Chastise. Max Hastings. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Max Hastings
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008280543
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      1 THE BIG PICTURE

      In May 1943 the Second World War was in its forty-fifth month. While it was evident that the Allies were destined to achieve victory over Germany, it was also embarrassingly obvious to the British people, albeit perhaps less so to Americans, that the Red Army would be the principal instrument in achieving this. The battle for Stalingrad had been the dominant event of the previous winter, culminating in the surrender of the remnants of Paulus’s Sixth Army on 31 January. The Russians had killed 150,000 Germans and taken 110,000 prisoners, in comparison with a mere nine thousand Axis dead, and thirty thousand mostly Italian prisoners taken, in Montgomery’s November victory at El Alamein.

      Day after day through the months that followed, newspapers headlined Soviet advances. To be sure, British and American forces also made headway in North Africa, but their drives from east and west to converge in Tunisia embraced barely thirty divisions between the two sides, whereas in the summer of 1943 two million men of Hitler’s and Stalin’s armies would clash at Kursk and Orel. Axis surrender in North Africa came only on 13 May, months later than Allied commanders had expected.

      Among the latter, even after its North African successes the standing of the British Army remained low: memories lingered, of so many 1940–42 defeats in Europe, North Africa and the Far East. Many Americans viewed their Anglo-Saxon ally with a disdain not far off contempt. A July 1942 Office of War Information survey invited people to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37 per cent answered, the US; 30 per cent named Russia; 14 per cent China; 13 per cent offered no opinion. Just 6 per cent identified the British as the hardest triers. ‘All the old animosities against the British have been revived,’ wrote an OWI analyst. ‘She didn’t pay her war debts for the past war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland, while her outposts are lost to the enemy … Phrases such as “The British always expect someone to pull their chestnuts out of the fire” and “England will fight to the last Frenchman” have attained considerable currency.’

      Belated successes in North Africa delivered Churchill from a real threat of eviction from his post as minister of defence. It was plain that the German flood tide on the Eastern Front was ebbing; that the Russians had survived the decisive crisis of their struggle. But the British people had seen little about their own war effort in which to take pride since the RAF’s sublime triumph in the 1940 Battle of Britain. An unusually reflective young airman afterwards looked back upon an early-1943 conversation with friends: ‘It was pleasant to sit there and rest a while and think that the worst was behind … The evening had been pleasant and we had practically “won” the war. But we wouldn’t have been so pleased if we had known of the big battles that were to be fought; the heavy casualties to be borne … The tide had turned, but it was a leap year tide.’ This was Guy Gibson, who in those days led 106 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command.

      2 HARRIS

      Some senior officers, including the USAAF’s Gen. Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, believed that air attack on Germany could render redundant a land invasion of the continent. 1943 was the year in which British warmakers drafted plans for Operation Rankin, whereby troops would stage an unopposed deployment to occupy Germany in the event that some combination of bombing, Russian victories and an internal political upheaval precipitated the collapse of the Nazi regime, an abrupt enemy surrender.

      In 1940–41 the RAF caused mild embarrassment to the Nazi leadership, which had promised to secure the Reich against such intrusions. Bombing nonetheless inflicted