A desperate will to fight

On D-day, June 6, 1944, the Western Allies landed in Normandy. Rome had fallen to them two days before. Sixteen days later, the Russians smashed the bulk of the German armies in the East. By early September, the Germans had given up five European capitals: Paris, Brussels, Bucharest, Sofia and Tallinn -- and most of France, Belgium, Romania, Bulgaria and Estonia. Yet the war did not come to an end. The Germans -- their armies and their people -- fought on through the autumn and winter and into late spring. Even after Berlin -- already knocked down to rubble -- had been conquered by the Russians, even after Hitler had killed himself, Germans kept on fighting across Central Europe with a tenacity that was, and remains, unprecedented in modern history. What happened -- and how this happened -- is the subject of Max Hastings’ “Armageddon.”

“This book is a portrait, not an official history,” he writes. So it is, but it is a rich portrait, whose main element is the march of the German armies. The rest of the portrait consists of hundreds of personal reminiscences and documents from sources on all sides. But there is much more to this work than a composite picture.

One of the book’s principal contributions is its demolition of the thesis that the Western Allies should have invaded France in 1943 and that this not only would have shortened the war but allowed them to occupy most or all of Germany and Central Europe ahead of the Russians. Had there been such an invasion in 1943, it probably would have ended in disaster, or near disaster at best. Winston Churchill was right to oppose the invasion until June 1944. He was worried about its outcome even thereafter. Those who believed in September that Germany would collapse before the end of the year were wrong. Beyond all of this stands the greater question: Could the Americans and the British have defeated Germany without the Russians? The answer is probably no.

“Armageddon” describes two wars: the Americans and British pushing into Germany from the west and the Russians moving in from the east. The differences between these two wars were greater than their similarities. There was much more aerial bombing in the west than in the east. The Russians advanced brutally, with little consideration for losses among their own men. The Allies in the west were more cautious, especially as the war neared its end.

To this day, most Germans think of their Second World War (and some will say so) as two separate conflicts: their war against the West, which was unfortunate, and their war against the East, which was ineluctable and not wrong. Most Germans were not like Hitler, but like Hitler they believed and hoped that the unnatural coalition between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin would split apart. And split apart it did, but too late for Hitler. In the end, the Germans had to recognize that they were defeated, and, unlike in 1918, entirely so. That recognition has marked their destiny and their politics ever since.

At another level too, “Armageddon” describes two wars: the warring of the armies and the struggles of the citizenry living through the war. This is one of the great merits of Hastings’ book, which includes hundreds of depictions of the horrible nature of the war in the East, marked by Russian brutalities and mass rapes. Of course, that was one of the motives for the German soldiery to fight the Russians until the bitter end. Yet there is no evidence, or even reason to think, that they would have fought less determinedly in the East had the news of the Russians’ barbaric behavior been nothing more than propaganda.

And so we come to the great unanswered -- perhaps unanswerable -- question: Why did the Germans fight until the bitter end -- indeed, in some cases beyond it? As in every good and honest description, the “why” is often implicit in the “how,” the latter being Hastings’ chief thrust. But was the German will to fight, particularly in the West, the customary result of German obedience to orders? To some extent the answer must be yes. Was it the result of the categorical Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, as many Germans say? The answer must be no. For one thing, no surrender is ever really unconditional. More important, to believe that without the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender the German people, or some of their representatives, would have revolted, and successfully, against Hitler is abject nonsense.

Why the Germans fought on and on, why so many of them kept believing in Hitler, why they were simply unable to believe that they could lose the war remains a conundrum, lodged deep within the psyche of a people. It is a conundrum that Hastings does not pretend to explain. But he illuminates its many sides and aspects very well. *