But Kaz likewise faced a crisis; smoke was filling one side of his tank. He pulled himself out of the hatch and staggered several dozen yards, collapsing near a clump of bushes. He became of aware of blood trickling over his goggles.
In the river, a haze of smoke and steam enveloped the German tank. Kaz could discern one tanker escaping from the hatch and throwing himself into the water. His head bobbed up and down as he swept past. His war was over; the current would take him downward toward the main Canadian force. A second man was by now out of the tank. Rather than take his chances with the river, he was struggling toward the bank, less than thirty yards from Kaz.
Perhaps to help him fight the current, he had thrown off his helmet. As he pulled himself up the bank, he was, in spite of his bedraggled appearance, the picture of a Prussian officer—firm chin, broad forehead, and blond, Aryan hair. Like Kaz, he had blood trickling down his face. The blow to his head had apparently been severe; as he rose uncertainly to his feet, he seemed disoriented. He began making his way unsteadily up the beach, limping noticeably.
There was something more than his Teutonic appearance that caught Kaz's attention, something more than the lengthy scar on his left cheek. Kaz had seen that face before. He wondered where. Then he recalled the face in the rifle scope five years before, on that first tragic day of war. Kaz fumbled inside his jumpsuit for his Luger, a trophy from one of Wittmann's men. Staggering closer, the German noticed the Pole, who was by now supporting himself on one elbow. The German blinked. His face hardened into an arrogant sneer. He turned his back on his adversary, and began to limp unsteadily across the dried mud toward the safety of the trees.
Kaz found that he was unable to get to his feet; he was aware of a numbness in his back. He carefully aimed the Luger until it pointed directly between the German's shoulder blades. Now that the Allies had blocked the lines of escape, the German was almost certainly headed toward captivity. Kaz let the Luger sag. Then he thought back to that day five years before, his comrades holding white clothing as they were machine gunned....
But he also thought back to his military college days, with its instilled code of chivalry.
After five years of war, what remained of that code?
POSTSCRIPT
The Battle of the Falaise Pocket was one of the great Allied victories of the Second World War, ranking close to Stalingrad. At Stalingrad, an estimated 275,000 German and Romanian soldiers were encircled when the Red Army closed the trap on Nov. 22, 1942. During the remaining ten weeks of the battle, about 25,000 wounded were flown out of the pocket, leaving about a quarter of a million men to face death or capture. Stalingrad marked the great turning point of the war in Europe; thereafter, Germans were everywhere on the defensive.
The toll on the Germans in the Falaise pocket is less easily quantified, in part because there is no simple starting point for the count, comparable to the time when the trap was sealed west of Stalingrad. The Falaise pocket was closed only slowly, allowing German columns to move eastward through the gap during the second and third weeks of August 1944, particularly under the cover of darkness.
If one picks the American thrust southward from St. Lô towards Avranches as the beginning of the Falaise battle, total German losses approached those at Stalingrad—200,000 men, of whom a fifth were killed. If, on the other hand, one considers only the German casualties after the trap was more-or-less closed, the total was less than half as large. But, by any estimate, the Germans suffered heavy losses.
One can, however, only speculate on the lost opportunities, on what might have been. There were recriminations among the Allies—Americans and British each accusing the other of insufficient vigor in closing and sealing the neck of the pocket, allowing perhaps as many as 300,000 German soldiers to escape. Many would face the Allies again, defending the channel ports. In those fortified positions, they slowed the Allied advance into Northern Germany.
The lost opportunities may be traced in part to the difficulties of coordination when two allied armies attempt to join head-on. Bradley was worried that Patton's vigorous advances would lead to accidental attacks on British, Canadian, or Polish troops. He became so concerned at one point that he ordered Patton to withdraw one of his northward thrusts toward Falaise. In fact, there was a minor—but harmless—skirmish between Polish and American forces when they finally did meet; it ended quickly when an American officer raised a white flag, signaling a request for parley.
At a critical time—August 14—Bradley became so frustrated by British inaction that he thought to himself, “If Montgomery wants help in closing the gap, then let him ask for it.” Bradley thereupon ordered a major spearhead, under Gen. Haislip, eastward toward the Seine, diverting troops that otherwise might have been used to seal the gap. Soon, he did receive a request from Montgomery to advance north to meet the Poles at Chambois, but Haislip was already on his way to the Seine.
For the Germans, Falaise was a catastrophe. But it could have been more. If the trap had been sprung more quickly—and more firmly—the whole German position in the west might have collapsed, leading to an end of the war by late 1944. Perhaps the partial, bittersweet nature of the victory explains a puzzle. Why does the Falaise encirclement command so little attention compared to the two other great events in the west in 1944: the D-Day landing—on whose success depended all that followed—and the Battle of the Bulge, when the dying Third Reich turned fiercely one last time on its western tormentors?
For the Poles, the battle of the Falaise gap reinforced their pride. Although many were untested in battle, they were chosen to lead the final thrust from the north, to link up with American forces. During one critical battle on the “Mace”—a ridge near Chambois—they were surrounded by Germans slipping through gaps in the allied lines. Raining fire on their enemies below, they stood firm. But then, they had little choice; they did not have the fuel to attempt a breakout. Later, when Royal Canadian Engineers passed over this ridge, they found it dotted with fresh graves. To honor their fallen comrades, the Engineers erected a simple sign: A Polish Battlefield.
But for the Poles, the Second World War was a tragedy. Invaded from the West by the Germans and from the East by the Soviets during the first month of the war, they faced continuous turmoil. First one, then the other, of their historical enemies launched devastating offensives across their land.
The Home Army ended in disaster. Predictably, the Soviets incited them to revolt. “People of Warsaw! To arms! Attack the Germans!” urged Moscow radio as the Red Army reached the Vistula River, across from Warsaw. The Home Army leadership was split: should they act? They were woefully ill-equipped after the recent German discoveries of their weapons caches. But their time had come; they revolted on the first day of August. Thereupon, the Red Army paused and marked time on the eastern side of the River.
This should scarcely have come as a surprise; the objective of the Polish uprising was to preempt a Communist takeover. Stalin wanted the noncommunist leadership eliminated, to clear the way for his puppet regime.
Why not let Hitler do his dirty work?
Hitler obliged. In seven weeks of heavy fighting, his troops crushed the uprising, killing 10,000 members of the Home Army and perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians. Week after week, Stalin refused to let British planes drop arms to the Home Army and then land at Soviet bases. He relented only after the sixth week of the uprising, when the outcome was no longer in doubt.
At the end, the proximate objective of the Second World War—a free Poland—remained unfulfilled.
That goal had to wait forty long years, for the peaceful revolutions of the 1980s. Then, the famous names would no longer belong to the aristocracy—names like Sikorski, Komorowski, or Raczynski—but rather to men of humble beginnings: a shipyard electrician turned labor leader, Lech Walesa, and a man who started his career as an obscure seminarian: Karol Wojtyla, Bishop of Rome. The Soviet leader, Gorbachev, also played a central role. In 1987, as part of his policy of glasnost (openn
ess), he decided to shine light into one of the more gruesome corners of Soviet history. He appointed a joint Soviet-Polish board to investigate the Katyn Forest massacres, foreshadowing an end to the already-shaky legitimacy the Communist regime in Poland. It was the beginning of the final chapter of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
Field Marshal Günther Von Kluge was buried in a quiet military ceremony, unlike his erstwhile subordinate, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Hitler's most celebrated General was given a state funeral with full military honors, after he, too, was linked to the bomb plot and committed suicide. In each case, the official cause of death was the same: cerebral hemorrhage.
25
Epilogue
History, Fiction, and Lies
... mostly a true book, with some stretchers.
Huckleberry Finn, describing Mr. Twain's earlier work,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The classical Greek word plasma means fiction. It also means forgery or “lies.” We may cringe at the word “lies.” But there is no denying: much of this book is not exactly true. Five of the main characters—Kaz, Anna, Ryk, Yvonne, and Jan—are fictional; they never existed.
Nevertheless, the main story is historically accurate. World War II was precipitated by Hitler's invasion of Poland, and by the decision of Britain and France to honor their commitment to Poland by declaring war on Germany. Yet Poland was beyond salvation, caught between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.
In addition, the fictional five participated in many real, historical events—the defense of Warsaw, the massacre in Katyn Forest, the exodus of the Polish army to North Africa, the significant role of Poles in the Battle of Britain, and, most of all, the early and indispensable Polish contributions to codebreaking.
A whole list of characters were real people, from the Polish codebreakers Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki to the main British characters at Bletchley Park—Alan Turing, Alastair Denniston, Alan Welchman, Harry Hinsley—to most of the German protagonists in France: von Kluge, Sepp Dietrich, von Stülpnagel, and Hofacker. They did approximately what they are reported to have done in this novel.
“Approximately.” There's the snag. How is the reader to know what is fact, and what is fiction? Interested readers may find footnote information at www.lastgoodwar.com. For the more casual reader, this epilogue will provide some guidance, some help in separating history from “lies.”
First, the flesh-and-blood dramatis personae should be identified, in addition to those listed above. Among the Poles, only Sikorski should be added to the real historical figures; the rest are fictional, although some of Anna's relatives are very loosely based on Polish diplomats of the 1930s. Bertrand, Lemoine, and Schmidt are real historical figures; they did meet in Verviers, Belgium, where Schmidt gave Enigma secrets to Bertrand.
At Bletchley Park, Yvonne joins Anna as a fictional character, but Mavis Lever was very real indeed. She did notice the strange absence of the letter L in an early Italian naval message; the result was the breaking of the Italian code and the British triumph off Cape Matapan. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham was indeed the victor in that naval engagement. When he came to BP to offer his thanks, he was backed into a newly whitewashed wall by Mavis and other vivacious, mischievous young women.
The two Americans at Bletchley Park, Bill Bundy and Lewis Powell, were also real people, although their role has been fictionalized. In later life, Bundy went on to become a senior official of the State Department, while Powell was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the Battle of Britain, the characters are fictional, with the notable exception of Sgt. Josef Frantisek. He was a Czech ace, who, in the words of Len Deighton (Fighter) “had flying and air-fighting skills in abundance but he lacked any kind of air discipline. Once in the air, he simply chased Germans. More than once this conduct endangered the men who flew with him. He was repeatedly reprimanded until finally the Poles decided to let him be a 'guest of the squadron.'“ He did decline to fly with his fellow Czechs, and he was credited with shooting down seventeen German aircraft before flying off, never to be seen again. His seventeen victims put Frantisek at the head of the list of allied aces at the time of his death, and the Polish 303 Squadron did shoot down more than twice as many German planes as the average RAF fighter squadron.
Among the Germans, most of the characters—apart from those mentioned above and well known individuals such as Hitler, Göring, Rommel, Himmler, and Dönitz—are fictional. Thus, Kurt Dietrich did not exist, even though his uncle, Sepp Dietrich, was indeed the commander of the Fifth Panzer Army and a favorite of Hitler. He did in fact stretch his orders to escape the Falaise pocket in spite of his closeness to the Führer; or perhaps because of his closeness to Hitler, which may have given him an extra degree of freedom. Nevertheless, when senior officers asked him to inform Hitler of the desperate situation in the Falaise Pocket, he did retort that such rashness was a good way to get himself shot. Likewise, Jeschonnek really was the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, whose concern over a relative on the Bismarck betrayed the battleship to the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. Incidentally, Anna's wish—that Jeschonnek never find out that his message had betrayed the Bismarck—came true, although not, perhaps, in the way she might have hoped. Under the crushing strain of allied air raids, he committed suicide on the night the allies bombed the rocket development station at Peënemunde.
People are not the only problem, but also events. In this book, real people do fictional things, and fictional people do real things. For example:
—The characters in the Warsaw Post Office are fictional, but their activities are real: the Poles did intercept and open a package with the Enigma machine.
—Churchill really was First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, and then again before he became Prime Minister in 1940. He could hardly have intervened in Anna's security clearance, however, as she is a fictional character.
—In this novel, Kaz plays a key role in the demise of German tank commander Wittmann. This is obviously untrue, since Kaz is a fictitious character. The Polish Armored Division was, however, attached to the Canadian Army, and the Poles played an important role in closing the Falaise gap. But they were not present at Wittmann's final, fatal encounter; he was trapped by five Canadian Sherman tanks.
—Anna's role in codebreaking is exaggerated, which is scarcely surprising, as she didn't exist and therefore played no role whatsoever. To fit the story, the work on Enigma has been greatly simplified. For example, the steckerboard was introduced at a much earlier date than this novel suggests, although the Germans did begin to use it much more heavily in 1938-39, and in this sense, the account in Chapter 6 is very loosely consistent with the facts.
In spite of the liberties taken to simplify the Enigma story, an attempt has been made to retain the flavor of how codebreaking actually worked: the meticulous, painstaking building of one small block upon another—interspersed with flashes of insight that unlocked parts of the code, and with windfalls from German misuse of the machine or from captured equipment or codebooks
Of course, real people also do real things in this novel. For example, Marian Rejewski did figure out the internal wiring of Enigma wheels in a brief period of several months in late 1932, aided by information provided by Schmidt and passed by French Intelligence officer Bertrand. Rejewski did repeat his feat by reconstructing the wiring of the fourth and fifth wheels in a more difficult setting, an achievement that Gordon Welchman “found hard to believe.” And Welchman himself was a mathematician.
The codebreakers did live with the nagging worry that the enemy would suspect that their messages were being deciphered. Observation planes were sent out, with the objective of being observed. But there were lapses. At one point, late in the war, the Allies used decryptions to sink two tenders that were scheduled to meet U-boats at obscure locations in the Indian Ocean. The Germans came to the conclusion that Allies must have known about the rendezvous points, either from a br
eaking of Enigma or from a traitor. Dönitz issued an emergency order. Rather than setting the rotors from their codebooks, U-boats were to use the initials of their radio operators. Unfortunately for Dönitz, this provided little protection. By then—March 1944—allied machines were so powerful and so numerous that they continued to break Shark.
The tales of the First World War are factual: the Zimmerman Telegram, which is described in fascinating detail in Barbara Tuchman's book with that title, and the story of the drunken German commander in the Middle East who sent out season's greetings in a number of different ciphers. The term “snookered santa” is, however, invented. Other codebreaking terms, such as “kisses,” are not.
The story of the real Polish codebreakers after the outbreak of the war is also factual. Rejewski, Zygalski, and Rozycki did flee to Romania, where they offered their services to the British embassy, only to be rebuffed; they could come back in several days. The Poles thereupon went to the French embassy, where they were cordially welcomed. When the Germans occupied Vichy, Rejewski and Zygalski escaped to Britain—Rozycki having lost his life when his boat went down between Algeria and Vichy France, perhaps as a result of a mine. In Britain, the talents of the two survivors were in fact wasted; they were given low-level decryption tasks.
Their sad history did not end there. At the end of the war, Rejewski and Zygalski were finally promoted to the elevated rank of Lieutenant. Rejewski joined the trickle of Poles returning from Britain to Communist Poland, where he searched without success for a position teaching mathematics at a high school. Having lived in England, he was considered untrustworthy. For decades he was ignored until, in a tardy act of contrition, a Polish University offered him an honorary degree in 1978. By then, just two years before his death, he was not interested. Zygalski's story had a happier ending: he stayed in England and became a college teacher in London.
THE LAST GOOD WAR: A Novel Page 33
