Taki Taki

Untold suffering

Broadsides from the pirate captain of the Jet Set

Nemmersdorf is a village in East Prussia that was overrun by the Soviets in the autumn of 1944. After seizing the village, the Russkies raped all the women, regardless of age, and then crucified them. All of them. Men and children were clubbed to death or run over with tanks. Not a single person survived. It was payback for three years of Nazi atrocities during their invasion of Russia. German units counter-attacked and retook Nemmersdorf, and then invited reporters from three neutral countries — Sweden, Switzerland and Spain — to see what our Allies had done. German newsreels showed the horror non-stop.

Which brings me to General George Patton, my favourite warrior after Robert E. Lee and Hasso von Manteuffel. Patton understood far more about strategy than Montgomery, Bradley and Eisenhower combined. He was a great tactician as well as a global thinker. He showed his superior insight when he disagreed with the so-called ‘endgame’ in Europe as designed by the Big Four — Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek. This plan had the Allied demarcation line at the Elbe River rather than Berlin or the Polish border. As Patton was hurtling through southern Germany during the spring of 1945, he realised that German troops were eager to surrender to Allied forces, whereas they were fighting to the death on the Eastern Front. This made a mockery of Eisenhower’s and Bradley’s predictions of a bloodbath if the Anglo–Americans tried to take Berlin. In fact, when the Russians lost 100,000 men in taking Berlin, short-term thinkers like Brad and Ike felt justified. They could not have been more wrong. Had Patton been given a free rein, most of Germany and Czechoslovakia would have remained free and democratic. Here’s Joachim Fest, whose book about the last days of Hitler is the basis for the film Der Untergang (Downfall):

The fighting for the Reichstag was especially intense.

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