Slaughter by conventional means carried on. During the bombing of Belgrade, 17,000 civilians were killed in a single day. The Yugoslavs signed an act of surrender, and national dissolution followed. Serbia, now under occupation, was succeeded as leader of the former union by a newly forged Fascist state of Croatia, with results that would be felt decades after the war had ended. Elsewhere in the Balkans, the Greek dictator Metaxas refused the Italian demand that he surrender his country’s ports. The Italian invasion of Greece, undertaken largely to impress Germany, was considered ‘easy to accomplish’, but it quickly sank into a vortex of lives lost in the cause of national self-respect. An overconfident Italian army found itself driven back into the mountains of Albania by dogged Greek opponents, but this hope for a free Europe quickly died when the Germans moved in to aid their ally, and Greece was divided between the two Axis powers.
Another large annexation was taking place. In the early morning of 22 June 1941, the Germans initiated their attack on Russia. Sixty-seven aerodromes were attacked and five cities subjected to bombardment, before the Germans began their march across the frontier. Three thousand Ukrainians were killed by the NKVD, the Communist secret police, followed by the massacre of Jews in Romania. This was not war as it had ever been envisaged. As the Germans advanced closer to Moscow, barbed wire and deep ditches were laid along their route. Seven thousand Jews at Borisov were shot ‘in the manner of tinned sardines’. The killers confirmed their slaughter by consuming bottles of alcohol. Such a recourse was not unusuaclass="underline" German doctors engaged to separate the healthy from the sick in the death camps could stomach such work only when drunk.
Everything changed on 11 December 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent American response, when Germany declared war on the United States. The Allies, immensely heartened, counselled time and patience – victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. Hong Kong surrendered to the Axis powers on 25 December, and 11,000 Allied prisoners were taken. The death camps multiplied in almost unimaginable ways. In Sobibor, in the Lubin district of Poland, the Axis troops killed 250,000 Jews in a year. Auschwitz was one of the most notorious of the camps, but the procedure was to be one of ‘concealment’. Whether this suggests guilt or fear of punishment is difficult to determine, though the euphemisms employed are telling: ‘special treatment’ referred to the mass murder of Jews; a ‘special action’ was an individual massacre. The latter often served as popular entertainment for visiting officials.
31
Would you like an onion?
In Britain, as rationing became even more severe, the most unlikely foodstuffs became luxury items. Jokes about onions wrapped up and offered as house-warming presents or wedding gifts quickly proved prophetic, but beer was still very much available. Despite severe rationing of grain, the government accepted that it would be foolish to deny the nation its follies. An unintended consequence was the new acceptance of women in pubs, or, rather, the new willingness of women to enter them. And grain could go to still more salutary uses. As a sign outside one bomb-wrecked pub proudly proclaimed: ‘Our windows are gone but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them.’
Nevertheless, life for civilians was harsh and uncertain; it was increasingly felt that the nation’s soldiers had it easy by comparison. Aerial bombardment had ensured that the ordinary citizen was placed in the front line, while the soldier was frequently kicking his heels, waiting to leave. One observer, speaking for many, noted: ‘Although I can readily believe that most serving men want to play their part in winning the war, I can’t resist the taunt that joining the Army is about the quickest way to forget all about it.’
Such sentiments were generally felt, if rarely uttered, and instead found their way into the nation’s disgruntlement as a joke. Caustic jeers about soldiers ‘practising for when they meet Rommel’ (in other words, running away) abounded in a nation whose sense of deference to the military had worn thin. Others jibed at ‘the chairborne troops’, the vast sub-army of auxiliary staff, who seemed to many to be little more than clerks. And in a time of austerity, some could not fail to notice that soldiers had certain material advantages over their compatriots. Much of this resentment was groundless, of course, and nor did it preclude gratitude. Yet the perceived discrepancies in life between soldier and civilian engendered an attitude quite different from that of twenty years before.
When the soldiers did encounter Rommel, the jokes about flight withered in the speakers’ mouths. The first battle of El Alamein had checked the German Eighth Army in its advance against Alexandria, but it had not been as successful as the second battle, under Bernard Montgomery. Like Wellington, ‘Monty’ was a martinet who cared deeply for his troops and received from them a respect leavened by wry affection. Sir John Cowley, recalling his first meeting with Montgomery, was to say that it took only the sight of that slight, wiry figure unhitching his jacket and rolling up his sleeves to know that all would be well. Lord Dowding, who commanded the air force, was of similar constitution; stern in most other ways, he would call his men his ‘lambs’.
The first battle, in the summer of 1942, had stopped the Axis advance. The second went much further, resulting in the retreat of the Afrika Corps and the German surrender in North Africa in 1943. It was the turning point of the war, the culmination of the Allied desert campaign that changed the whole conflict. If the invincible Rommel could be stopped, what else might be achieved? That turning of the tide was matched with the Russian defence of Stalingrad and the ability of British and Commonwealth troops to expel the Germans from Egyptian territory. This may have been the moment when Hitler and his officers were revealed as superior only in the art of killing. The campaign was related to ‘Operation Torch’, devised to expel the Germans from North Africa with 300 warships, a large force of merchant ships and over 100,000 men. The church bells rang through England.
In the same month as the invasion began, November 1942, the Red Army launched an opposing force against the Germans north of Stalingrad, before moving south of the enemy forces and encircling them. The siege of Malta was also broken. Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca, with Churchill insisting that the Allies ‘cannot let Russia down’. It was also agreed that ‘Hitler’s extinction’ must take priority over the defeat of Japan. The Stalingrad trap had caught the Germans, and the Axis surrendered the city. It was a great victory and must have suggested to Hitler and his cohorts that the writing of destiny was on the wall, not that Hitler had succumbed internally. The air raids against Germany continued day and night. Preparations were now being made for a cross-Channel invasion, with an elaborate deception arranged to convince the Nazis that the Americans and English were to aim for Pas de Calais rather than their true destination of Normandy. The monthly loss of German aircraft rose to 1,581.
Both Western and Eastern Fronts were now being attacked by the Allied forces, with mutual distrust set aside. The nightmare of Hitler’s Aryan empire was being torn apart piece by piece. The Red Army had advanced almost 1,000 miles in a year, while the breaking of the Enigma codes gave the Allies an accurate and invaluable insight into German military preparations. The situation in Berlin became disordered, yet still the Germans threw more and more innocents upon the fire. Several thousand Jews were sent each day to Auschwitz, including more and more from newly annexed Hungary. The most obscure islands in the Aegean were raided to find the handful of Jews who had escaped the Greek mainland, and all this while the Allies marched further north and approached the gates of Rome. The Reich had reached the last limits of self-delusion.