as part of the rights of the conqueror. He asked Marshal Tito in April 1945 about these rights of the ordinary Russian soldier:

What is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?… You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be … The important thing is that it fights Germans.

Stalin with Churchill at the Yalta Conference in February.

Some historians have argued that these atrocities, like those committed by the Red Army earlier in the year during the siege of Budapest, must be seen in the overall context of violent retribution on all sides of the war. After all, they claim, for years the Red Army had been fighting an enemy who had announced that they were fighting a ‘war of annihilation’. As well as for the sexual gratification of the soldiers, mass rape was intended as a humiliation and revenge on Germany. If the men of the Wehrmacht had sown the wind in Operation Barbarossa, it was their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters who were forced to reap that whirlwind. Yet it is perfectly possible, given events elsewhere the same year, that the Red Army would have brutalised the Germans even if they had not envied their enemies’ prosperity and sought revenge for the terrible acts of war they had exacted during their invasion, occupation and destruction of vast tracts of their ‘motherland’ and its defenders.

It was not the Red Army alone that indulged in the ‘weaponisation’ of rape against civilians. In North Africa and western Europe, the US Army stands indicted of raping an estimated fourteen thousand civilian women between 1942 and 1945. But though these resulted in arrests, convictions and executions (iniquitously of black GIs), nobody was ever executed for raping a German woman. Nor is there any evidence that Russian soldiers were reprimanded for rape, despite the two million cases in one campaign lasting at most three months. It was no doubt in the context of that ‘campaign of retribution’ against both the Wehrmacht and the German civilian population that Vladen Anchiskin later admitted to committing the ultimate act of revenge in Czechoslovakia when he and some of his comrades were fired upon by a group of retreating SS soldiers. All his pent-up hatred burst through into what he himself described as ‘a frenzy’. Once they were captured, he had a number of these soldiers brought in to see him in an apartment block, one by one, for “interrogation”. He stabbed the first man to death, also cutting his throat. He tried to explain his actions:

I was in such a state. … What could I feel? … only one thing, revenge. … I felt, “You wanted to kill me? Now you have it. I waited for this – you were hunting me down for four years. You killed so many of my friends in the rear and on the front, and you were allowed to do that. But here I have the right. … You asked for it.”

Three Suicides, Two Surrenders & a Celebration:

As Soviet forces approached the bunker under the chancellery on 30 April 1945, at about 3.30 p.m, Hitler simultaneously clenched his teeth on a cyanide capsule and shot himself through the temple. When Winston Churchill was told the next day of the German official broadcast stating that Hitler had died fighting with his last breath against Bolshevism, his comment was: Well, I must say he was perfectly right to die like that. Lord Beaverbrook, who was dining with him at the time, observed that the report was obviously untrue. It had taken units as hardened as Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front to force their way into the capital of the Reich, which was defended street-by-street all the way up to the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery. Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad, commander of the Eighth Guards Army and now of Soviet forces in central Berlin, recalled the Germans’ attempted capitulation, which took place at his command post on May Day, with the visit of General Hans Krebs, whom Hitler had appointed Chief of the OKH General Staff in Guderian’s place the previous month:

At last, at 03:50 hours, there was a knock at the door, and in came a German general with the Order of the Iron Cross around his neck, and the Nazi swastika on his sleeve. … A man of middle height, and solid build, with a shaven head, and scars on his face. … With his right hand he makes a gesture of greeting – in his own, Nazi, fashion; with his left he tenders his service book to me.

Speaking through an interpreter, Krebs said:

I shall speak of exceptionally secret matters. You are the first foreigner to whom I will give this information, that on 30 April Hitler passed from us from his own will, ending his life by suicide.

Chuikov recalled that Krebs paused at this point, expecting ardent interest in this sensational news. Instead, Chuikov replied that the Soviets had already heard this news. In fact, this was not true, but he had already determined that he would show no surprise at any unexpected approaches, but remain calm and avoid drawing any hasty conclusions. Since Krebs had brought only an offer of a negotiated surrender with a new government, headed by Dönitz as president and Goebbels as chancellor, Chuikov – under orders from Zhukov and the Stavka – refused and demanded an unconditional surrender. Krebs then left to report to Goebbels, commenting as he left that May Day is a great festival for you, to which Chuikov responded:

And today why should we not celebrate? It is the end of the war, and the Russians are in Berlin.

After Krebs had told Goebbels the news, they both committed suicide, their remains being thrown in with those of Mr and Mrs Hitler. Goebbels’ corpse was identified by the special boot he wore for his clubbed foot. The next day, 2 May, Berlin capitulated and six days later so did all German forces throughout the now-defunct Reich. Soviet attacks in Kurland continued to be repulsed until the day of capitulation, but over the next week, the German armies still in the field surrendered to the Allied forces encircling them. Limited resistance continued until the remaining German forces surrendered on 7 May. In the early morning, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the German High Command, signed the document of unconditional surrender. The next day, the war in Europe, which had cost some thirty million lives, was finally over. The capitulation of all German forces became effective on 9 May.

The famous photograph (above and below) of the red flag being waved over the Reichstag in 1945 was taken by the twenty-eight-year-old Ukrainian Jew Yevgeny Khaldei with a Leica camera. The flag was actually one of three red tablecloths that the photographer had, in his words, got from Grisha, the bloke in charge of the stores at work. He had promised to return them and a tailor friend of his father’s had spent all night cutting out hammers and sickles and sewing them onto the cloths to make Soviet flags. So it was a tablecloth that was flown, somewhat precariously, over the devastated Berlin that day. When Khaldei explained to Gisha what had happened to his tablecloth, the latter reacted ‘angrily’:

What do you mean, you left it on the Reichstag? Now you’re really going to get me into trouble!

The Tass picture editor spotted that the young soldier propping up his flag-waving comrade had watches on both wrists, a clear indication of Red Army looting, so he made Khaldei airbrush the supporting soldier out of the photograph, also making the flag-wavers act look more hazardous and heroic. Although Zhukov was relegated after the war by a suspicious and jealous Stalin, his eminence and popularity in the West did at least allow him to escape the fate of 135,056 other Red Army soldiers and officers who were condemned by military tribunals for counter-revolutionary crimes. A further 1.5 million Soviet soldiers who had earlier surrendered to the Germans were transported to the ‘Gulag’ or labour battalions in Siberia. The issue as to how many Soviets, military and civilian, died in during what they called their ‘Great Patriotic War’ was an intensely political one, and the true figure was classified as a national secret in the USSR until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even then, the figures were disputed. Richard Overy has chosen to believe the 1997 Russian figures of eleven million military losses and civilian losses of around sixteen million, giving an aggregate figure of twenty-seven million. In a conflict that claimed the lives of fifty million people, this means that the USSR lost more than the whole of the rest of the world put together.

The Immediate Aftermath & Routes to Potsdam:

The fact that it was not until May 1945  that Germany bowed to its conquerors, is testimony to the sheer bloody-minded determination of the German Reich was one reason for the length of time they were able to hold out against the Allies, but the high quality of their troops was the other. The statistics are unequivocal: up to the end of 1944, on a man-for-man basis, the Germans inflicted between twenty and fifty per cent higher casualties on the British and Americans than they suffered, and far higher than that of the Russians, under almost all military conditions. Even in the first five months of 1945, the Red Army’s advance on the Eastern front was very costly because the Germans continued to inflict more losses on their opponents than they suffered themselves. Although they lost because of their Führer’s domination of grand strategy as well as the sheer size of the populations and economies ranged against them, it is indisputable that the Germans were the best fighting men of the Second World War for all but the last few months of the struggle when they suffered a massive dearth of equipment, petrol, reinforcements and air cover. But although throughout the last year of the war the Germans inflicted higher casualties on the Russians than they received, this was never more than the Soviets could absorb. Attacks, especially the final assault on Berlin, were undertaken by the Red Army generals without regard to the cost in lives, an approach which German generals could not adopt because of a lack of adequate reserves. From his Nuremberg cell in June 1946, Kleist reflected:

The Russians were five times superior to us poor but brave Germans, both in numbers and in the superiority of their equipment. My immediate commander was Hitler himself. Unfortunately, Hitler’s advice in those critical periods was invariably lousy.   

As the Red Army prepared to celebrate victory in eastern Europe, Roosevelt was replaced by his Vice President, Harry Truman, who immediately brought new energy to the presidency, as George Elsey, working in the White House map room, discovered:

Harry Truman was utterly unlike President Roosevelt in terms of a personal relationship. First of all, our impression of him – here’s a guy who can walk. And he was vigorous, physically vigorous. He was only a few years younger than Franklin Roosevelt but in behaviour, attitude, speech and so on would have thought he was twenty-five years younger. When he first came into the map room he walked briskly around, introduced himself to each of us – “I’m Harry Truman” … and he took an intense interest in what we had in the map room, wanted to read our files. … Truman was open and eager to learn, and was very willing to admit that he didn’t know. Roosevelt would never have admitted that he didn’t know everything himself.

As for the Soviets, they knew little about him and disliked what they did know. Truman was unaware of the intricacies of US foreign policy; so, in those early weeks of his presidency, he relied on old hands like Harriman and Hopkins. On 25 May, six weeks after Roosevelt’s death, Harry Hopkins arrived in Moscow at Truman’s request. He met Stalin on the evening of 26 May. It was an important meeting, not so much in terms of what was decided, but because Stalin’s behaviour demonstrated that there was no doubt that he – rather than, allegedly, the ‘people behind him’ – controlled Soviet policy. Hopkins emphasised that ‘public opinion’ in the USA had been badly affected by the inability to carry into effect the Yalta agreement on Poland. Stalin replied by putting the blame for the failure squarely on the British, who, he claimed, wanted to build up a ‘cordon sanitaire’ on the Soviet borders, presumably in order to keep the Soviets in check. Hopkins denied that the United States wanted any such thing, and added that the Americans were happy to see ‘friendly countries’ along the Soviet borders. The use of the trigger word ‘friendly’ was welcomed by Stalin who said that, if that was the case, then they could ‘easily come to terms’ about Poland.

But Hopkins’ remarks were turned to his disadvantage by Stalin at their second meeting on 27 May. The Soviet leader said that he would not attempt to use Soviet public opinion as a screen but would, instead, speak about the views of his government. He then stated his position that the Yalta agreement meant that the existing Lublin government could simply be ‘reconstructed’. He went on to warn that:

Despite the fact that they were simple people, the Russians should not be regarded as fools, which was a mistake the West frequently made, nor were they blind and could quite well see what was going on before their eyes. It is true that that the Russians are patient in the interests of a common cause but their patience had its limits.

Stalin also remarked that if the Americans started to use the issue of ‘Lend-Lease’ as a ‘pressure’ on the Russians, this would be a ‘fundamental mistake’. Hopkins was bruised by these remarks and denied the accusations that he was ‘hiding’ behind American public opinion and attempting to use the issue of Lend-Lease as a ‘pressure weapon’. Stalin was using offensive remarks as a means of probing the strength of his opponent, as he had done with Churchill and Roosevelt in April, by correspondence. But Stalin knew that these negotiations had nothing to do with ‘friendship’ or ‘personal relationships’. He did not care whether he was liked or not. What mattered to him was power and credibility Eden, with all his experience of international relations and negotiations wrote that:

If I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice.

Stalin was toying with the new President’s envoy, telling Hopkins that the ‘Warsaw’ (formerly Lublin) Poles might be persuaded to concede four ministerial posts in the Polish provisional government to the ‘London’ Poles from the list submitted by the British and Americans. The idea that he had to bow to the wishes of his own puppet government in Poland was also a trick he had used before, but no-one had yet dared to say to his face that it was obvious nonsense. Towards the end of the meeting, Hopkins made an impassioned appeal for the Soviets to allow the three ‘freedoms’ so core to the Atlantic Charter – freedom of speech, assembly and religion – to be guaranteed to the citizens of the newly occupied territories. In his response, Stalin once again played with Hopkins, saying that in regard to the specific freedoms… they could only be applied… with certain limitations. Eventually, a ‘compromise’ of sorts was agreed, with five ‘democratic’ Poles joining the new provisional government, far from the ‘ideal’ that Roosevelt and Churchill had hoped for in the immediate aftermath of Yalta.

The harsh reality, of course, was that the Soviet Union was already in possession of Poland and most of the other countries bordering the Soviet Union and that the Western powers could do little about this ‘take-over’, a reality that was brought home at the Potsdam Conference. By the time of the Conference in July, the British had already considered and rejected the possibility of imposing upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire. In the wake of the Soviets’ perceived failure to stick to the Yalta agreement, Churchill had ordered British military planners to consider a worst-case, military option against the USSR. Called ‘Operation Unthinkable’, the final report was completed on 22 May. Its conclusion was stark, if somewhat obvious:

If our political object is to be achieved with certainty and with lasting results, the defeat of Russia in a total war will be necessary. The result … is not possible to forecast, but the one thing that is certain is that to win it would take us a very long time.

The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, was less bland in his diary, writing on 24 May:

This evening went carefully through the Planners’ report on the possibility of taking on Russia should trouble arise on future discussion with her. We were instructed to carry out this investigation. The idea is, of course, fantastic and the chance of success quite impossible. 

After the experience of Operation Barbarossa, the idea of ‘conquering’ the Soviet Union was something that few would contemplate seriously. In any case, Truman had already recognised that Britain was now very much the minor partner in the triangular relationship with the Soviet Union. The new American President had not even bothered to discuss Hopkins’ mission to Moscow beforehand. He also declined Churchill’s invitation to meet together before the Potsdam Conference, to discuss tactics. Truman had also received a number of impassioned suggestions from Churchill about how the relationship with Stalin should be hardened because of the Soviets’ failure to implement the Yalta agreement. In particular, Churchill suggested that the Western Allies should not withdraw from the area of Germany they currently occupied, which lay within the Yalta-agreed Soviet-controlled sphere. He even sent Truman a telegram warning that an iron curtain is being drawn down on their front. But Truman wanted no dramatic confrontation with Stalin, especially one orchestrated by Churchill. The British PM got the impression that Truman was trying to edge him out of matters still more by asking the British to attend the Potsdam Conference only after the Americans had already spent time alone with Stalin. On that basis, said Churchill, he was simply ‘not prepared to attend’. As a result, the Americans agreed that he should be present from the beginning. So Winston Churchill was there to witness the fall of the Iron Curtain and the beginning of the Cold War in Europe. It took forty-five years for the West to win it, but cost far fewer European lives, though many more American ones.

Appendix:

Article by Max Hastings from The Observer Magazine, 7/7/19:

Sources:

Andrew Roberts (2009), The Storm of War. London: Penguin Books.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two: Behind Closed Doors. London: BBC Books.

Richard Overy (1996), The Penguin Historical Atlas of The Third Reich. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Hermann Kinder & Werner Hilgemann (1988), The Penguin Atlas of World History Volume II. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Colin McEvedy (1982), The Penguin Atlas of Recent History (Europe since 1815). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

 

Epilogue to the Eighties & Prologue to the Nineties:

I can recall the real sense of optimism which resulted from the end of the Cold War, formally ending with President Gorbachev’s announcement of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991. Although never an all-out global war, it had resulted in the deaths of up to forty million people throughout the world, involving more than a hundred and fifty smaller ‘proxy’ conflicts. Moreover, we had lived under a continual sense of doom, that it was only a matter of time until our brief, young lives would be snuffed out by a nuclear apocalypse. Now, politicians and journalists in the West talked of a coming ‘peace dividend’ and the end of the surveillance, spy and secret state in both east and west. The only continuing threat to British security came from the Provisional IRA. They hit Downing Street with a triple mortar attack in February 1991, coming close to killing the new Prime Minister, John Major, and his team of ministers and officials directing the Gulf War.

By the time Margaret Thatcher left office in tears on 28 November 1990, ‘Thatcherism’ was also a spent force, though its influence lingered on until at least the end of the century, and not just among Conservatives. Only a minority even among the ‘party faithful’ had been true believers and the Tory MPs would have voted her out had her cabinet ministers not beaten them to it. As Andrew Marr has written, History is harshest to a leader just as they fall. She had been such a strident presence for so long that many who had first welcomed her as a ‘gust’ of fresh air now felt the need for gentler breezes. Those who wanted a quieter, less confrontational leader found one in John Major.

Yet most people, in the end, had done well under her premiership, not just the ‘yuppies’ but also her lower-middle-class critics who developed their own entrepreneurial sub-cultures rather than depending on traditional sponsorship from arts councils and local authorities. By the early nineties, Britons were on average much wealthier than they had been in the late seventies and enjoyed a wider range of holidays, better food, and a greater variety of television channels and other forms of home entertainment. Nor was everything the Thatcher governments did out of tune with social reality. The sale of council houses which corresponded to the long passion of the British to be kings and queens of their own little castles. Sales of state utilities, on the other hand, presupposed a hunger for stakeholdership that was much less deeply rooted in British habits, and the subsequently mixed fortunes of those stocks did nothing to help change those habits. Most misguided of all was the decision to implement the ‘poll tax’ as a regressive tax. In the end, Thatcher’s 1987-90 government became just the latest in a succession of post-war British governments that had seen their assumptions rebound on them disastrously. This ‘trend’ was to continue under John Major. The upper middle-class ‘Victorian Values’ of the grocer’s daughter from Grantham were replaced by the ‘family values’ of the lower middle-class garden gnome salesman from Brixton, only for him to be overwhelmed by an avalanche of sexual and financial scandals.

The single most important event of the early nineties in Britain, possibly globally too, had nothing to do with politics and diplomacy or warfare and terrorism, at least not in the nineties. Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web, or the Internet. His idea was for a worldwide ‘hypertext’, the computer-aided reading of electronic documents to allow people to work together remotely., sharing their knowledge in a ‘web’ of documents. His creation of it would give the internet’s hardware its global voice. He was an Oxford graduate who had made his first computer with a soldering iron, before moving to CERN, the European Physics laboratory, in Switzerland in 1980, the world’s largest scientific research centre. Here he wrote his first programme in 1989 and a year later he proposed his hypertext revolution which arrived in CERN in December 1990. The ‘internet’ was born the following summer. He chose not to patent his creation so that it would be free to everyone.

The Election of 1992 – A Curious Confidence Trick?:

John Major called an election for April 1992. Under a pugnacious Chris Patten, now Party chairman, the Tories targeted Labour’s enthusiasm for high taxes. During the campaign itself, Major found himself returning to his roots in Brixton and mounting a ‘soap-box’, from which he addressed raucous crowds through a megaphone. John Simpson, the BBC correspondent, was given the task of covering Major’s own campaign, and on 15 March he travelled to Sawley, in the PM’s constituency of Huntingdon, where Major was due to Meet the People. I have written elsewhere about the details of this, and his soap-box campaign, as reported by Simpson. Although Simpson described it as ‘a wooden construction of some kind’, Andrew Marr claims it was ‘a plastic container’. Either way, it has gone down in political history, together with the megaphone, as the prop that won him the election. The stark visual contrast achieved with the carefully stage-managed Labour campaign struck a chord with the media and he kept up an act that his father would have been proud of, playing the underdog to Neil Kinnock’s government in waiting. Right at the end, at an eve of poll rally in Sheffield, Kinnock’s self-control finally gave way and he began punching the air and crying “y’awl’ right!” as if he were an American presidential candidate. It was totally ‘cringe-worthy’ TV viewing, alienating if not repulsing swathes of the very middle England voters he needed to attract.

On 9 April 1992 Major’s Conservatives won fourteen million votes, more than any party in British political history. It was a great personal victory for the ‘new’ Prime Minister, but one which was also based on people’s fears of higher taxes under a Labour government. It was also one of the biggest victories in percentage terms since 1945, though the vagaries of the electoral system gave the Tories a majority of just twenty-one seats in parliament. Neil Kinnock was even more devastated than he had been in 1987 when he had not been expected to defeat Thatcher. The only organ of the entire British press which had called the election correctly was the Spectator. Its editor, Dominic Lawson, headlined the article which John Simpson wrote for him The Curious Confidence of Mr Major so that the magazine seemed to suggest that the Conservatives might pull off a surprise win. Simpson himself admitted to not having the slightest idea who would win, though it seemed more likely to him that Labour would. Yet he felt that John Major’s own apparent certainty was worth mentioning. When the results started to become clear on that Friday morning, 10 April, the Spectator stood out favourably from the shelves of newsagents, surrounded by even the late, or early editions of newspapers and magazines which had all been predicting a Labour victory.

The only politician possibly more disappointed than Neil Kinnock, who immediately left front-line politics, was Chris Patten, who had been the real magician behind Major’s remarkable victory. He lost his seat to the Liberals in marginal Bath and went off to become the final governor of Hong Kong ahead of the long-agreed handover of Britain’s last colony in 1997. Kinnock, a former long-term opponent of Britain’s membership of the EEC/ EC went off to Brussels to become a European Commissioner. Despite his triumph in the popular vote, never has such a famous victory produced so rotten an outcome for the victors. The smallness of Major’s majority meant that his authority could easily be eaten away in the Commons. As a consequence, he would not go down as a great leader in parliamentary posterity, though he remained popular in the country as a whole for some time, if not with the Thatcherites and Eurosceptic “bastards” in his own party.  Even Margaret Thatcher could not have carried through her revolutionary reforms after the 1979 and 1983 elections with the kind of parliamentary arithmetic which was dealt her successor. In Rugby terms, although the opposition’s three-quarters had been foiled by this artful dodger of a full-back, he had been dealt a ‘hospital pass’ by his own side. For the moment, he had control of the slippery ball, but he was soon to be forced back into series of crushing rucks and mauls among his own twenty-stone forwards.

 John Smith – Labour’s lost leader and his legacy:

After Neil Kinnock gave up the Labour leadership following his second electoral defeat in 1992, he was replaced by John Smith (pictured above), a placid, secure, self-confident Scottish lawyer. As Shadow Chancellor, he had been an effective cross-examiner of Nigel Lawson, John Major and Norman Lamont and had he not died of a heart attack in 1994, three years ahead of the next election, most political pundits agreed that, following the tarnishing of the Major administration in the mid-nineties, he would have become Prime Minister at that election. Had he done so, Britain would have had a traditional social democratic government, much like those of continental Europe. He came from a family of herring fishermen on the West Coast of Scotland, the son of a headmaster. Labour-supporting from early youth, bright and self-assured, he got his real political education at Glasgow University, part of a generation of brilliant student debaters from all parties who would go on to dominate Scottish and UK politics including, in due succession, Donald Dewar, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Douglas Alexander. Back in the early sixties, Glasgow University Labour Club was a hotbed not of radicals, but of Gaitskell-supporting moderates. This was a position that Smith never wavered from, as he rose as one of the brightest stars of the Scottish party, and then through government under Wilson and Callaghan as a junior minister dealing with the oil industry and devolution before entering cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, its youngest member at just forty. In opposition, John Smith managed to steer clear of the worst in-fighting, eventually becoming Kinnock’s shadow chancellor. In Thatcher’s England, however, he was spotted as a tax-raising corporatist of the old school. One xenophobic letter he received brusquely informed him:

You’ll not get my BT shares yet, you bald, owl-looking Scottish bastard. Go back to Scotland and let that other twit Kinnock go back to Wales.

Smith came from an old-fashioned Christian egalitarian background which put him naturally out of sympathy with the hedonistic culture of southern England.  Just before he became Labour leader he told a newspaper he believed above all in education, because…

 … it opens the doors of the imagination, breaks down class barriers and frees people. In our family … money was looked down on and education was revered. I am still slightly contemptuous of money.

Smith was never personally close to Kinnock but was scrupulously loyal to him as his leader, he nevertheless succeeded him by a huge margin in 1992. By then he had already survived a serious cardiac arrest and had taken up hill-walking. Though Smith swiftly advanced the careers of his bright young lieutenants, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, they soon became disappointed by his view that the Labour party needed simply to be improved, not radically transformed. In particular, he was reluctant to take on the party hierarchy and unions over issues of internal democracy, such as the introduction of a one-member, one-vote system for future leadership elections. He was sure that Labour could regain power with a revival of its traditional spirit. At one point, Tony Blair was so dispirited by Smith’s leadership style that he considered leaving politics altogether and going back to practising law. Smith died of a second heart attack on 12 May 1994. After the initial shock and grief subsided, Labour moved rapidly away from his policy of ‘gradualism’ towards ‘Blairite’ transformation. One part of his legacy still remains, however, shaping modern Britain today. As the minister who had struggled to achieve devolution for Scotland in 1978-9, he remained a passionate supporter of the ‘unfinished business’ of re-establishing the Holyrood Parliament and setting up a Welsh Assembly. With his friend Donal Dewar he had committed Labour so utterly to the idea in Opposition, despite Kinnock’s original strong anti-nationalist stance, that Blair, no great fan of devolution himself, found that he had to implement Smith’s unwelcome bequest to him.

Black Wednesday and the Maastricht Treaty:

The crisis that soon engulfed the Major government back in the early autumn of 1992 was a complicated economic one. From August 1992 to July 1996 I was mainly resident in Hungary, and so, although an economic historian, never really understood the immediate series of events that led to it or the effects that followed. This was still in pre-internet days, so I had little access to English language sources, except via my short-wave radio and intermittent newspapers bought during brief visits to Budapest. I had also spent most of 1990 and half of 1991 in Hungary, so there were also longer-term gaps in my understanding of these matters. I have written about them in earlier articles in this series, dealing with the end of the Thatcher years. Hungary itself was still using an unconvertible currency throughout the nineties, which only became seriously devalued in 1994-96, and when my income from my UK employers also fell in value, as a family we decided to move back to Britain to seek full-time sterling salaries. The first thing that happened was that they lost their fiscal policy in a single day when the pound fell out of the ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism). In his memoirs, John Major described the effect of this event in stark terms:

Black Wednesday – 16 September 1992, the day the pound toppled out of the ERM – was a political and economic calamity. It unleashed havoc in the Conservative Party and it changed the political landscape of Britain.

For Major and his government, the point was that as the German central bank had a deserved reputation for anti-inflationary rigour, having to follow or ‘shadow’ the mark meant that Britain had purchased a respected off-the-shelf policy. Sticking to the mighty mark was a useful signal to the rest of the world that this government, following all the inflationary booms of the seventies and eighties, was serious about controlling inflation. On the continent, however, the point of the ERM was entirely different, intended to lead to a strong new single currency that the countries of central Europe would want to join as members of an enlarged EC/EU. So a policy which Margaret Thatcher had earlier agreed to, in order to bring down British inflation, was now a policy she and her followers abhorred since it drew Britain ever closer towards a European superstate in the ‘Delors Plan’. This was a confused and conflicted state of affairs for most of the Tories, never mind British subjects at home and abroad.

The catalyst for sterling’s fall was the fall in the value of the dollar, pulling the pound down with it. Worse still, the money flowed into the Deutschmarks, which duly rose; so the British government raised interest rates to an eye-watering ten per cent, in order to lift the pound. When this failed to work, the next obvious step would have been for the German central bank to cut their interest rates, lowering the value of the mark and keeping the ERM formation intact. This would have helped the Italian lira and other weak currencies as well as the pound. But since Germany had just reunited after the ‘fall of the wall’, the whole cost of bringing the poorer East Germans into line with their richer compatriots in the West led to a real fear of renewed inflation as well as to memories of the Berlin Crisis of 1948-49 and the hyperinflation of the Weimar period. So the Germans, regardless of the pain being experienced by Britain, Italy and the rest, wanted to keep their high-value mark and their high interest rates. Major put considerable and concerted pressure on Chancellor Kohl, warning of the danger of the Maastricht treaty failing completely since the Danes had just rejected it in a referendum and the French were also having a plebiscite. None of this had any effect on Kohl who, like a previous German Chancellor, would not move.

In public, the British government stuck to the line that the pound would stay in the ERM at all costs. It was not simply a European ‘joint-venture’ mechanism but had been part of the anti-inflation policy of both the Lawson and Major chancellorships. Then, the now PM had told the unemployed workers and the repossessed homeowners in Britain that if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working, so his credibility had been tied to the success of the ERM ever since. It had also been, as Foreign Secretary and now as Prime Minister, his foreign policy of placing Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’. It was his big idea for both economic and diplomatic survival in an increasingly ‘globalised’ environment. Norman Lamont, who as Chancellor was as committed as Major, told ‘the markets’ that Britain would neither leave the mechanism nor deviate from it by devaluing the pound. ERM membership was at the centre of our policy and there should not be one scintilla of doubt that it would continue. Major went even further, telling a Scottish audience that with inflation down to 3.7 per cent and falling, it would be madness to leave the ERM. He added that:

“The soft option, the devaluer’s option, the inflationary option, would be a betrayal of our future.”

However, then the crisis deepened with the lira crashing out of the ERM formation. International money traders, such as the Hungarian-born György Soros, began to turn their attention to the weak pound and carried on selling. They were betting that Major and Lamont would not keep interest rates so high that the pound could remain up there with the mark – an easy, one-way bet. In the real world, British interest rates were already painfully high. On the morning of ‘Black Wednesday’, at 11 a.m., the Bank of England raised them by another two points. This was to be agonising for home-owners and businesses alike, but Lamont said he would take whatever measures were necessary to keep the pound in the mechanism. Panic mounted and the selling continued: a shaken Lamont rushed round to tell Major that the interest rate hike had not worked, but Major and his key ministers decided to stay in the ERM. The Bank of England announced that interest would go up by a further three points, to fifteen per cent. Had it been sustained, this would have caused multiple bankruptcies across the country, but the third rise made no difference either. Eventually, at 4 p.m., Major phoned the Queen to tell her that he was recalling Parliament. At 7.30 p.m., Lamont left the Treasury to announce to the press and media in Whitehall that he was suspending sterling’s membership of the ERM and was reversing the day’s rise in interest rates.

Major considered resigning. It was the most humiliating moment in British politics since the IMF crisis of 1976, sixteen years earlier. But if he had done so Lamont would have had to go as well, leaving the country without its two most senior ministers in the midst of a terrible crisis. Major decided to stay on, though he was forever diminished by what had happened. Lamont also stayed at his post and was delighted as the economy began to respond to lower interest rates, and a slow recovery began. While others suffered further unemployment, repossession and bankruptcy, he was forever spotting the ‘green shoots’ of recovery. In the following months, Lamont created a new unified budget system and took tough decisions to repair the public finances. But as the country wearied of recession, he became an increasingly easy ‘butt’ of media derision. To Lamont’s complete surprise, Major sacked him as Chancellor a little over six months after Black Wednesday. Lamont retaliated in a Commons statement in which he said: We give the impression of being in office, but not in power. Major appointed Kenneth Clarke, one of the great characters of modern Conservatism, to replace him.

In the Commons, the struggle to ratify the Maastricht Treaty hailed as a great success for Major before the election, became a long and bloody one. Major’s small majority was more than wiped out by the number of ‘Maastricht rebels’, egged on by Lady Thatcher and Lord Tebbit. Black Wednesday had emboldened those who saw the ERM and every aspect of European federalism as disastrous for Britain. Major himself wrote in his memoirs that it turned …

… a quarter of a century of unease into a flat rejection of any wider involvement in Europe … emotional rivers burst their banks.

Most of the newspapers which had welcomed Maastricht were now just as vehemently against it. The most powerful Conservative voices in the media were hostile both to the treaty and to Major. His often leaded use of English and lack of ‘panache’ led many of England’s snobbish ‘High Tories’ to brand him shockingly ill-educated and third-rate as a national leader. A constantly shifting group of between forty to sixty Tory MPs regularly worked with the Labour opposition to defeat key parts of the Maastricht bill, so that Major’s day-to-day survival was always in doubt. Whenever, however, he called a vote of confidence and threatened his rebellious MPs with an election, he won. Whenever John Smith’s Labour Party and the Tory rebels could find some common cause, however thin, he was in danger of losing. In the end, Major got his legislation and Britain signed the Maastricht Treaty, but it came at an appalling personal and political cost. Talking in the general direction of an eavesdropping microphone, he spoke of three anti-European ‘bastards’ in his own cabinet, an obvious reference to Michael Portillo, Peter Lilley and John Redwood. The country watched a divided party tearing itself apart and was not impressed.

By the autumn of 1993, Norman Lamont was speaking openly about the possibility that Britain might have to leave the European Union altogether, and there were moves to force a national referendum. The next row was over the voting system to be used when the EU expanded. Forced to choose between a deal which weakened Britain’s hand and stopping the enlargement from happening at all by vetoing it, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd went for a compromise. All hell broke loose, as Tory MPs began talking of a leadership challenge to Major. This subsided, but battle broke out again over the European budget and fisheries policy. Eight MPs had their formal membership of the Tory Party withdrawn. By this point, John Smith’s sudden death had brought Tony Blair to the fore as leader of the Opposition. When Major readmitted the Tory rebels, Blair jibed: I lead my party, you follow yours. Unlike Lamont’s remark in the Commons, Blair’s comment struck a chord with the country.

The concluding chapter of the Thatcher Revolution:

While the central story of British politics in the seven years between the fall of Thatcher and the arrival to power of Blair was taken up by Europe, on the ‘home front’ the government tried to maintain the momentum of the Thatcher revolution. After many years of dithering, British Rail was divided up and privatised, as was the remaining coal industry. After the 1992 election, it was decided that over half the remaining coal mining jobs must go, in a closure programme of thirty-one pits to prepare the industry for privatization. This angered many Tory MPs who felt that the strike-breaking effect of the Nottinghamshire-based Union of Democratic Mineworkers in the previous decade deserved a better reward, and it aroused public protest as far afield as Cheltenham. Nevertheless, with power companies moving towards gas and oil, and the industrial muscle of the miners long-since broken, the closures and sales went ahead within the next two years, 1992-4. The economic effect on local communities was devastating, as the 1996 film Brassed Off shows vividly, with its memorable depiction of the social impact on the Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe and its famous Brass Band of the 1992 closure programme. Effectively, the only coalfields left working after this were those of North Warwickshire and South Derbyshire.

Interfering in the railway system became and remained a favourite ‘boys with toys’ hobby but a dangerous obsession of governments of different colours. Margaret Thatcher, not being a boy, knew that the railways were much too much part of the working life of millions to be lightly broken up or sold off. When Nicholas Ridley, as Transport Secretary, had suggested this, Thatcher is said to have replied:

“Railway privatisation will be the Waterloo of this government. Please never mention the railways to me again.”

It was taken up again enthusiastically by John Major. British Rail had become a national joke, loss-making, accident-prone, with elderly tracks and rolling stock, and serving curled-up sandwiches. But the challenge of selling off a system on which millions of people depended was obvious. Making it profitable would result in significant and unpopular fare rises and cuts in services. Moreover, different train companies could hardly compete with each other directly, racing up and down the same rails. There was, therefore, a binary choice between cutting up ‘BR’ geographically, selling off both trains and track for each region, so that the system would look much the way it was in the thirties, or the railway could be split ‘vertically’ so that the State would continue to own the track, while the stations and the trains would be owned by private companies. This latter solution was the one chosen by the government and a vast, complicated new system of subsidies, contracts, bids, pricing, cross-ticketing and regulation was created, but rather than keeping the track under public control, it too was to be sold off to a single private monopoly to be called Railtrack. Getting across the country would become a complicated proposition and transaction, involving two or three separate rail companies. A Franchise Director was to be given powers over the profits, timetables and ticket-pricing of the new companies, and a Rail Regulator would oversee the track. Both would report directly to the Secretary of State so that any public dissatisfaction, commercial problem or safety issue would ultimately be the responsibility of the government. This was a strange and pointless form of privatization which ended up costing the taxpayer far more than British Rail. The journalist Simon Jenkins concluded:

The Treasury’s treatment of the railway in the 1990s was probably the worst instance of Whitehall industrial management since the Second World War.

One success story in the rail network was the completion of the Channel Tunnel link to France in 1994 (the Folkestone terminal is pictured above), providing a good example of the inter-relationship between transport links and general economic development. The Kent town of Ashford had a relationship with the railways going back to 1842, and the closure of the town’s railway works between 1981 and 1993 did not, however, undermine the local economy. Instead, Ashford benefited from the Channel Tunnel rail link, which made use of railway lines running through the town, and its population actually grew by ten per cent in the 1990s. The completion of the ‘Chunnel’ gave the town an international catchment area of eighty-five million within a single day’s journey. The opening of the Ashford International railway station, the main terminal for the rail link to Europe, attracted a range of engineering, financial, distribution and manufacturing companies. In addition to the fourteen business parks that were opened in and around the town itself, four greenfield sites were opened on the outskirts, including a science park owned by Trinity College, Cambridge. As the map above shows, Ashford is now closer to Paris and Brussels in travelling time than it is to Manchester and Liverpool. By the end of the century, the town, with its position at the hub of a huge motorway network as well as its international rail link, was ready to become part of a truly international economy.

Many of the improvements in transport infrastructure on both islands of Britain and Ireland were the result of EU funding, especially in Northern Ireland, and it was also having an impact on transport planning in Britain, with projects in the Highlands and Islands. In 1993 the EU decided to create a European-wide transport network. Of the fourteen priority associated with this aim, three are based in Britain and Ireland – a rail link from Cork to Northern Ireland and the ferry route to Scotland; a road link from the Low Countries across England and Wales to Ireland, and the West Coast rail route in Britain.

As a Brixton man, Major had experienced unemployment and was well prepared to take on the arrogant and inefficient quality of much so-called public service. But under the iron grip of the Treasury, there was little prospect for a revival of local democracy to take charge of local services again. This left a highly bureaucratic centralism as the only option left, one which gained momentum in the Thatcher years. Under Major, the centralised Funding Agency for Schools was formed and schools in England and Wales were ranked by crude league tables, depending on how well their pupils did in exams. The university system was vastly expanded by simply allowing colleges and polytechnics to rename themselves as universities. The hospital system was further centralised and given a host of new targets. The police, faced with a review of their pay and demands by the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke for their forces to be amalgamated, were given their own performance league tables. The Tories had spent seventy-four per cent more, in real terms, on law and order since 1979, yet crime was at an all-time high. Clarke’s contempt for many of the forces as ‘vested interests’ was not calculated to win them round to reform. Across England and Wales elected councillors were turfed off police boards and replaced by businessmen. In 1993 Clarke, the old Tory dog who had clearly learned new tricks during his time at the Department of Health where he was said to have castrated the regional health authority chairmen, defended his new police league tables in the ‘newspeak’ of governments yet to come:

The new accountability that we seek from our public services will not be achieved simply because men of good will and reasonableness wish that it be so. The new accountability is the new radicalism.

Across Britain, from the auditing of local government to the running of courts and the working hours of nurses, an army of civil servants, accountants, auditors and inspectors marched into workplaces. From time to time, ministers would weakly blame Brussels for the imposition of the cult of central control and measurement. But this was mostly a home-grown ‘superstate’. Major called this centralising policy the ‘Citizen’s Charter’, ignoring the fact that Britons are ‘subjects’ rather than citizens. He himself did not like the ‘headline’ very much because of its unconscious echoes of Revolutionary France. Every part of the government dealing with public service was ordered to come up with proposals for improvement at ‘grass-roots level’, to be pursued from the centre by questionnaires, league tables and a system of awards, called ‘Charter Marks’ for organizations that achieved the required standards. He spoke of ’empowering’, ‘helping the customer’ and ‘devolving’ and thought that regulation from the centre would not last long, rather like a Marxist-Leninist anticipating the ‘withering away’ of the state. In his case, though, this would come about as the effects of growing competition are felt. In practice, of course, the regulators grew more powerful, not less so. Despite the rhetoric, public servants were not being given real freedom to manage. Elected office-holders were being sacked. Major’s ‘withering away’ of the state was no more successful than Lenin’s.

Britain and Ireland – first steps on the road to peace:

Above: US President Bill Clinton addressing a peace rally in Belfast during his visit in 1995. Clinton played a significant role as a ‘peace broker’ in negotiations leading up to ‘the Good Friday Agreement’.

In December 1993, John Major stood outside the steel-armoured door of Number Ten Downing Street with the ‘Taoiseach’ of the Irish Republic, Albert Reynolds. He declared a new principle which offended many traditional Conservatives and Unionists. If both parts of Ireland voted to be reunited, Britain would not stand in the way. She had, said Major, no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland. He also stated that if the Provisional IRA, which had lately bombed the very building Major was standing in front of and murdered two young boys in Cheshire, renounced violence, Sinn Fein could be recognised as a legitimate political party. In the run-up to this Downing Street Declaration, which some saw as a betrayal of the Tory Party’s long-held dedication to the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the government had been conducting ‘back channel’ negotiations with the terrorist organisation. In August 1994 the IRA finally declared a complete cessation of military operations which, though it stopped a long way short of renouncing the use of violence altogether, was widely welcomed and was followed a month later by a Loyalist ceasefire. A complicated choreography of three-strand talks, framework documents and discussions about the decommissioning of weapons followed, while on the streets, extortion, knee-capping and occasional ‘executions’ continued. But whereas the number of those killed in sectarian violence and bombings in 1993 had been eighty-four, the toll fell to sixty-one the following year, and in 1995 it was in single figures, at just nine deaths.

Long negotiations between London and Dublin led to cross-border arrangements. These negotiations had also involved the United States, where an influential pro-Irish lobby had helped to sustain the IRA campaign into the nineties through finance provided through ‘Noraid’. In the mid-nineties, President Clinton acted as a peace-broker, visiting Belfast in 1995 and helping to maintain the fragile cease-fire in the North. The contradictory demands of Irish Republicanism and Ulster Unionism meant that Major failed to get a final agreement, which was left to Tony Blair, with the ongoing help of the American ex-senator George Mitchell. The fact that in 1991 both countries had signed the Maastricht Treaty for closer political and economic unity in Europe, set a broader context for a bilateral agreement. However, while Irish political leaders eagerly embraced the idea of European integration, their British counterparts, as we have seen, remained deeply divided over it.

Economic decline/ growth & political resuscitation:

The closure of the Swan Hunter shipyard on the Tyne in May 1993 is an illuminating example of the impact of de-industrialisation. Swan Hunter was the last working shipyard in the region but had failed to secure a warship contract. An old, established firm, it was suffering some of the same long-term decline that decimated shipbuilding employment nationally to 26,000 by the end of a century. This devastated the local economy, especially as a bitter legal wrangle over redundancy payments left many former workers with no compensation whatever for the loss of what they had believed was employment for life. But the effects of de-industrialisation could spread much further than local communities. The closure of the shipyard, as shown in the map above, but the failure of the firm also had a ‘knock-on’ effect as suppliers as far afield as London and Glasgow lost valuable orders and, as a result, jobs.

By 1994, employment in manufacturing in Britain had fallen to four million from the nine million it had reached at its peak in 1966. The resulting mass unemployment hurt the older industries of the Northwest worst, but the losses were proportionately as high in the Southeast, reflecting the decline in newer manufacturing industry. Across most of Britain and Ireland, there was also a decline in the number of manufacturing jobs continuing into and throughout the 1990s. The service sector, however, expanded, and general levels of unemployment, especially in Britain, fell dramatically in the nineties. Financial services showed strong growth, particularly in such places as London’s Docklands, with its new ‘light railway’, and Edinburgh. By the late nineties, the financial industry was the largest employer in northern manufacturing towns and cities like Leeds, which grew rapidly throughout the decade, aided by its ability to offer a range of cultural facilities that helped to attract an array of UK company headquarters. Manchester, similarly, enjoyed a renaissance, particularly in the spheres of music, the media and sport.

In July 1995, tormented by yet more rumours of right-wing conspiracies against him, Major riposted with a theatrical gesture of his own, resigning as leader of the Conservative Party and inviting all-comers to take him on. He told journalists gathered in the Number Ten garden that it was “put up or shut up time”. If he lost he would resign as Prime Minister. If he won, he would expect the party to rally around him. This was a gamble, since other potential leaders were available, not least Michael Heseltine, who had become Deputy Prime Minister, and Michael Portillo, then the pin-up boy of the Thatcherites, whose supporters prepared a campaign headquarters for him, only for him to then decide against standing. In the event, the challenger was John Redwood, the Secretary of State for Wales and a highly intelligent anti-EU right-winger. Major won his fight, though 109 Tory MPs refused to back him.

Fighting the return of Fascism in Europe:

Major was also having to deal with the inter-ethnic wars breaking out in the former Yugoslavia, following the recognition of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as independent states in the early nineties. The worst violence occurred during the Serbian assault on Bosnia (I have written about the bloody 1992-94 Siege of Sarajevo, its capital, in an article elsewhere on this site based on John Simpson’s reporting). The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was used for the first time as woeful columns of refugees fled in different directions. A nightmare which Europeans thought was over in 1945 was returning, only a couple of days’ drive away from London and half a day’s drive from where I was living on the southern borders of Hungary with Serbia and Croatia.

Six years after the siege, during a school visit to the Hague, I sat in the courtroom of the International War Crimes Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia and listened, in horror, to the testimonies of those who had been imprisoned and tortured in concentration camps during the Bosnian War. I couldn’t believe that what I was hearing had happened in the final decade of the twentieth century in Europe. Those on trial at that time were the prison camp guards who had carried out the atrocities, claiming what had become known as the Nuremberg Defence. Later on, those giving the orders, both Mladko Radic and Radovan Karadzic (pictured below with John Simpson in 1993), the military and political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, went on trial in the same courtroom, were convicted of war crimes and duly locked away, together with the former Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic. Major had asked how many troops it would take to keep the warring three sides apart and was told the number was four hundred thousand, three times the total size of the British Army at that time. He sent 1,800 men to protect the humanitarian convoys that were rumbling south from the UN bases in Hungary.

Although many British people sent food parcels, warm clothes, medicine and blankets, loaded onto trucks and driven across the Croatian border and into Bosnia, many in the government were reluctant for Britain to become further involved. But the evening news bulletins showed pictures of starving refugees, the uncovered mass graves of civilians shot dead by death squads, and children with appalling injuries. There was a frenzied campaign for Western intervention, but President Clinton was determined not to risk the lives of American soldiers on the ground. Instead, he considered less costly alternatives, such as air strikes. This would have put others who were on the ground, including the British and other nationalities involved in the UN operation, directly into the line of retaliatory fire of the Serbian troops. When the NATO air-strikes began, the Serbs took the UN troops hostage, including British soldiers, who were then used as human shields. When the Serbs captured the town of Srebrenica and carried out a mass slaughter of its Muslim citizens, there were renewed calls for ‘boots on the ground’, but they never came.

Following three years of fighting, sanctions on Serbia and the success of the Croat Army in fighting back, a peace agreement was finally made in Dayton, Ohio. The UN convoys and troops left Hungary. Major became the first British Prime Minister of the post-War World to grapple with the question of what the proper role of the West should be to ‘regional’ conflicts such as the Balkan wars. They showed quite clearly both the dangers and the limitations of intervention. When a civil conflict is relayed in all its horror to tens of millions of voters every night by television, the pressure to ‘do something’ is intense.  But mostly this requires not air strikes but a full-scale ground force, which will then be drawn into the war itself. Then it must be followed by years of neo-colonial aid and rebuilding. Major and his colleagues were accused of moral cowardice and cynicism in allowing the revival of fascist behaviour in one corner of Europe. Yet, especially given the benefit of hindsight of what happened subsequently in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps Western leaders were right to be wary of full-scale intervention.

Back to basics?

For many British voters, the Major years were associated with the sad, petty and lurid personal scandals that attended so many of his ministers, after he made an unwise speech calling for the return as old-style morality. In fact, back to basics referred to almost everything except personal sexual morality; he spoke of public service, industry, sound money, free trade, traditional teaching, respect for the family and the law and the defeat of crime. It gave the press, however, a fail-safe headline charge of hypocrisy whenever ministers were caught out. A series of infidelities were exposed; children born out-of-wedlock, a death from a sex stunt which went wrong, rumours about Major’s own affairs (which later turned out to be truer than realised at the time). More seriously, there was also an inquiry as to whether Parliament had been misled over the sale of arms to Iraq, but these were all knitted together into a single pattern of misbehaviour, referred to as ‘sleaze’.

In 1996, a three-year inquiry into whether the government had allowed a trial to go ahead against directors of an arms company, Matrix Churchill, knowing that they were, in fact, acting inside privately accepted guidelines, resulted in two ministers being publicly criticised. It showed that the government had allowed a more relaxed régime of military-related exports to Saddam Hussein even after the horrific gassing of five thousand Kurds at Falluja, also revealing a culture of secrecy and double standards in the process. Neil Hamilton MP was accused of accepting cash from Mohammed al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods, for asking questions in the Commons. One of the most dramatic episodes in the 1997 election was the overwhelming defeat he suffered in his Tatton constituency by the former BBC war reporter, Martin Bell, who had been badly injured in Sarajevo who became Britain’s first independent MP for nearly fifty years. Jonathan Aitken, a Treasury minister was accused of accepting improper hospitality from an Arab business contact. He resigned to fight the Guardian over the claims, with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play. He was found guilty of perjury, spending eighteen months in prison.

By the end of Major’s government, it seemed that the Tories might have learned the lesson that disagreements over the EU were capable of splitting their party. However, there was a general mood of contempt for politicians and the press, in particular, had lost any sense of deference. The reforms of the health service, police and schools had produced few significant improvements. The post-Cold War world was turning out to be nastier and less predictable than the early nineties days of the ‘peace dividend’ had promised. The Labour Opposition would, in due course, consider how the country might be better governed and reformed, as well as what would be the right British approach to peace-keeping and intervention now that the United States was the last superpower left standing. But in the early months of 1997,  Tony Blair and his fresh young ‘New Labour’ team, including Alistair Campbell (pictured above), were oiling their effective election-winning machine and moving in to roll over a tired-looking John Major and his tarnished old Tories.

Sources:

Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Pan-Macmillan.

Simon Schama (2018), A History of Britain, 1776-2000; The Fate of Empire. London: BBC Worldwide.

John Simpson (1999), Strange Places, Questionable People. Basingstoke: Pan-Macmillan.

Peter Caterall, Roger Middleton, John Swift (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

Former Yugoslavia in Crisis: Views from Beyond the Borders:

The successful conclusion to the prosecution of Ratko Mladic at the International War Crimes Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague last week (22 November 2017) has taken me back in my mind’s eye both to January 2001, when I witnessed some of the evidence being presented at the War Crimes Tribunal during a trip to the Hague, as well as to 1992, when I was on the periphery of the events themselves. In August of that year, I moved back to Hungary with my family, to the beautiful southern cathedral city of Pécs, close to the border with ‘Former Yugoslavia’, which had recently become four borders, with Slovenia in the west, Croatia and the UNPROFOR disputed territory to the south, and Serbia to the east. Pécs is just a few hundred kilometres from the Croatian border with Bosnia-Herzegovina, and yet the scenes shown on British (ITN) television and on networks around the world that August were like those shot on cine-cameras on the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau nearly half a century earlier: pictures of barbed wire and skeletal figures from the camps run by the Bosnian Serbs at Omarska and Trnopplje. As I sat outside the glass courtroom in the Hague almost a decade later, I had those unforgettable images in my mind as the commandant of one of the camps was listening to the evidence brought against him for his role in what had already been presented to the world as a second Holocaust. That ‘presentation’, of course, was erroneous from the first suggestion that the term could be applied to any events other than the original ones.

Yet, not all was as it seemed from those pictures. Somehow along the way, the reservations of the ITN team which had filmed the camps were cast aside. The ITN reporters had been careful not to make an analogy with the Nazi concentration camps, but others did in their own voice-overs and commentaries. The skeletal figures shown weren’t inside the barbed wire, for instance, but outside it. The wire was old and ran around a small enclosure, and the cameraman got behind it to shoot the scene. There was also a famine-like food shortage at that time and place, which meant that everyone in the locality was starving. The most skeletal of all the prisoners shown, Fikrit Alic, was just as thin weeks after his release. ITN’s reporting was accurate, but the pictures seemed to speak for themselves. They caused a sensation in the United States, forcing the Executive there to act.

In October 1992, the United States announced that it would contribute an additional $900,000 to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to support refugees from the former Yugoslavia who were in Hungary. Many of these were Hungarian-speakers from the Vojvodina province in the disputed area between Croatia and Serbia. I remember a former English teacher from the town of Osziek who was also fluent in German, in addition to her ‘native’ languages of Hungarian and Croatian. Not qualified to teach in Hungary, she had found employment in a travel agency, where her multi-lingual abilities were put to good use in a time before people began to make their travel and accommodation arrangements online. My work involved placing and supporting teachers from the UK in various towns and villages throughout Baranya, the county surrounding and including the city of Pécs, including Harkány, Siklós and Mohács, along the southern borders. Driving between them and visiting even more remote villages, I was struck by the lack of any development in a long belt of land, due to the constant threat of conflict between Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact which had been one of the untold stories of the Cold War. More recently, during the brief but fierce war between the Serbs and Croats in 1991, stray mortars had landed on or near some of these villages. The most serious incident of this kind was when a bomb fell on the town of Barcs but fortunately did not explode. In total, the borderline between Hungary and the former Yugoslavia stretched over six hundred kilometres. Legislators and executive authorities, both national and local, were faced with adjusting to a significant security crisis to the south of this border at a time when they had just embarked upon a path of civilian democratic development, in which I played a modest part between 1992 and 1996. They could ill afford for the newly-independent central European states to be dragged back into another Balkan Crisis like that of a century before.

The intensity of this crisis had caught Western Europe and the United States unprepared. These regional powers were already hardly coping with the swift changes that were taking place following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, so that they were even less equipped to cope with the internal tensions and conflicts related to the creation of new nation states. A multitude of small and medium-intensity armed conflicts differing in character from the conflicts previously known emerged in Bosnia-Herzegovina from the autumn of 1990, and even more violently from July 1991. Neither the United Nations, nor the European Union, and not even the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, proved capable of coping with the crisis. There was general agreement among the Hungarian political élite, both at a national and local level, that the only real means of breaking away from a disintegrating central-eastern European region was by gaining access to the integrating West. The reunification of Germany, although not a template for the rest of central-eastern Europe, proved that the institutional anchoring of a former member of the Warsaw Pact within the NATO alliance was possible.

By the Spring of 1992, the actual warfare had shifted considerably further south of the Hungarian border, to the territories which had only recently become known as Bosnia-Herzegovina. But with the intensification of the civil conflict came an intensification of ‘western’ involvement, and of Hungary’s strategic role within it. At the end of October, with the permission of the Hungarian Government of József Antall, AWACS reconnaissance aircraft, under NATO command, began flying missions from Hungarian airspace to monitor the no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina. Throughout this period, UNPROFOR convoys of blue-helmeted troops were a common sight on the roads through the city, headed towards the borders with humanitarian aid and supplies for the peace-keeping operation. The Hungarians quickly realised the necessity of replacing their membership of the Warsaw Pact with a collective security system based on NATO. As a country neighbouring the Balkan region, which had turned into a hotbed of crisis, Hungary was already experiencing the economic and political implications of that crisis directly, not to speak of the danger, felt to be very real at the time, of a territorial spillover of the hostilities. Neutrality was not a viable alternative for a people living in the centre of Europe, since risks existed irrespective of the independent status of their country, and by their nature, these risks did not halt at national borders. Following its own peaceful transition to independence in 1989, Hungary had begun to develop its own external relations with five neighbouring countries as one of the smallest countries in the region, but by the mid-nineties, five out of its seven neighbours had a statehood younger than its own, and Hungary had become one of the medium-size leaders in the region.

In both the regional and international contexts, second-rate journalism was bound to be commonplace. Editors wanted from their reporters what other editors were getting from theirs. The hunt was on for Nazi-style atrocities, and several reporters won major awards for revealing them, even though their sources were questioned afterwards. Atrocities certainly took place, and more were carried out by the Bosnian Serbs than by anyone else, but a climate began to be created in which it became very hard to understand what was really going on, because everything came to be seen through the filter of the Holocaust. As a result, and as the war ‘progressed’, there were stories about extermination centres and mass rape camps, as if the Bosnian Serbs were capable of a level of organisation akin to that of the Third Reich. The fact that they were believed meant that the Bosnian Crisis began to monopolise the foreign policy of the major Western powers in a manner in which the three two previous Yugoslav crises did not.

What was the Bosnian War?: A Chronology of the Conflicts:

The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The war was part of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Following the Slovenian and Croatian secessions from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991, the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – which was inhabited by mainly Muslim Bosniaks (44 percent), as well as Orthodox Serbs (32.5 percent) and Catholic Croats (17 percent) – passed a referendum for independence on 29 February 1992. This was rejected by the political representatives of the Bosnian Serbs, who had boycotted the referendum.

Following a number of violent incidents in early 1992, the war is commonly viewed as having started on 6 April 1992. However, there is still debate over the start date of the war. Clashes between Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats started in late February 1992. Following Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence (which gained international recognition), the Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadžić and supported by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), mobilised their forces inside Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to secure ethnic Serb territory. War soon spread across the country, accompanied by ethnic cleansing.

Nevertheless, Serbs consider the Sarajevo wedding shooting, when a groom’s father was killed on the second day of the Bosnian independence referendum, 1 March 1992, to have been the first incident of the war. The Sijekovac killings of Serbs took place on 26 March and led to the Bijeljina massacre (of mostly Bosniaks) on 1–2 April. On April 5, when a huge crowd approached a barricade, a demonstrator was killed by Serb forces, and it was widely reported that full-scale hostilities had broken out by 6 April. This was the same day that the United States and the European Community (EC)  recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although BBC correspondent Misha Glenny gives a date of 22 March as the starting point, Philip Hammond, then a junior minister at the Foreign Office and currently the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, claims that the most common view is that the war started on 6 April 1992. It ended on 14 December 1995.

The main belligerents were the forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and those of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat entities within Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska and Herzeg-Bosnia, which were led and supplied by Serbia and Croatia, respectively. The conflict was initially between the Yugoslav Army units in Bosnia which later transformed into the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) on the one side, and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) which was largely composed of Bosniaks, and the Croat forces in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) on the other side. However, tensions between Croats and Bosniaks increased throughout late 1992 and in 1993 the war evolved into a three-cornered conflict between the three armies.

Ethnic map of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1991
  Bosniaks (Green)   Serbs (Blue)   Croats (Gold)

From the very beginning, it was accompanied by war crimes against civilians and acts of ethnic cleansing on all sides, which became, on the Serbian side, an attempted genocide against ethnic Bosniak populations, as demonstrated in the trials at the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia at the Hague. However, the first atrocity following the outbreak of war occurred when, on 21 June 1992, Bosniak forces entered the Bosnian Serb village of Ratkovići near Srebrenica and murdered 24 Serb civilians.

In the same month, UNPROFOR, originally deployed in Croatia, had its mandate extended into Bosnia and Herzegovina, initially to protect the Sarajevo International Airport. In September, its role was expanded still further in order to protect humanitarian aid and assist relief delivery in the whole Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as to help protect civilian refugees when required to do so by the Red Cross.

On 4 August 1992, the IV Knight Motorised Brigade of the ARBiH attempted to break through the circle surrounding Sarajevo, and a fierce battle ensued between the ARBiH and the VRS in and around the damaged FAMOS factory in the suburb of Hrasnica. The VRS repelled the attack but failed to take Hrasnica in a decisive counterattack. On 12 August 1992, the name of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was changed to Republika Srpska (RS).

By November 1992, 400 square miles of eastern Bosnia was under Bosniak control. On 21 July 1992, the Agreement on Friendship and Cooperation had been signed by Tuđman, the Croat President, and Izetbegović, for the Bosniaks, establishing a military cooperation between the two armies. At a session held on 6 August, the Bosnian Presidency had accepted HVO as an integral part of the Bosnian armed forces. Despite this, the Croat–Bosniak alliance was often far from harmonious. The existence of two parallel commands caused problems in coordinating the two armies against the VRS.  Tensions steadily increased throughout the 2nd half of 1992 and on 18 October, a dispute over a gas station near Novi Travnik that was shared by both armies escalated into an armed conflict in the town centre. The situation worsened after HVO Commander Ivica Stojak was killed near Travnik on 20 October. On the same day, fighting escalated on an ARBiH roadblock set on the main road through the Lašva Valley. Spontaneous clashes spread throughout the region, resulting in almost fifty casualties until a ceasefire was negotiated by the UNPROFOR on 21 October. However, on 23 October, a major battle between the ARBiH and the HVO started in the town of Prozor in northern Herzegovina and resulted in an HVO victory.

The Serbian forces were not slow in taking advantage of these divisions. On 29 October, the VRS captured Jajce although the town had been jointly defended by the HVO and the ARBiH. The lack of cooperation between the ‘allied’ forces, combined with an advantage in troop size and firepower for the VRS, led to the fall of the town. Croat refugees from Jajce fled to Herzegovina and Croatia, while around 20,000 Bosniak refugees settled in Travnik, Novi Travnik, Vitez, Busovača, and villages near Zenica. Despite the October confrontations, and with each side blaming the other for the fall of Jajce, there were no large-scale clashes and a general military alliance was still in effect. Tuđman and Izetbegović met in Zagreb on 1 November 1992 and agreed to establish a Joint Command of HVO and ARBiH.

Above: The executive council building burns after being hit by artillery fire in Sarajevo May 1992; Ratko Mladić with Army of Republika Srpska officers; a Norwegian UN soldier in Sarajevo.

Who killed Sarajevo?:

John Simpson, BBC correspondent and (in 1992) a journalist at The Spectator magazine, first went to Bosnia in December 1992. On arrival in Sarajevo, he decided he would use an approach to reporting which had served him well in the past: the night walk. He had taken long walks after dark in Tehran, Baghdad and other weird places, writing about them for the Guardian. Why not, then, in Sarajevo? Despite much advice to the contrary. he decided to walk back to the Holiday Inn where he was staying from the television station from where they sent their material by satellite. As he walked, he began to think that he should have accepted his colleague’s advice:

I was in a world of utter darkness, loneliness and cold, and it was clear to me directly the glass door of the shattered building swung laxily closed behind me that I had made a terrible mistake. There was no sound except for the grumbling of artillery on Mount Igman and Zuc Hill, a few miles away, and no light except for the occasional distant magnesium flares, which gave a blueish tinge to the skyline, like the fingernails of a corpse. The besieged city was dead, and sprawled around me abandoned. Not a window glowed in the huge blocks of flats which lay along the line of the main avenue. No street lamp was left standing. The snow itself barely glimmered in the darkness.

Simpson’s colleagues had headed off in their armoured vehicle, having failed to persuade him to go with them. He made his way down the front steps of the television station. It had taken a lot of hits, and every step was difficult. He made his way gingerly to the main street, which he had only seen from the safety of the vehicle before. Under Tito this had been named The Boulevard of ‘something empty and pompous’, but it had been renamed Sniper Alley since the beginning of the war.  Every intersection along its course was dangerous and in the daytime, those who couldn’t avoid crossing did the nervous, stuttering dash for which the journalists also had a name: the Sarajevo shuffle. The snipers were holed up in buildings which lay a hundred yards or so back from the southern side of the road, the right-hand side, as he walked in the direction of the Holiday Inn:

Within thirty seconds the cold had worked its way through my protective clothing. Protective in a double sense. I had put on the whole armour of Messrs Tetranike, complete with the latest ceramic plates to the chest and the back. It bound my ribs and stomach like a Victorian corset. Usually I hated it. Not now; it gave me warmth and the feeling that even if something struck me I might live. I especially didn’t want to die in this loneliness and dark.

Later in his sojourn, he got into trouble with the BBC when he told them he had given up wearing his flak-jacket. He was embarrassed to walk among the people in the streets who had no such protection against the shells and snipers’ bullets. Kalashnikov rifles were trained on every crossing along the road. Cars raced across the intersections as bullets cracked, but the echoes from the vast, smashed, empty buildings of Tito’s dream deflected the sound so that it was impossible to tell the direction of the firing. The buildings weren’t entirely empty as some had windows left in them. lit by candles and the sounds of the last inhabitants coming from within:

Who killed Sarajevo? I mused as I left the little flicker of life behind me.

Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, whose ambitious, angry nationalism had broken up the Yugoslav Federation in 1991 and led to three ferocious wars of liberation, complete with the horrors of ethnic cleansing?

Radavan Karadzic, the ludicrous Bosnian Serb leader, with his mane of greying hair and the psychiatrist’s diploma on his office wall?

Ratko Mladic, the psychopath who could have been his patient but was his military commander instead, playing him off against Milosevic?

The predominantly Muslim government of Bosnia, decent enough in its way, which had insisted on holding a referendum on independence and had given the Bosnian Serbs the excuse they needed to attack?

Tito, who had bottled up the vicious nationalistic passions of a century and insisted that nothing but Yugoslavism existed? The Germans, who unwisely recognised the independence of their friends the Croats and so helped to spark off the fighting?

Britain and France, united only in their determination to avoid getting involved in a shooting war? The United States, which liked to criticise everyone else but refused to stir from its own sloth?

It doesn’t really matter, I thought, as I headed towards the first sniper intersection; but people in a state of advanced despair need someone to blame, and most of the candidates were too vague or too distant to qualify. Only the United Nations, driving round the streets in the daytime in its large white vehicles, was on hand for everyone to see and revile. 

On reaching the pavement on the other side of the road and came to a line of burned and looted shops, there was a crack from a high-velocity rifle nearby. Something slammed into the concrete above his head and, as he ran along, bent double, there was another crack even closer to him. He sprawled on the pavement. After a while without hearing more shots, he got up and began walking again. There was the distant sound of artillery and an upward rush of rockets from a mile away. In a minute or so, he was alongside the white wall which marked the museum dedicated to Tito’s socialist revolution. The building was burnt out and empty. The Holiday Inn was just ahead of him.

A Tale of Two Christmases and two Cities under Siege:

John Simpson spent a lot of time in Sarajevo during the war, but Martin Bell had established himself as the resident BBC correspondent in the former Yugoslavia. So Simpson had spent much of his time up to Advent and Christmas 1992 doing other things while the series of ugly little wars had erupted. He had always enjoyed working over Christmas and New Year. The audience for the news bulletins was huge between watching the Queen, Christmas pudding and the family blockbuster shows and dramas. On Christmas morning, 25th, his crew drove into Sarajevo in a fleet of aid lorries manned by volunteers, unemployed drivers from his own home county of Suffolk. It was a terrible drive through smashed tanks, wrecked cars, burned and ruined houses. It wasn’t the most damaged city he had seen, but it was the most miserable. The lorries, probably the same ones I had seen in convoys leaving southern Hungary, were bringing flour to the last bakery operating in Sarajevo, though what the bakers needed most of all was fuel for their ovens. They filmed the last loaf coming off the conveyor belt, and then the bakery closing down.

The Holiday Inn, the only hotel left operating, was a hideous construction of concrete and yellow plastic facing, standing at the end of the motorway leading to the older part of the city. It had been hit many times by shells and mortars, and the upper floors were closed, as were the rooms at the front. They looked out on a Jewish cemetery a few hundred yards away on the opposite hillside, marking the Bosnian Serb front line. They parked their armoured Land Rover, brought in by the BBC, behind the hotel, and worked their way nervously around the outside of the building. The big plate-glass windows on the ground floor had been smashed and replaced with thin clear plastic sheets. Inside, the hotel was dark and very cold. It had been in an ‘atrium’ style, with a large, open space, bigger than the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

The reception staff huddled together in a small room, around a stove which ran on bottled gas, wearing overcoats and gloves. Simpson and his crew were given rooms on the fourth floor. His crew consisted of a producer, a sound recordist and a huge South African cameraman. They were not made to feel particularly welcome by those already resident on the floors below. These included Christiane Amanpour from CNN and John Burns from the New York Times, but the rest were mostly young ‘daredevils’ who had arrived there early on in the war, attracted by the danger and hired by better-known news organisations who couldn’t get more famous reporters to go there. The temperature inside their rooms was indistinguishable from that outside which, within a day or so of their arrival, had dropped to minus nineteen degrees centigrade. The windows had long since been blown in, so there was nothing between the curtains and the outside world except for a single thin sheet of clear plastic. There was no electricity and no water. Simpson describes the lengths he had to go to in order to take a bath after three weeks, and how for days he would wear the same things, day and night, only removing his boots to get into his sleeping bag. He describes the night of the first winter snowfall on 27 December:

The city lost what little colour it still had. A sky as grey as a dirty handkerchief hung over the patchy white of fields and parks from which the trees had long been stripped for firewood. The misery grew much worse. Thanks to the United Nations, no one was starving. No one, that is, that you hears about. Anything could be happening behind the broken windows and tattered curtains in the darkness of thousand blocks of socialistic blocks and Austro-Hungarian stuccoed buildings. 

Life for most people in Sarajevo was so dreadful it was hard to understand how they could remain law-abiding and relatively decent to one another. A university professor I knew kept himself and his wife alive by burning his books… he offered some to a neighbour… Yet in this Hobbesian existence people didn’t savage each other for scraps of food, they behaved as if there were still rules which had to be obeyed. They presented themselves at distribution centres where the UN food was parcelled out, and accepted their inadequate ration without complaint; even though the Bosnian government bureaucrats skimmed off large quantities for their own families’ use.

For most people, the worst thing was not so much the privation as the risk of sudden death. The city was running out of space for graves faster than it was running out of everything else. One young man told them to stop filming a line of shivering people queuing at one of the few water-pumps in the old city centre, outside a disused brewery. He believed that the Bosnian Serbs would watch their pictures and know where to aim in order to cause maximum casualties. It was difficult for people to come to terms with the idea that the violence had no pattern to it, that it was utterly random. A peasant woman in her late forties could only carry a couple of small orange-juice containers the two miles back to her home. Her heart was bad, she explained. Her husband was dead, her mother had died of her wounds after being shot by a sniper.

On that morning of the first snow, the BBC crew went to an old people’s home not far from the airport. The building lay on the Serbs’ front line. It was extremely difficult to get there along a narrow lane blocked off with wooden screens which hid them from the Bosnian government snipers. A Serbian tank was parked in the hedgerow, its gun pointing at positions only two hundred yards away. The home had once cared for two hundred and fifty patients, most of them from the Yugoslav haute bourgeoisie. It had had a staff of a hundred doctors, nurses and domestics. There were bullet holes in nearly all the windows, and large portions of the building had been rendered uninhabitable by shell-fire. A UN armoured car stood outside, and a couple of French soldiers were chopping wood next to it. There were still a hundred and twenty old people in the home, although over the previous four nights eight of them had died of cold, and only six staff remained to look after them. One of them was a Serb woman, jolly and hard-working. She and her bird-like Muslim colleague were overwhelmed by their task of caring for the incontinent, bed-ridden patients. They could only heat one room per floor, and everyone who could walk there huddled inside. The rest stayed in bed, slowly dying.

One of these patients, a ninety-four-year-old man, declared proudly that he had been born in Sarajevo, where he had lived all his life, and that he would now die there. Simpson reflected that he would have been sixteen at the time of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. The wars that Gavrilo Princip’s action had precipitated had killed at least a hundred thousand lives in one way or another, and had led directly to the ascendancy of Marxism-Leninism and Nazism as dominant ideologies. Even this nasty little siege in the same city was a distant ripple of the shots fired by Princip; an old man who remembered the moment was waiting to die of cold and exposure as a result. Outside, the French soldiers had left in their APC, and an old man in his late seventies was finishing the job of chopping wood they had left. Simpson interviewed him:

Transcript of report on 9.40 news, 27.12.92

JS: Without his efforts, there will be no heating for the old people’s home for the rest of today and tonight.

Old man: I like to do it. I’m the only one left here who can do it now. They need me.

The old was the only patient still fit enough to chop wood for the furnace. A couple of hours later, he was shot dead by a Bosnian government sniper from close range. The bullet entered his head exactly between the eyes; a copybook killing. There can have been no mistake about it, no thought that he might have been a Serb soldier.

The longer John Simpson spent in Sarajevo, the more he decided that the proper distinction was not between constitutional rights and wrongs, nor between taking pro-Bosnian and pro-Serb positions, western journalists instinctively and invariably taking the former. The real distinction was between the powerful and the powerless. He was shocked to discover, for example, that the reason Sarajevo had neither water nor electricity was that the Bosnian government wouldn’t allow the UN to repair the electricity sub-stations just outside the city. There were various legitimate tactical reasons behind this, not least that the repaired sub-stations would also supply power to a Bosnian Serb weapons factory. But there was more to it than that, Simpson commented. The Bosnian government, lacking the military strength of the Serbs, regarded international opinion as their chief weapon. The more the Western press based in the Holiday Inn reported on the savage horrors of the siege, the more likely it was that the British, French and Americans would intervene on their side. It was not, therefore, in the interests of President Alija Izetbegovic and his government to ease the suffering of their fellow citizens. Those sufferings, on the contrary, might just be the key to victory.

Much of the reporting from Sarajevo was one-sided, so much so that even the UN forces were regarded as an enemy. The UN’s announcements about the obstructiveness of the Bosnian government was hardly reported in the Western press, and neither was the discovery by UN troops of a group of Serb prisoners who had been held by Bosnian government forces in a large sewage pipe for several weeks, fed once a day by food thrown into them in the darkness and the excrement. Worse atrocities were carried out by Serbs against Muslims, but they were all faithfully reported. On the other hand, when Simpson tried to report the crimes committed by the other side, he was labelled as being pro-Serb:

In fact I was very far from being pro-Serb. It was perfectly clear to me that it was the Bosnian Serbs, with the support of their puppet-master Slobadon Milosovic… who were guilty of the war crimes we saw enacted in front of us. The Bosnian Serbs were undoubtedly the aggressors, and the Bosnian government and its people were equally unquestionably the victims: unprepared for war, peaceable, non-sectarian.

Although the government became increasingly Muslim, and sometimes fiercely so, it still had the support of Croats and Serbs who lived in the city. There were no witch-hunts. Simpson knew of the case of an elderly Serb woman who was taken in by a Muslim family because she had nowhere else to live. She would sometimes get a phone-call from her son after a shelling episode, checking that she was all right. He was manning one of the guns on the mountainside which was firing the shells. The old woman’s Muslim hosts never blamed her for the shelling.

John Simpson reported on the former Yugoslavia for the next three years, but didn’t enjoy it. As he put it,

… I didn’t like the place at all. There was too much extremism, too much hatred, too much cruelty. I liked many individuals, but found each of the population groups – Serbs, Croats and Muslims – equally unattractive. The Serbs, overall, were the least lovable, but I found the international media’s demonization of them outrageous. It was an enormous relief to read the words of my friend and colleague, Nick Gowing of BBC World:

“Some of the strongly anti-Serb reporting in Bosnia is the secret shame of journalism. There is a cancer now which is affecting journalism: it is the unspoken issue of partiality and bias in foreign reporting.”

I am not alone, I thought, when I read that.

There were no good guys. The abandonment of the Muslims of Srbrenica to the murderous General Mladic by the Dutch contingent of the UN was one of the most shameful incidents of my lifetime. 

Simpson was also critical of the other UN contingents, including the Ukrainians, the Egyptians, the French and the Americans. Each had their own agenda and though the British were by far the best soldiers, they played as minimal a part as they could, he thought. The UN allowed the Serbians to maintain their checkpoint on the road to the airport, even though, according to the agreement between them, the Serbs had no right to be there. It was this checkpoint which had caused the city to run out of drinking water in the summer of 1992, because the Serbs wouldn’t allow the UN to bring through oil for the pumping station. This had created a sense of fear among the populace, which was worse than the cold and hunger. This was a sense of fear about not having enough to drink, as their mouths cracked with dryness, and everybody smelled bad because they wanted to conserve what little water they could get for drinking rather than washing. Yet the UN allowed the checkpoint to continue, because if the Serbs were antagonised it would be harder than ever to bring food and medicines into the city. This demonstrated to all, including the Serbs, the weakness of the UN deployment in Sarajevo. The UN also policed the siege in other ways for the Serbs, stopping people from leaving the city, forcibly turning back those they caught trying to escape and preventing private individuals from bringing in food supplies. If only the UN had had the guns to fire a couple of tank rounds here on the day the Serbs had set up the point, how much easier things would have been for the people of Sarajevo, Simpson reflected, as they picked up speed in their UN vehicle towards the airport, looking forward to a UN flight to Croatia or Italy, to real food and even hot water.

On 7 January 1993, Orthodox Christmas Day, 8th Operational Unit of the ARBiH, based in the besieged city of Srebrenica under the command of Naser Orić, attacked the village of Kravica near Bratunac. Altogether, forty-six Serbs died in the attack: thirty-five soldiers and eleven civilians. The attack on a holiday was intentional, as the Serbs were unprepared. The Bosniak forces used the Srebrenica safe zone (where no military was allowed) to carry out attacks on Serb villages including Kravica, and then flee back into the safe zone before the VRS could catch them. In total, 119 Serb civilians and 424 Serb soldiers died in Bratunac during the war. Republika Srpska claimed that the ARBiH forces torched Serb homes and massacred civilians. However, this could not be independently verified during the ICTY trials, which concluded that many homes were already previously destroyed and that the siege of Srebrenica had caused extreme hunger, forcing Bosniaks to attack nearby Serb villages to acquire food and weapons to survive.

What are they doing to my lovely Sarajevo?

The following morning, 8 January, the BBC crew headed off to see the man who was primarily responsible for causing so much misery. The Bosnian Serbs’ headquarters was a small skiing village on the outskirts of Sarajevo, where the winter Olympics had been held a few years earlier. Pale had been one of the main centres in this, and various identikit hotels had been built there in a style that was half Titoesque and half Alpine. Simpson was greeted by a question from a dark, fierce-featured young woman: What are they doing to my lovely Sarajevo? She was the daughter of Radovan Karadzic, but Simpson replied unabashedly: When you say “they”, who exactly do you mean?  She replied that she meant the Muslims, of course, whom she then claimed were always shelling their own people. Her father entered the room: a big man with hair like a badger and fingers badly gnawed from nervousness. His military commander, Ratko Mladic, seemed by contrast to be a monster of ferocity and anger; a strong, stocky little man with a thick neck. Simpson had once seen him grab a Sky News correspondent round the throat, forcing him up on tiptoe.

Simpson assumed that Karadzic managed to live with himself by blocking off the reality of what he was doing. Like his daughter, he regarded everything as the fault of the other side. If the Muslims hadn’t done this or that, his forces wouldn’t have been obliged to respond:

Transcript of interview with Dr Radovan Karadzic, 8.1.93.

JS: Conditions to Sarajevo are increasingly bad now. Why do you treat innocent civilians as the legitimate targets of war?

RK: But we don’t, you understand. Our Serbian communities inside and outside the city are under constant attack by the Muslims, and we have to  defend them. That is what we are doing.

JS: But how is firing mortars and sniping and cutting  off their food and fuel and water supplies defending the Serbs?

RK: We have to respond to their attacks. Our people are dying and being injured every day, and the international community does nothing to help them. We have to help ourselves. 

JS: And what about the Serbs who live in Sarajevo and support the government  there?

RK: They are not acting as true Serbs.

JS: So they become legitimate targets too?

RK: If the Muslims attack us, we must defend ourselves.

The argument went on in this circular fashion for some time. Outside, Simpson bumped into Karadzic’s deputy, Nikola Koljevic, who had been a Shakespearean scholar at Sarajevo University. Quotations from the bard peppered his conversation, though Simpson felt that they were perhaps somewhat misquoted:

Interview with Nikola Koljevic, 8.1.93:

NK: We are surrounded by enemies, and it is necessary for us to keep our own counsel. As your great national poet William Shakespeare says in his tragedy of Macbeth, ‘love, obedience and honour  and groups of friends, we cannot expect to have.’   

Simpson found it impossible to understand how someone who had spent his life studying the works of the most humane writer who ever lived could support so inhumane a cause. People said it was because his son had been killed, apparently by Muslims; until that time he had been a gentle enough academic, but his character had been changed by the incident. Yet even as he mouthed the verbal defences of the Bosnian Serbs about their being the innocent victims of Muslim aggression, something else seemed to be working away inside him. Eventually, when the siege of Sarajevo was in its final stages, he shot himself.

One morning in mid-January, as they were driving through Sarajevo, Simpson started talking to Vera Kordic, their fixer and translator, about ways of showing the misery of ordinary people in the siege. Why don’t we just ask any of these? she said, pointing at the lines of harassed women queuing for water. But the journalist felt that they needed to be inside someone’s house, to see how they lived from day-to-day. They walked along a street and eventually found a small doorway with a dark little window on either side of it: a miserable, humble place. They knocked at the door, and an old woman clutching her worn dressing-gown eventually came to the door and agreed to let them in. She lived in a single room, cold, but with the fug of living and cooking filling the place. A candle burnt by her bedside. She spent most of her day in bed, keeping herself warm and using up fewer calories. The food she was given by the UN was just enough to keep her going. She had a small stove and a covered bucket as a lavatory. There was no water: she had to queue up for that, if her neighbour couldn’t spare any. A few keepsakes decorated her place, including a little tapestry of a young girl hung on the wall. She was sallow and not very clean, with greasy grey hair. Most people in Sarajevo lived without washing: water was too valuable to waste, and soap non-existent. In the background, shells landed from time to time, and there was the regular crack of a sniper’s rifle. The old woman flinched in fear every time there was an explosion, which shook the whole place and caused a little dust to drift down from the ceiling. She was ashamed of the way she lived, and that they should see it, but Vera persuaded her that this was the only way people outside Sarajevo could understand what it was like to live there. By the time they started to interview her about her life, her story poured out of her:

Transcript of interview with woman in Sarajevo, 14.1.93:

I was a nurse in a hospital, a trained nurse. I wasn’t always poor like you see me now. I had people under me. But I am alone in the world, you see. My neighbours, they were Muslims, were very good to me even though I am Serbian. ‘We must help each other’ they said, and they helped me. But now they don’t. Maybe they are dead. I don’t know. So many people have died here.

(sound of shell explosion, not far away).

I am so frightened when I hear these noises. I don’t know what to do. I am old, you see, and completely alone. No one cares about me. I have no family, no husband, no children. I am alone in the world. And I am very frightened. 

Simpson’s crew gave her money, medicine and food. She wept again, and gave them a few little keepsakes from her life before the siege. Every time they went back to Sarajevo after that they would take things to her, and see how she was. It may have made her feel better, but the real effect was on them. To do anything for anyone amid this horror made them feel a little better, and a little less guilty that they could get out of Sarajevo at any time they wanted, leaving the victims of the siege to the mercy of the snipers, shells and shortages.

War Crimes and Punishment of the Perpetrators:                                                   

Above: Ratko Mladic, former Chief of Staff of the Army of the Republika Srpska.

The reporting of eye-witness journalists from Sarajevo and elsewhere provide historians with valuable primary sources about the nature of the Bosnian War.  It may take some time before historians to be able to form balanced views, since even at a distance of twenty-five years, the same distance as between the outbreak of the first and second world wars, the level of propaganda surrounding the events is still creating ripple effects, especially in deciding on responsibility for the atrocities which took place on all sides of the ethnic triangle. The ICTY in the Hague has finally ended with the dramatic self-poisoning of one of the accused in the courtroom itself.

On the Serbian side, in addition to the well-publicised case of the former President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2006, Radovan Karadzic was held on trial and was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2016 for crimes, including crimes against humanity and genocide. Ratko Mladić was also tried by the ICTY, charged with crimes in connection with the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre. Mladić was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment by The Hague in November 2017.

Alija Izetbegović during his visit to the United States in 1997.

After the death of Alija Izetbegović, The Hague revealed that he was under investigation for war crimes; however, the prosecutor did not find sufficient evidence in Izetbegović’s lifetime to issue an indictment. Other Bosniaks who were convicted of or are under trial for war crimes include Rasim Delić, chief of staff of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was sentenced to 3 years’ imprisonment on 15 September 2008 for his failure to prevent the Bosnian mujahideen members of the Bosnian army from committing crimes against captured civilians and enemy combatants (murder, rape, torture). Enver Hadžihasanović, a general of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was sentenced to 3.5 years for authority over acts of murder and wanton destruction in Central Bosnia. Hazim Delić was the Bosniak Deputy Commander of the Čelebići prison camp, which detained Serb civilians. He was sentenced to 18 years by the ICTY Appeals Chamber on 8 April 2003 for murder and torture of the prisoners and for raping two Serbian women. Bosnian commander Sefer Halilović was charged with one count of violation of the laws and customs of war on the basis of superior criminal responsibility of the incidents during Operation Neretva ’93 and found not guilty. In 2006, Naser Orić, commander of the Bosnian government troops near Srebrenica on 8 January 1993, was found on the charges of not preventing the murder of Serbs, but was subsequently acquitted of all charges on appeal.

Dario Kordić, the political leader of Croats in Central Bosnia, was convicted of the crimes against humanity in Central Bosnia i.e. ethnic cleansing and sentenced to 25 years in prison. On 29 May 2013, in a first instance verdict, the ICTY sentenced Prlić to 25 years in prison. The tribunal also convicted five other wartime leaders of the joint trial: defence minister of Herzeg-Bosnia Bruno Stojić (20 years), military officers Slobodan Praljak (20 years) and Milivoj Petković (20 years), military police commander Valentin Ćorić (20 years), and head of prisoner exchanges and detention facilities Berislav Pušić (10 years). The Chamber ruled, by a majority, with the presiding judge Jean-Claude Antonetti dissenting, that they took part in a joint criminal enterprise (JCE) against the non-Croat population of Bosnia and Herzegovina and that the JCE included the Croatian President Franjo Tuđman, Defence Minister Gojko Šušak, and General Janko Bobetko. However, on 19 July 2016, the Appeals Chamber in the case announced that the Trial Chamber made no explicit findings concerning [Tudjman’s, Šušak’s and Bobetko’s] participation in the JCE and did not find them guilty of any crimes.  It was left to the lesser military staff to take responsibility for the Croat war crimes. A final chapter in these cases was reached as I was writing this, on 29 November 2017, when Slobodan Praljak killed himself by taking poison in Court, having had his appeal against his twenty-year sentence rejected. His last words were, I am no war criminal.

Not surprisingly then, the Bosnian Serbs, and to some extent the Bosnian Croats have accused both the UN authorities on the ground, and the ICTY of practising selective justice by actively prosecuting Serbs (and Croats) while ignoring or downplaying Bosniak war crimes. When is a war crime ethnic cleansing? When is it genocide? When is it not a war crime? The Bosnian War posed all three questions and subsequently, at least seemingly, answered them.

Main Sources:

John Simpson (1998), Strange Places, Questionable People. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Rudolf Joó (1999), Hungary: A Member of NATO. Budapest: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Hungary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_War

Gunpowder: viewers shocked by violent scenes in BBC drama

Above: Kit Harington, Liv Tyler and Sian Webber in Gunpowder. ‘This was a century of fierce religious conflict which was defined by conflict wrought by the competing powers of state battling for supremacy.’ Photograph: Robert Viglaski/BBC / Kudos.

The following article appeared in The Guardian last week, and it not only got me thinking about my favourite period in British and European history, one which had me dressing up as a Roundhead army chaplain in the Sealed Knot, but also researching into both my own ancestors from that period and those of ‘Kit Harington’. Just as it’s quite likely that my own ancestors were on both sides of the Gunpowder Rebellion, as it should more properly be called, it is certain that this was the case with those of the now famous actor. As a historical event, it is not unsurprising that the ‘Plot’ should be seen as a precursor to the full-scale civil wars which were to dominate the middle years of the century both in Britain and on the continent, but the nature of the actual and potential violence involved was more reminiscent of the previous century than it was of the battles, sieges and skirmishes which provided the context for the fratricide of the new one. Life in the 1600s remained as ‘nasty, brutal and short’ as it had done in the 1500s, but for most of the population this was due to the virulence of pestilences in Britain, whereas in Tudor times many had lived in terror of the violence of the state towards the adherents of the Catholic cause on the one hand, or Protestantism on the other. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had given both sides the right to impose their faith on the other through the rulers of the cities and states in which they lived. Civilian Catholics were massacred in the North of England, the Huguenots were massacred on St Bartholemew’s Day 1572 in France and thereafter ‘harried out of the land’ by Louis XIV, and the Dutch fought a guerilla war against the Spanish Empire’s Counter-Reforming zeal. In all of this, torture and the torch were the main weapons of oppression of both individuals and whole communities. Against this backcloth, plots and counter-plots became the order of the day in Elizabeth’s reign. Admittedly, had the 1605 Plot succeeded in blowing up the entire Establishment at Westminster, it would have dwarfed even the Spanish Armada in the scale of its attempt to restore Britain to Catholic Christendom, but in its abject failure it mirrored the Earl of Essex’s ‘Rebellion’ against Queen Elizabeth of four years earlier.

When battles and skirmishes are re-enacted, the attempt to portray the nature and extent of the violence on TV is often shielded from the viewer by the rapid repetition with which it occurs, together with the sheer scale of the events depicted. Massacres of baggage trains are beginning to be shown, but generally the violence is seen as occurring between armed forces roughly equal in their power of arms. Despite this, I was recently reminded of the importance of the unsentimental portrayal of violence in children’s literature from this period, in reading Captain Maryat’s Children of the New Forest to my eleven-year-old son. Maryat made no attempt to shield his young readers from the results of violent acts on the individual.  To depict the more personal and individual violence inflicted by powerful states in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in massacres and executions, it is the inequality of power which needs to be depicted. That is one reason why I find the reaction to violent ‘re-enactments’ and representations of historical realities so surprising, especially when they come from historians.

Unnecessarily gruesome and brutal”, “sickening” and “gore-filled” are just some of the ways Kit Harington’s new BBC series, Gunpowder, has been described by viewers and critics.

The series follows the events of the plot to blow up the House of Lords in 1605 and, during the first episode, we saw a Catholic woman crushed to death as punishment for her faith, and a Jesuit priest hanged, drawn and quartered. We saw the blood. We saw the guts. We saw the pain. Unsurprisingly, some viewers were shocked, and have argued that the explicit violence was gratuitous and too much for a Saturday night TV show.

But when it comes to history on television, too often the brutal reality of everyday life is brushed under the sumptuous carpets of romantic period dramas… Dramas such as Gunpowder (and, indeed, ‘Peaky Blinders’ and ‘Harlots’) provide a crucial insight into a violent past that modern Brits need to confront.

What’s more, it is only by understanding this past that we can begin to fully understand the religious persecutions of our history and the country we live in today. That Gunpowder is shockingly violent is undeniable, but what is also undeniable is that it provides an authentic glimpse into the real, raw world that 17th-century people had to endure.

Actually, another reason for my surprise at the way some critics have reacted, is that ‘it’s all been done before’. There was an excellent historical drama on the Plot in 2005 (with Robert Carlyle as James I) which also contained graphic violence, including the gruesome execution of Jesuit priests. What was most interesting, however, was the way in which James I’s change of policy in reviving the more barbaric forms of execution was justified with reference to the Jesuit belief that martyrdom would result in them going straight to heaven, without passing through purgatory. In the film, both James and his wife, Anne of Denmark, agree that only a slow and agonising death would act as a deterrence. Although the violent solution may be very much of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, there is little doubt that the failure of deterrence used by powerful but democratic states today leaves them vulnerable to terrorism on a small-scale, as well as on a larger one. Yet we are critical when counter-terrorist forces use even discriminatory violence to ‘take out’ suspect terrorists ‘in theatre’ in order to prevent them from mounting further attacks and to deter others from joining the ‘jihadis’.

Arguably, the gruesome death of my own ancestors, the Wintour brothers, made them more central to the Plot as it occurred than even Catesby, whom they recruited as a ‘celebrity’ leader, though he himself was a recent convert to Catholicism. In the end, it was the brothers, from a long line of noble and gentlemen recusants, degraded through persecution, who paid for their choice and his mistakes by facing the Scaffold, since both ‘financiers’, Catesby and Percy, were killed (allegedly by the same musket-ball) at the siege at Holbeach. It was the gruesome death of two brothers with the right to wear Plantagenet coats of arms, which finally terrorised the Catholic gentry of the Midlands into submission and put an end to the Plantaganet plotting which had continued since their defeat at Stoke Field in 1487. Elizabeth’s policy of fines and imprisonment had failed, hence the reintroduction of more barbaric methods of torture and execution. I shall be interested to see how well this dilemma is portrayed in this series, or whether it simply succeeds in substituting one ‘celebrity’, Guy Fawkes, for another, Robert Catesby.

Perhaps Kit Harington might have made his drama less violent, and at the same time more interesting, by paying homage to the other side of his family, who were just as involved in the events of 1603-5 as the Catesbys and the Wintours. In addition to being a direct descendant of Robert Catesby through his mother, from whose maiden name he acquired his middle name, Catesby, Christopher  (or ‘Kit’ from Shakespeare’s contemporary playwright, Christopher Marlowe) Harington is directly descended through his paternal grandfather,  Sir Richard Harington, 14th baronet, to the sixteenth century Haringtons, to Sir James Harington of Exton, Rutland and his sons. Sir John Harington, created 1st baronet Exton at the coronation of James I, was a close member of the courts of both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Sir James Harington, the third son, became 1st baronet of Ridlington, from whom Kit Harington’s father is directly descended.

Sir John Harington became guardian and tutor to the King’s daughter, Elizabeth, on whom the Midland Rebellion centred, and who was spirited away to the walled city of Coventry from Harington’s home at nearby Coombe Abbey on the night the plot in London was ‘discovered’ by the King and Cecil. This followed their receipt of the anonymous warning letter,  which both Catesby and Percy claimed to have been written to Lord Monteagle by Francis Tresham, the thirteenth plotter. But Tresham pleaded his innocence, and recent evidence suggests that the letter have been written by Henry Percy, Duke of Northumberland, Thomas Percy’s own cousin and patron. He was also the man most likely to become Elizabeth’s Protector, had the Plot succeeded. Both Thomas and Henry had been frequent guests at Coombe Abbey, so both would have known the young princess well. In an extraordinary act of bravado Catesby had planned to go hunting with James just before the opening of Parliament, but was warned of the ‘betrayal’ by Monteagle’s servant.

Harington accompanied the Earl of Warwick, Fulke Greville, in his pursuit and besieging of the rebels at Holbeach House. He had himself been made High Sheriff of Rutland under Elizabeth and was Greville’s Deputy Lieutenant in Warwickshire. Sir John had acquired Coombe Abbey on his marriage to Anne Kelway. Though the Haringtons were a Rutland family, they claimed descent from the Scottish Bruces, hence their closeness to the royal family. Harington had accompanied Mary Queen of Scots on her progress from Staffordshire to Fotheringay in Northamptonshire, and his wife attended on Anne of Denmark, James’ Queen consort, during her stay in Edinburgh, as well as on the couple’s progress to London in the spring of 1603. The Princess Elizabeth broke her journey to attend the coronation two months later, and had been just seven years of age when her new governor brought her to live at Coombe Abbey in October. It remained her chief place of residence between 1603 and 1608. There she formed a close friendship with Harington’s niece, Ann Dudley. It is said that they could often be seen going off for walks in the nearby woods, or sitting together in the beautiful formal gardens that immediately surrounded the house.

The second baronet Exton, John Harington, born at Coombe in 1592, was a close friend and companion of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, on 5 January 1604 he was created, along with The Duke of York and others, a Knight of the Bath. In September he went a foreign tour with John Tovey, a master of the free school at Guildford, who later became Elizabeth’s Tutor and Chaplain during her time at Coombe, when he was master of the Free School in Coventry. While abroad, young John corresponded in French and Latin with Prince Henry. After seven weeks in the Low Countries, where he visited the universities, courts of three princes, and military fortifications, he went to Italy in 1608. He wrote from Venice (28 May 1609) announcing his intention of returning through France to spend the rest of his life with his royal friend. Henry’s death (6 November 1612) greatly grieved him, as it did his sister (I have written about their sibling relationship elsewhere on this site). The following year, Elizabeth married Frederick V, Elector Palatine and Lord Harington accompanied her to the Electoral Palatinate, but died at Worms, Germany on his way home in 1613. After his death his estate at Exton was sold to pay his creditors, so the young Lord Harington had only the Coombe estate to fall back on. Aged 21, he never recovered from the debts his father had incurred in providing royal hospitality, and continued to grieve deeply for Prince Henry. He died in 1614 and was buried at Exton with an eulogy from John Donne.

Not only did Coombe host Prince Henry on an occasional basis, in addition to the Princess, but the Harington’s second home also provided lodging to several Scottish and English noblemen, including two Percies, a Devereux, a Hume and a Bruce. The combined households of the Prince and Princess numbered 141 above and 85 below stairs. At one point, Lord Harington was entertaining no fewer than 426 guests at the Abbey, of whom 207 were in receipt of salaries and a further 97 were employed by the architect Inigo Jones, who had been hired to carry out renovations at this time.

Above: Elizabeth Stuart, aged 7 (1603, at Coombe?)

 

Right: Elizabeth, aged 10 (1606)

 

It may have been Thomas Percy’s frequent visits to Coombe which led to the plot to capture the royal princess. The rebels may have hoped that Prince Henry would have been there too. He was only two years older than Elizabeth in 1605, aged 11. If he was in the House of Lords with his father, as Prince of Wales, he would lose his life. Thomas Percy, as a member of the royal household, was trying to find out what the plans were, but seems not to have succeeded in doing so before the fuse was about be lit. He visited his cousin on 4th November, to find out how much Northumberland, and perhaps others, knew about the plot. The younger of James’ sons, Prince Charles, was quite a sickly child, and was not expected to long outlive his brother, although he was second in line before Elizabeth. Percy had visited him on 1 November to try to ascertain his whereabouts on 5th.

It therefore seemed to be a lower-risk strategy to kidnap Elizabeth from her country residence than to attempt to smuggle Charles out of his rooms in Whitehall, where he would have been surrounded by guards. In any case, the people would surely warm to a talented young woman as Queen who, even at the age of seven, was displaying all the skills of her illustrious aunt and namesake, and James had probably not yet fixed the succession in any case.

At Allhallowtide on 31 October, 1603, Catesby had sent for his cousin Thomas Wintour, who was at Huddington Court in Worcestershire with his brother Robert. As descendents of both the Golafre and Huddington families, they were entitled to wear the baronial coats of arms of both families. Thomas was educated as a lawyer and had fought for England in the Low Countries, but in 1600 had converted to Catholicism. Following the Earl of Essex’s failed rebellion, he had travelled to Spain to raise support for English Catholics, a mission which the authorities would later describe as comprising part of a ‘Spanish Treason’. Although Thomas declined his invitation, Catesby again invited him in February the next year. They were related through the wealthy recusant Throckmorton family of Coughton Court in Warwickshire, which was to feature in the plot. When Wintour responded to the summons he found his cousin with the swordsman John Wright. Catesby told him of his plan to kill the king and his government by blowing up “the Parliament howse with Gunpowder … in that place have they done us all the mischiefe, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.” Wintour at first objected to his cousin’s scheme, but Catesby, who said that “the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy”, won him over.

Despite Catholic Spain’s moves toward diplomacy with England, Catesby still harboured hopes of foreign support and a peaceful solution. Wintour therefore returned to the continent, where he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the affable Constable of Castille to press for good terms for English Catholics in forthcoming peace negotiations. He then turned to Sir William Stanley, an English Catholic and veteran commander who had switched sides from England to Spain, and the exiled Welsh spy Hugh Owen; both cast doubt on the plotters’ chances of receiving Spanish support. Owen did, however, introduce Wintour to Guy Fawkes, whose name Catesby had already supplied as “a confidant gentleman” who might enter their ranks. Fawkes was a devout English Catholic who had travelled to the continent to fight for Spain in the Dutch War of Independence. Wintour told him of their plan to “doe some whatt in Ingland if the pece with Spaine healped us nott”, and thus in April 1604 the two men returned home. Wintour told Catesby that despite positive noises from the Spanish, he feared that they “the deeds would nott answere”. This was a response that in Nicholls’s opinion came as no surprise to Catesby, who wanted and expected nothing less.

A contemporary engraving of eight of the thirteen conspirators, by Crispijn van de Passe; Catesby is second from the right.

Early in June 1605, Catesby met the principal Jesuit in England, Father Henry Garnet, on Thames Street in London. While discussing the war in Flanders, Catesby asked about the morality of “killing innocents”, in other words, the royal children who would be at the state opening of Parliament. This continued to prick the consciences of the plotters right up until 4th November, which is why they sought opportunities to kidnap all three of the children. It is also notable that this is what sets them apart from more recent terrorists, who have no such moral qualms in sacrificing children to their cause. Garnet said that such actions could often be excused, but according to his own account during a second meeting in July he showed Catesby a letter from the pope which forbade rebellion anyway. Catesby replied, “Whatever I mean to do, if the Pope knew, he would not hinder for the general good of our country.” Father Garnet’s protestations prompted Catesby’s next reply, “I am not bound to take knowledge by you of the Pope’s will.”Soon after, Father Tesimond told Father Garnet that, while taking Catesby’s confession, he had learned of the plot. Father Garnet met with Catesby a third time on 24 July at White Webbs in Enfield Chase, the home of Catesby’s wealthy relative Anne Vaux, and a house long suspected by the government of harbouring Jesuit priests. Without acknowledging that he was aware of the precise nature of the plot, the priest tried in vain to dissuade Catesby from his course.

At the beginning of November, as Fawkes made a final check on the gunpowder, other conspirators took up their positions in the Midlands. Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, already aware of certain stirrings before he received the letter, did not yet know the exact nature of the plot or who exactly was involved. He elected to wait, to see how events unfolded. On 3 November, Catesby met with Wintour and Percy in London. Although the nature of their discussion is unknown, Antonia Fraser theorises that some adjustment of their plan to abduct Princess Elizabeth may have occurred, as later accounts told how Percy had been seen at Charles, Duke of York’s lodgings, also enquiring as to the movements of the king’s daughter. A week earlier—on the same day that Monteagle received his letter—Catesby had been at White Webbs with Fawkes, to discuss kidnapping Prince Henry rather than Princess Elizabeth. As already conjectured, he may have received information from Percy that both the Prince and Princess would be at Coombe during the state opening, though Fawkes’ possible involvement may also suggest that he would kidnap the Prince from Whitehall, perhaps with the help of Percy. Certainly, it seems to have been part of the plan for Henry Percy to become Elizabeth’s Protector had the Plot in London succeeded. Both Thomas and Henry were probably well-known to both Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, from the time they spent together at Coombe Abbey. 

The events of the night of 4th-5th November are well-known. Catesby and Percy met up with other gentry under the guise of a hunting match on Dunsmore near Coombe Abbey. When the news from London reached the ears of those assembled at Dunchurch, most refused to join Catesby’s rebellion. Those who did rode off in the direction of Warwick, seemingly abandoning their plan to kidnap the Princess Elizabeth. On 6 November the rebels raided Warwick Castle for supplies, before continuing to Norbrook to collect stored weapons. From there they continued their journey to Huddington in Worcestershire. Catesby gave his servant Bates a letter to deliver to Father Garnet and the other priests gathered at Coughton Court, informing them of what had transpired, and asking for their help in raising an army in Wales, where Catholic support was believed to be strong. The priest begged Catesby and his followers to stop their “wicked actions”, and to listen to the Pope’s preachings. Father Garnet fled, and managed to evade capture for several weeks. Catesby and the others arrived at Huddington at about 2:00 pm, and were met by Thomas Wintour. Terrified of being associated with the fugitives, family members and former friends showed them no sympathy.

Meanwhile, it  was also on the morning of 6th November that Lord Harington received a letter from Mr Benock, the Horse Trainer at Warwick Castle, informing him that John Grant of Norbrook had stolen some of the war horses and, judging from the manner in which these circumstances occurred, he feared that insurrection was at hand in the country. Harington wrote immediately to Salisbury, enclosing Benock’s letter and asking for an immediate reply as to what was to be done if there was indeed a rebellion taking place. He then arranged for the Princess Elizabeth to be taken into the walled City of Coventry, where she was lodged in the Palace Yard, remaining there until the apparent danger had passed. The citizens of Coventry, loyal protestants all, rallied to her defence and armed themselves in readiness. Harington himself rode to Warwick Castle to lend Sir Fulke Greville, as County Sheriff, his assistance in the pursuit of the rebels, who by this time were already at Huddington.

Back in London, under pain of torture, Fawkes had started to reveal what he knew, and on 7 November the government named Catesby as a wanted man. Early that morning at Huddington, the remaining outlaws went to confession, before taking the sacrament — in Fraser’s opinion, a sign that none of them thought they had long to live. The party of fugitives, which included those at the centre of the plot, their supporters and Digby’s hunting party, by now had dwindled to only thirty-six in number. From there, they struck out for Staffordshire and Holbeche House, perhaps still with the intention of trying to raise a Welsh army. The House was home to Stephen Lyttleton, one of their party. The following day, 8th November, while the fugitives were recovering from injuries sustained in an accident while trying to dry the gunpowder, the sheriffs of Staffordshire and Worcestershire had joined Fulke Greville’s posse from Warwickshire.

Percy and Catesby slain in attempting their escape from Holbeach, unknown artist.

Again, the main events are relatively well-known. Richard Walsh, Sheriff of Worcester, and his company of 200 men besieged Holbeche House at about 11:00 a.m. While crossing the courtyard Thomas Wintour was hit in the shoulder. John Wright was shot, followed by his brother, and then Rookwood. Catesby and Percy were reportedly both dropped by a single lucky shot, while standing near the door, and not, as depicted above, in the sword-fight in which Catesby had vowed to die defending his faith. He managed to crawl inside the house, where his body was later found, clutching a picture of the Virgin Mary. The survivors were taken into custody and the dead buried near Holbeche. On the orders of the Earl of Northampton however, the bodies of Catesby and Percy were later exhumed and decapitated, their heads taken to London to be placed on spikes to look upon the parliament buildings they had failed to destroy.

With Thomas Percy dead, there was nobody who could either implicate or clear his cousin, Henry Percy of any involvement in the plot. Some have speculated that this was why Catesby and Thomas Percy were not captured alive at Holbeach, along with most of the other conspirators, and why they were mysteriously killed by the same musket ball. Was someone under orders to make sure they did not survive to tell the tale, or, as seems more likely, were they determined to die then and there rather than implicating others under torture? Certainly, it seems strange that they were the only principle plotters to meet their end under musket fire, when the group as a whole, about thirty in number at most, could easily have been wiped out by a force of two hundred trained musketeers. As it was, Henry’s failure to ensure that Thomas took the Oath of Supremacy upon his appointment as a Gentleman Pensioner, and their meeting on 4 November, constituted damning evidence. The Privy Council also suspected that had the plot succeeded, he would have been Princess Elizabeth’s Lord Protector. With insufficient evidence to convict him, however, he was charged with contempt, fined £30,000 and stripped of all public offices. He remained in the Tower until 1621.

A few months later, when Princess Elizabeth was safely back at Coombe Abbey, Lord Harington wrote a letter to his cousin, James Harington of Ridlington, describing the events of 5-8 November. In it, he suggests that the rebellion was not finally put down until 10th November, with the three sheriffs and himself remaining on active duty and alert until then (we know that at least four of the major protagonists had left Holbeach before the siege):

Our great care and honourable charge entrusted to us by the King’s majesty hath been a matter of so much concern that it almost effaced the attentions of kin or friend. With God’s assistance we hope to do our lady Elizabeth such service as is due to her princely endowments and natural abilities, both which appear the sweet dawning of future comfort to her Royal Father. The late devilish conspiracy did much to disturb this part. I went with Sir Fulke Greville to alarm the neighbourhood and surprise the villains who came to Holbeche and was out five days in peril of death, in fear for the great charge I had left at home. Her highness doth often say, “What a Queen I should have been by this means. I had rather have been with my Royal Father in the Parliament House, than wear his crown on such condition.” This poor Lady hath not yet recovered the surprise and is very ill and troubled.

The princess  remained at Coombe for another three years, until at Christmas 1608 she moved to her own establishment at Kew, though Lord Harington still controlled her movements and expenditure. This was the source of many of Harington’s troubles, since the two thousand pounds a year pension promised by the King was never paid, but, in any case, would have come nowhere near meeting the princess’ expenditure, which in 1612-13 alone was in the region of 3,500 pounds (she was unaware of these debts, unpaid by her father, until after her wedding). She was married to Frederick, Elector Palatine, on Valentine’s Day in 1613, despite her mother’s disapproval, and Lord Harington rode at the head of the wedding procession to Whitehall. He also bore the costs of the wedding, later disclosing that it had cost him in the region of thirty thousand pounds to take care of her. Lord and Lady Harington accompanied the Royal couple to Heidelberg after the wedding, as did Elizabeth’s friend, Ann Dudley. Frederick was so besotted by his new bride that he had a whole new wing of the castle built for her and her servants. Harington stayed at Heidelberg for a further four months, arbitrating in various disputes within her household in his role as Royal Ambassador.  Worn out by these cares and concerns, he decided to return to England, but died of a fever at Worms, only fifty miles from the castle. His body was returned to Exton for burial, after which Lady Harington was invited to rejoin Elizabeth’s household. Finally, James granted her a stipend of five thousand pounds.

Young John Harington, who became the 2nd baron of Exton, a teenager at the time of the plot, later remembered making an opportune study of the heads of Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy while en route to London, and later reflected: “more terrible countenances were never looked upon”. The second baronet, described by one of his companions as the most complete young gentleman of his age that this kingdom could afford for religion, learning and courteous behaviour, tragically died of smallpox in February 1614, aged just 22, having sold his family home at Exton just a week before. The Coombe estates passed to his sister Lucy, by then the Countess of Bedford, though she was forced to sell it to cover her gambling debts, to Elizabeth Craven, the widow of William Craven, in 1622. By a strange twist of fate, their eldest son, also William Craven, entered the service of Maurice, Prince of Orange, in the fight to restore the Bohemian Crown to Frederick and Elizabeth, the couple now known as ‘the winter King and Queen’ of Bohemia, having been deposed by the Hapsburgs after just one winter in Prague. These were the events which marked the beginning the Thirty Years’ War in 1618, which laid waste to much of Europe.

Coat of Arms of the Harington baronets, ancestors of Kit Harington

In 1632, Frederick and Elizabeth were refugees at the court of the Prince of Orange in the Netherlands. Lord Craven was among the first to respond to the call to reinstate the exiles to the throne of Bohemia, and was appointed one of the commanders of the English army in Germany. He accompanied Frederick when he left the Hague to begin his campaign. He led his British volunteers on a seemingly hopeless attack on the Fortress at Creuznach, himself planting the Bohemian standard in victory on the Citadel walls. He was knighted by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden as he lay wounded among the ruins. King Gustavus was killed during the victorious Battle of Lutzen. This demoralised Frederick so much that he gave up the fight, falling into a fit of melancholy which, together with illness, brought about his death in November 1632. The following year, Craven returned to England, where he received a hero’s welcome and Charles I granted him permission to enclose six hundred acres around Coombe Abbey to form a park. He became the principal benefactor for the widowed Elizabeth and in 1637 was back on the continent fighting for Prince Rupert, her eldest son, in his attempt to regain his father’s throne. They were both captured at the Battle of Limgea but, having secured his own release on ransom of twenty thousand pounds, Craven remained in Germany to secure Prince Rupert’s release on the condition that he ceased hostilities against the Emperor.

Shortly after Craven returned to England, but in 1640 he moved permanently to Elizabeth’s Court at the Hague. Although supporting Charles I on the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, he remained abroad and aided the Royalist cause with financial contributions. When Parliament eventually won the war, the majority of his estates were confiscated. However, his prospective heir had married into the Fairfax family, leading Parliamentarians, so the Cravens were allowed to keep Coombe Abbey. When, following his restoration in 1660, King Charles II turned his back on his aunt, making no palace or house available to her, Craven, who had continued to support her in the Hague, offered her his own house in Drury Lane. She continued to live there until 1662, when she leased her own dwelling at Leicester House. There she died a fortnight after moving in, on 26 February, aged 66. There were rumours of a romantic relationship between Craven and Elizabeth, and some suggested that a private marriage existed between them. However, she was twelve years his senior, he having been born in 1608. Perhaps he was simply the perfect, gallant and chivalrous knight who had sworn to serve Elizabeth and considered it a great honour to do so. Certainly, he continued to spend vast amounts on her. When she died, he was having a country house built for her, Ashdown House, near his own house at Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire, which, along with Coombe Abbey, was also being rebuilt. The latter was leased to his godson, Isaac Gibson, and in 1667-1669 a new wing was added to the original Harington building.

Ashdown House

Lord Craven regained control of Coombe in the 1670s, putting his son and heir in charged of the planned alterations to the House. He had planned for some time to create an appropriate setting for collection of Stuart portraits left to him by the Queen of Bohemia. He may also have decided to house the few possessions she held at her death to a place where, as a child, she had spent her happiest hours. The idea to transform Hamstead Marshall into a “miniature Heidelberg” had never materialised and the sentimental links with Coombe Abbey may have persuaded Lord Craven to make Coombe Abbey their permanent home, as well as the principal family seat of the Cravens, following the death of the Earl himself. He eventually died on 9 April 1697 at Drury Lane, aged 89.

We should not assume that people at that time were any more inured to the violence than we are to the use of torture and execution in the twentieth century (in recent memory). Neither was the state violence of the seventeenth century primarily anti-Catholic or religiously motivated. The executions, viewed in the context and the standards of the time, were punishments for treason, not heresy, as the Marian burnings had been. Nevertheless, the Jacobite policy was a radical return to methods not used since that time, an admission that Elizabeth I’s ‘via media’ had not worked in bringing about the Tudor dynasty’s hoped for security from foreign-sponsored plots and insurrections. This has also to be seen in the broader geographical context of a successful counter-reformation in Europe led, violently, by the Hapsburgs, as evident in the Spanish Inquisition. Anti-Catholic feeling in Britain was certainly at a high water mark in 1601-5, manipulated by a vulnerable establishment. In this context, the Jesuits were seen as the ‘Jihadi’ apologists of a terrorist network stretching through the Spanish Netherlands to Wales and Ireland. In fact, their role in the Gunpowder Plot indicates that they were extremely reluctant to justify acts of violence by lay Catholics. As for the rest of the century, although it was one of continual conflict throughout Europe, it was not one of continuous violence in Britain and Ireland. Even the attack on Drogheda of 1649, although often described as a ‘massacre’ by Cromwell’s troops was, at the time, viewed as an act of war. Although an atrocity worthy of the title ‘war crime’, it should not be compared with the massacre of Protestant settlers which took place decades earlier. Again, the intention of the war in Ireland was to provide security for the newly established British Republic, not to terrorise the native population. Besides this, a fuller exploration of the lives of those associated with the events of 1605 would also suggest that, in British terms, that we need also to consider their constructive contribution in art, architecture and chivalry, not to mention their advocacy and practice of religious toleration and the refusal of many to take up arms in any cause. Life for many may have continued nasty, brutish and short in Burke’s well-known phrase, but it was not just about the enactment of sickening violence. Neither should it be re-enacted as such from an unearned sense of post-millenial, secular superiority.