World War II Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees Page B

Parachute Division to withdraw.
    The remaining German soldiers on Monte Cassino – those who were too sick or too badly wounded to evacuate – surrendered to the Poles on the morning of the 18th. Just before ten o'clock Anders's men raised a makeshift red and white Polish flag over the ruins of the monastery: it was a famous victory. But a victory won at massive cost. Several thousand Poles were killed or wounded inthe battle for Monte Cassino. And the majority of these Poles – like the majority of the soldiers in Anders's army – came from the very areas of eastern Poland that Stalin now claimed as his own.
    As they fought and died in the rocky outcrops and gorges of the heights of Monte Cassino, these Poles hoped that their sacrifice would help Poland to become a free and independent land. As it turned out – tragically – they were mistaken.
    THE SECOND FRONT IS LAUNCHED AT LAST
    At half past seven in the morning on 6 June 1944, tanks of the British cavalry regiment the 13th/18th Hussars pushed forward over the sandy beach of Ouistreham in Normandy. They were part of an invasion force of over 160,000 Allied troops targeting five main beaches, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Juno, Gold and Sword. This was D-Day – the first opposed amphibious landing in strength on the coast of France for nearly a thousand years. It was also the start of the second front that Stalin had been calling for since the summer of 1941 – something he believed Roosevelt had promised would be mounted two years earlier.
    ‘We kept going in and in, and all of a sudden we hear these pings on the steel-hulled landing craft’, says Sid Salomon, 73 a member of the US Rangers who took part in the attack on Omaha beach, where the Allies faced the toughest resistance. ‘And the guy said: “The Germans are firing at us”. We could see them in the distance up on top of the cliffs. Something landed in the water and the concussion hit and it flipped me over and I heard somebody yell: “Keep moving! Keep moving! …I reached over and grabbed him by the jacket … pulled him out from the surf. And just then a mortar shell landed behind me – knocked me flat on my face and I thought: “What the hell! I must be dead”…. And there were guys lying on the beach dead. Shells hitting it, machine gun fire ripping across it, an LST off to our right – they got a dead hit as they were unloading. These guys were coming down and just blew that sucker right out of the water. Hell of a sight. Awful’.
    But on the other beaches the landings went more smoothly. ‘I can remember talking it over with a fellow company commander and reckoning our chances of getting across the beach alive were going to be pretty small’, says Peter Martin, 74 then a major with the Cheshire Regiment. ‘But in fact everything by that time had quietened down and we weren't under fire of any sort… and it was one of those very rare occasions in war when the plan goes absolutely according to plan’.
    As soldiers of the Western Allies battled to establish a foothold in Normandy, the Red Army prepared to launch a massive attack on German Army Group Centre in an attempt to recapture Minsk and push the Wehrmacht back out of the Soviet Union. This operation, which had been agreed at Tehran, dwarfed D-Day in scale. The Germans had 30 divisions in the West to face the Allied onslaught following D-Day, but concentrated 165 divisions against the Red Army in the East. Over 2 million Red Army soldiers would take part in the June offensive, codenamed by Stalin Operation Bagration' after the Georgian military hero who had fought against Napoleon.
    ‘For Bagration we were preparing very carefully’, says Veniamin Fyodorov, 75 then a twenty-year-old soldier with the Soviet 77th Guards infantry regiment. ‘Whatever resources the Soviet Union had were concentrated in this direction. Big numbers of artillery, tanks and ammunition. And big numbers of infantry’. On 22 June 1944 (the third anniversary of