The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  Our work was straightforward. With characteristic efficiency, the German clerks had filed incoming and outgoing correspondence into daybooks. With Squadron Leader Godwin’s agreement, I decided we would begin with the most recent correspondence and work backwards. Old files dealing with anything earlier than June 6th 1944 were not likely to be of much use in informing us about current German strategic thinking, the state of their resources or the swirl of politics within the Nazi Party hierarchy.

  But I discovered one cache of earlier documents that I will never forget.

  Beginning in March 1944, with the German invasion of Hungary, a series of memoranda had been circulated to several high-ranking government ministers and military leaders, including Admiral Dönitz. They came from SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann and concerned a programme of mass deportation of Jews from Hungary. Many thousands, it seemed, had been taken by train to a place called Auschwitz in southern Poland. There were several lists and a proliferation of numbers. But the language was vague, talking of following ‘the Wannsee Protocols’ and ‘the Jewish question’, and the tone was sinister. We had heard stories of labour camps and atrocities committed in ghettos and on the Eastern Front by the SS, but this seemed altogether different. The phrase used by Eichmann that leapt off the page for me was ‘the fate of the Jews is an internal matter for the SS’.

  I showed what I had found to Squadron Leader Godwin, translating for him as I turned the pages from Dönitz’s files. He too knew the stories, and the treatment of the Jews in Germany before the war was well documented. While Godwin agreed that the memos did indeed sound sinister, what they contained was not an intelligence priority. I should put that material to one side and carry on with the analysis of much more recent documents.

  In the cafés and bars, and even in our mess at the château, I overheard a good deal of jaunty talk about a swift end to the war. The Germans had retreated behind the Westwall but in the process had lost many men as casualties or prisoners of war, and been forced to abandon weapons and supplies that would be impossible to replace. The RAF’s Bomber Command was pounding their cities and factories, and in the east the Russians were in the outskirts of Warsaw, only three hundred miles from Berlin. The Allies would squeeze and starve the Germans into surrender.

  The military correspondence told a different story. The pivotal date was July 20th, the day of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler. At that moment everything changed.

  In the days that followed, the Nazi leadership of Goebbels, Himmler and Speer had declared a state of Totaler Krieg, total war. Every sinew of the German economy would be stretched to the utmost, a Replacement Army would be recruited, citizens in the Volkssturm would be armed and trained and every last drop of blood would be wrung out of the army. That was where the plotters had found support. The army owed the German people a debt of honour, and of blood.

  It seemed to me that the Allies’ insistence on unconditional surrender was a propaganda gift to Goebbels. He had been able to convince millions of Germans to fight on regardless of loss, to the last man if necessary, to buy time for the development of Wonder Weapons, the Wunderwaffen. My own assessment was that the war would continue through the winter and into the spring of 1945, perhaps even longer.

  Amidst the chaos of conflicting reports and views, I kept my own counsel amongst my contemporaries. Only in conversation with Squadron Leader Godwin was I completely candid.

  3 October 1944

  Only ten days after Paris had fallen to the Allies, the front line had advanced dramatically and, on September 4th, the great port of Antwerp was captured.

  Supply lines across northern France had become so extended that an emergency one-way system known as the Red Ball Express operated from the Channel ports to keep tanks and other vehicles supplied with petrol and troops supplied with food and ammunition. The distances were so great that it cost four gallons of fuel to deliver one to the front. That made Antwerp vital. Only a few miles from the German border, it was a deep-water port where tankers could dock. The difficulty was that the Germans still held the shores of the Scheldt estuary and could easily prevent the passage of sea traffic to the port. The 1st Canadian Army had been handed the task of clearing the estuary and two battalions of Borderers would fight alongside them. I found myself in Antwerp to liaise with the Canadians and compile a situation report for my regimental commanders.

  The jagged litter of war lay everywhere. In contrast to the miraculously preserved glories of Paris, the ancient merchant city had been bombed to smithereens. I had to weave my jeep between mounds of rubble at the foot of gaunt ruins, many of them gable ends that stood like tombstones. On one of them were the sad remains of three homes: three fireplaces that had warmed families were now exposed, somehow obscenely, one with tattered wallpaper flapping in the late afternoon breeze.

  But even though the price of freedom had been the destruction of their city, the people of Antwerp thanked us for it. When a military policeman stopped me at a crossroads, a group of men working with wheelbarrows to shift the scatter of rubble stopped and waved, one of them managing a passable version of Winston Churchill’s V-sign.

  When I reached the Canadians’ headquarters at the port, where the Albert Canal meets the Scheldt, and reported to the adjutant’s office of Lieutenant General Simonds, I was told that a massive bombing raid had begun on German positions at the mouth of the estuary.

  ‘Your Lancasters are coming across the North Sea in waves,’ said Captain Charet of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry. ‘Pounding the dykes to pieces. I guess they want to breach them to let the sea in, put Walcheren island under water. Flooding will hamper the Germans. Us too. But they’ll be marooned, easy targets for the bombers.’

  ‘Is there a vantage point where I can look westwards down the Scheldt?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s no high ground around here,’ Charet said, ‘but you can get a good idea of the lay of the land from the harbour cranes.’

  Helpful, cheerful and generous (giving me a pack of the excellent American cigarettes, Lucky Strikes), Charet offered to come with me. ‘The Belgian resistance did a great job, really brave,’ he said. ‘Before they evacuated, the Germans set explosives on all the cranes but these guys defused every one.’ As we climbed up the iron ladders and crossed the landings to the operator’s box, the Canadian chattered about how, pretty soon, the tankers would begin to arrive with fuel and supplies, and we would not be looking west but east, to Germany, its borders only a few miles away. ‘Once our guys clear the estuary, the war is as good as over.’ We wound down the windows and focused our binoculars.

  At the same time as Charet and I clanked up the crane at Antwerp, the Americans were launching a long-awaited attack on the Westwall at Aachen. An ancient city at the centre of the empire of Charlemagne, what the Nazis called the First Reich, it was freighted with great symbolic significance. Vastly outnumbered and pounded by bombers and artillery, its defenders fought fanatically to prevent the Allies defiling the holy soil of Germany. With only eighteen thousand soldiers, many of them Volkssturm, and eleven tanks, they held a force five times larger at bay.

  Throughout the four months since our landing on Queen Beach, I had been continually in awe of the fighting spirit of the German army. Most of our soldiers, British, American and Canadian, were conscripted civilians who would fight against what they saw as a manifest evil, but they also wanted to survive. By contrast, under the Nazis, German soldiers knew that savage punishment, often summary execution, awaited those who disobeyed orders, deserted or even showed something less than total disregard for their own safety.

  And added to this unbending regime was a visceral wish for vengeance. Many German soldiers had lost family, often children, to the terror bombing of their cities, fuelling their rage. For many, four years of fighting on the Eastern Front had also forged them into highly professional fighting units, able to improvise and surprise their enemies again and again. I had seen the iron resolve of the Germans at Estry and t
he Americans saw it at Aachen.

  But on October 3rd 1944, the Westwall was finally pierced north of the city, US units crossed the River Wurm and, despite ferocious and repeated counter-attacks, they established the first bridgehead inside Germany, breaching the borders of the Reich.

  Although Walcheren island was more than forty miles west of Antwerp, Charet and I fancied we could hear the drone of the bombers’ engines as the Lancaster pilots over-flew their targets and began to turn for home. From our dizzyingly high vantage point we looked directly west over the Scheldt estuary and the billiard-table flat landscape to the north and south.

  Like most of their equipment, the Canadians’ binoculars were more powerful and of better quality than ours. Sharing them meant that one of us could have all-round vision while the other tried to make out detail in the far distance.

  But when it came, neither of us understood what we saw.

  Like sheet lightning in daytime, a sudden and dazzling flash lit up the western horizon. We exchanged open-mouthed glances.

  When Charet looked again through his binoculars, adjusting the focus with his thumbs, I heard him whisper, ‘My God. My God in Heaven. What in hell is that?’ He handed them to me.

  A great distance away, far across the North Sea, it seemed, a giant cloud was rising, forming itself into the shape of a mushroom.

  ‘What in God’s name is that?’ said Charet.

  ‘Götterdämmerung,’ I said. ‘It is Götterdämmerung.’

  IV

  22 December 1944

  A slow, pink dawn crept over the snow-covered landscape, the sort of dawn when few would venture out who did not have to. On the eastern horizon, a sliver of the sun’s disc began to turn the gun-metal grey of the sky a pale blue; the wind beat down from the north, whistling through the stones of the old tower. High on a crag, it was both visible for miles around and offered views for miles: south to the dark heads of the Cheviot Hills and north to where the foothills of the Lammermuirs shelved up to their watershed ridges; to the east, looking down between the arms of its sheltering hills, were the white fields and farms of the great river valley, my native place, the valley of the River Tweed.

  Believing that all of the bridges would be watched and probably manned by sentries, I had decided to keep to the north bank. Travelling only at night and resting by day, though not often sleeping, I had reached the foot of the tower in four nights and three shivering days, moving slowly in the black darkness along empty country lanes, listening for movement, watching for watchers, imagining shapes in the gaunt, leafless hedges, remembering the dangers of the bocage. I often zigzagged inland but always kept the river on my left. Even though I knew this country well, it would be easy to get lost in the formless fields or stumble into a drain or down the steep banks of an unseen stream and injure myself.

  For most of the previous day, I had lain hidden amongst the dense rhododendra at the side of the long driveway up to Floors Castle, near Kelso. An ugly pile, its pepperpot turrets making it look like a rectangular wedding cake, I did not want to get too close but the evergreen shrubs supplied the only cover I could be sure of in a leafless December when the snow made the land graphic and even the smallest movement noticeable. I had only a duffel coat and a thick pullover over my army fatigues to keep out the chill as I curled up on the ground amongst the debris of a dozen dead summers. And keeping still did not mean keeping warm. But the day was short and when gloaming came and I could pull aside the branches and look up the drive to the castle; I watched its lights twinkle but saw no movement outside in the courtyard. Staying in the shadows, I passed by to the north, following the river westwards.

  A peel tower built as a refuge from the incessant English raiding of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it had long been abandoned in favour of a much more comfortable mansion by the Tweed. But the old fortification had survived the snows, ice and rain of five hundred winters more or less intact, its roof of stone slabs keeping out the weather and the pigeons. Its glowering mass had prompted the father of one of my friends to describe it as ‘sod off in stone’.

  Having shouldered aside a wooden door tied to the iron bolts in the walls, something to discourage curious sheep but not a cold traveller, I climbed the steep spiral staircase to the roofwalk. It was something I had done often as an adventuresome boy in another world, one that had fled and would never return. Next to the blackened stones of the old chimney stack with a recess above it for a lantern was the watchman’s seat. Slipping my rucksack off my shoulders, I looked out as the day lit the land and sat down to wait.

  *

  I had been an unwilling witness to a moment when history shifted. On the way back to their East Anglian bases, the crews of the Lancasters had seen it seconds before Captain Charet and I watched the mushroom cloud rising many miles into the evening sky.

  In what we were told was an airburst, there was a gigantic explosion over central London. Through a ring of fire, the white mushroom cloud climbed to a height of perhaps twenty miles while at the same time a circular black cloud formed and in seconds it spread over the city like a tidal wave rolling up everything in its path. Those who were within a mile of the blast zone were burned to carbon in moments, some simply evaporating in the thermal flash. The black shockwave killed even more people, blistering and tearing at their flesh, leaving it to dangle from their skeletons like ragged clothing.

  This was what von Klige had known something of. It was an atomic bomb, Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, the instant that plunged the world into darkness.

  Once the borders of the Reich had been breached at Aachen, Hitler had given orders that a rocket, carrying what the Germans called a warhead, be launched from an airfield near The Hague, not far from Antwerp. According to what we were told, it was the ultimate Vergeltungswaffe, the Weapon of Vengeance.

  When Charet and I climbed down the crane by the dockside and reached Canadian HQ, there was chaos. The Lancaster crews had sent back radio messages and some of their photographer flight-recorders had taken pictures. These were passed to the Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Eisenhower, and his staff scrambled to find information. How bad was it? How many killed? Where was the king, the prime minister? What had happened? What had been dropped on London?

  Just after midnight on October 4th 1944, the Germans answered all questions.

  In a radio broadcast of chilling simplicity and brevity that could be heard all over Britain and by Allied forces in Europe, they explained what had happened. ‘The Allies are defeated. The war is over,’ crackled a triumphant voice. ‘The centre of London has been obliterated. Half a million people have died. The king is dead. The prime minister is dead. German weapons have changed the course of history. The Führer has led Germany to total victory.’

  The broadcast ended with a clear ultimatum: unless the Allies immediately halted their offensive and agreed to an unconditional surrender, the Führer would authorise the launch of more warheads in the coming days to attack British cities. The Allied air forces were to remain grounded and all naval ships were to return to port.

  It seemed that in those hours and days that followed, the stunned world had ceased to turn, history had been turned upside down.

  *

  The winter wind soughed around the roofwalk of the tower and I longed for the moment when I could seek the sanctuary of the chamber behind me. The reason I had come there was its high vantage point and that the crag around it was open ground. There were no woods or cover of any kind for at least half a mile on every side. If anyone approached, I would see them long before they saw me. I had asked my friend to meet me an hour after first light, at approximately 09.00, and to come on the eastern track. And to make sure no one was following.

  Four nights earlier, I had become a fugitive, running for my life. If apprehended, I would be summarily shot.

  When photographs of the destruction of London and leaflets listing the appalling numbers of casualties were dropped all over the Western Front on Octo
ber 4th, and the death of King George, his family, Winston Churchill and the entire war cabinet had been confirmed, General Eisenhower issued orders for an immediate ceasefire. In the absence of a civilian government of any sort, the British Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Montgomery, acted on his own initiative and sought a parley with his German counterpart, Field Marshal Model. His overtures were ignored and almost four thousand miles to the west and sixteen hundred miles to the north-east, actions spoke much louder than words.

  As the autumn sun climbed, clearing the morning mist over the Hudson River, and the city of New York began to rumble into life, Captain Horst Schellenberg looked through his periscope.

  His orders were unequivocal. At 08.00 he was to stay submerged and manoeuvre his U-boat as close as possible to the shores of the Battery on the tip of Manhattan Island and then surface at 08.30. Once the conning tower was clear of the water, a red, white and black swastika flag was to be flown so that no one who saw the U-boat could be in any doubt where it had come from.

  At the same time a telegram was received at the White House. Having passed through several agencies, it was addressed to Harry Hopkins, for his eyes only. He was a key and trusted aide to President Franklin Roosevelt. The terms were stark:

  Unless you immediately direct General Eisenhower to surrender all of the Allied armies in Europe under his command, and unless the war against our allies in the Pacific ceases at once, the city of New York will suffer the same fate as London. Be in no doubt that hundreds of thousands of civilians will die instantly and the city will be destroyed. For the Fatherland, our brave sailors have brought an atomic bomb even more powerful than that dropped on London. If you do not immediately comply with our directive, the bomb will be detonated. If the U-boat is attacked, it will be detonated. Await further instructions.

  Later the same day, another, more detailed communication arrived on Hopkins’ desk. It demanded that a team of US government physicists should cease their work at their laboratory and be flown to Europe within forty-eight hours. All of their data, all of their research workings and such materials as could be uplifted were to travel with them. Their immediate families would also accompany them – with no exceptions.