Eight Days at Yalta by Diana Preston

Author:Diana Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

The Allied advance continued that day. Montgomery launched his new offensive, Operation Veritable, aimed at driving south from Nijmegen to clear German troops from the area between the Rhine and Maas Rivers as part of Eisenhower’s ‘broad front’ strategy to secure the west bank of the Rhine. In cold, grey, miserable weather Veritable began with a five-hour barrage by 1,034 guns – the heaviest of the war in the West – followed by an advance along an eight-mile front of five British and Canadian infantry divisions and three armoured brigades. Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks found the sight ‘awe-inspiring. All across the front shells were exploding. We had arranged for a barrage, a curtain of fire, to move forward at a rate of 300 yards every twelve minutes, or 100 yards every four minutes, in front of the troops.’ To signal when the guns would increase their range ‘they all fired a round of yellow smoke . . . I could see small scattered groups of men and tanks all moving slowly forward’. ‘All our thoughts are with you and your splendid troops,’ Churchill found time to telegraph Montgomery that day. ‘Strike hard for victory in the West.’

In a slave labour camp at Peenemünde, on a Baltic island where the German scientists and engineers led by Werner von Braun researched and produced their V2 ballistic missiles, a Russian prisoner, fighter pilot Mikhail Petrovich Devyataev, knew that unless he got away he would soon be dead either of starvation or at the hands of his brutal guards who considered him and his compatriots as ‘Untermensch’, subhuman. His solution on 8 February was to steal the camp commandant’s plane. Persuading the nine other members of his work gang to join him, they killed a guard with a crowbar and stole his uniform so one of them could impersonate him. Then, ‘escorted’ by the fake guard, they marched a mile to the airfield where the commandant’s Heinkel 111 was standing. It took time to start the twin engines and Luftwaffe mechanics were already at work on other aircraft nearby by the time they were ready to take off. However, no one challenged them and as the Heinkel raced along the runway and rose into the sky, they broke into the Communist Internationale.*

Disaster nearly followed. Devyataev had never flown this type of plane before and didn’t know how to raise the undercarriage. The aircraft went into a sharp nosedive. He struggled with the lever controlling the flaps to level out the plane but, by now emaciated and weighing only ninety pounds, he lacked the strength. Only when others entered the cockpit and added their efforts to his did he manage to pull back the lever and fly on along the Baltic coast to attempt a crash-landing in snow behind the Soviet lines. As the Heinkel touched the ground its undercarriage collapsed. The first Red Army soldiers to reach the shaken escapers greeted them as heroes. But they were followed by members of Beria’s NKVD who refused to believe their story and alleged, ‘This is obviously a German plot.

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