Armageddon by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online

chances as possible in the last days. On 28 August, the British Air Ministry circulated a memorandum to all RAF commands about precautionary measures for celebrations of the end of the war. There should be no extravagant or destructive displays, it warned. Commanding officers should ensure that personnel had no unauthorized access to firearms, explosives or pyrotechnics. “Everything is going so wonderfully well,” Colonel George Turner-Cain, commanding the British 1st Herefords, wrote in his diary on 1 September, “with the Huns showing little fight. Most seem content to give themselves up.” Four days later, he recorded: “Rumours flying in streams. Swiss radio says Hitler has gone to Spain and peace has been declared.”
    Many Germans seemed eager to abandon the struggle. “A Jerry gives himself up to us in a cabbage field,” Trooper John Thorpe of the 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry wrote in his diary on 2 September. “The water is running out of his clothes, he’s covered in mud and shaking with cold and fright. We give him a biscuit and hand him over to our infantry.” “Dear Mum,” Lieutenant Michael Gow of the Scots Guards wrote home on 1 September, “Isn’t the news splendid? At last it seems that the German withdrawal, which in many respects was as masterly as our advance, has turned into a rout.”
    The weary remnants of I SS Panzer Corps found themselves approaching the little town of Troisvierges, just inside Luxembourg, on their retreat into Germany. “We could not believe our eyes,” said Captain Herbert Rink, one of its battle-group commanders.
     
Down in the town stood the entire population along the main street, flowers and drinks in hand. They were clearly waiting for the liberation forces . . . We did not have much time, if we wanted to beat the Americans to the town . . . We raced out of the forest . . . turned down the main street, keeping a watch to the south, and drove slowly past the waiting people . . . Never in my life have I seen people so quiet and embarrassed. They did not know what to do with their flowers. They looked at the ground. Their hands sank in a helpless gesture.
     
    Fortunately for the people of Troisvierges, the Americans were indeed close behind the SS half-tracks.
    A Dutch doctor, Fritz van den Broek, was on holiday with his family near Maastricht. He gazed in wonder upon the spectacle of German occupation troops fleeing eastward on dolle Dinsdag —“Crazy Tuesday,” as the Dutch christened 5 September—laden with the booty of half Europe—paintings, furniture, carpets, clocks, even pigs. The doctor thought, “Well, that’s it then,” and took the train complacently home to Dordrecht, untroubled even by the interruptions to his journey caused by strafing Spitfires, to wait out the few days that seemed likely to intervene before liberation. “It was a glorious feeling when we heard of the Allied breakout,” said twenty-year-old Theodore Wempe, a Dutch Resistance worker in Appeldoorn. “The Germans seemed completely panic-stricken. We expected each day to be the last of the war.”
    “This period was made up of fruit,” wrote Brigadier John Stone, chief engineer of the British Second Army. “Belgians stood by the roads with baskets of grapes, pears, apples, plums and peaches. If you stopped for a moment, presents were pressed on you, and a refusal hurt the offerer very much.” “As we went across France with no resistance of any moment in front of us, we were racing towards Germany,” recorded General Omar Bradley’s aide Colonel Chester Hansen. “I thought they might quit.” In the first week of September, 67 per cent of Americans questioned for a Gallup poll said that they expected the war to be over by Christmas. The British embassy in Washington reported to London on the national mood: “Early victory in the European campaign continues to be taken for granted.” The Allied Control Commission for Germany was “called upon to make itself ready to