Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory

Nowhere was this Nazi attitude towards the Eastern Front more evident than in the Warsaw Rising of August 1944. An Allied capital containing nearly a million people had risen against

Many years later, a debate was sparked in post-war Germany over the ‘barbarization’ of soldiers on the Eastern Front.22 It was widely believed that the Wehrmacht, unlike the SS, had generally upheld the standards of good soldiering, and that ordinary German soldiers had not been guilty of serious atrocities. This myth was easily shown to be false.

General Heinz Guderian (1888–1954) was the true author of blitzkrieg as propounded in his book Achtung Panzer (1937).

Front were so enormous that peremptory

The British Army produced no first-rate generals during 1939–45. This was partly because it always acted as a junior partner – first to the French in 1939–40, and then to the Americans after 1942 – and partly because it was condemned by its political superiors to ultra caution. The Desert Campaign of 1940–43 was the only one in which the British ex

These paradoxes became very apparent during the Warsaw Rising of 1944. The Polish Home Army had assumed that it was fighting ‘the Germans’, and the appalling massacres of civilians that took place are generally denounced as ‘German atrocities’. Yet the picture looks rather different if examined in detail. The Wehrmacht was loath to release units fr

It appears to be possible, therefore, that the Red Army’s self-inflicted losses exceeded the total number of battle deaths of the British and US armies combined (see pp. 106–7).26

British soldiers were threatened with court martial for opining (quite truthfully) that the Katyn massacres were a Soviet atrocity.

An important geographical distinction also operated. When Poland was attacked, in 1939, the Führer made a point of ordering his generals to act with ‘the harshest cruelty’. In effect he was inviting the Wehrmacht to ignore the conventions of civilized warfare when fighting in the East. He repeated the injunction in 1941 before the attacks on Yugosl