In Europe

was around fifty-five, and he was like a father to me.’ According to Behr, Rommel was actually a very down-to-earth man. ‘He said what was on his mind. “Hitler expects us to advance! Things can't go on like this!” he would say sometimes. But then he would come back a little later and say: “Well, Behr, we mustn't forget, Adolf Hitler is a great man.” Then he would sleep on it a night, and the next morning he would say: “What a terrible person, what a windbag!” And he would pound his fists on his stomach in rage.’
    Rommel, Behr believed, was not in favour of assassinating Hitler. ‘He wanted the whole clique to be imprisoned, taken to trial, anything, but murder them, no. It wasn't in him to be a Brutus. But, like most of the other generals, he wanted peace to come quickly. The fatherland had to be saved. In that sense he saw himself as a second Hindenburg, who had played a conciliatory role after the First World War. After all, both friend and foe saw Rommel as a respectable German, and he knew that.’
    To the east of Germany, the second great European front congealed. On 22 June, 1944, a little more than two weeks after D-Day, the Soviets began their own counteroffensive. Operation Bagration has been allocated only a tiny role in Western textbooks, but was at least as decisive as Normandy for the outcome of the war. The senior German command was once more taken unawares. They had been expecting the next great offensive to take place along the Black Sea, with the oilfields of Pripet and Ploieşs as prizes. But now the fronts were suddenly moving towards the Baltic States, East Prussia, Poland, and ultimately towards Germany itself.
    The size of the Soviet force came as such a shock that Hitler, like Stalin in 1941, at first refused to believe the reports: 166 divisions, 30,000 cannons, mortars and rocket launchers, 4,000 tanks, 6,000 planes. TheSoviets had twice as many soldiers as the Germans, almost three times as many cannons and mortars, and more than four times as many tanks and planes. The Russian ‘steamroller’, once a favourite source of speculation by paranoid military officers, had become reality.
    Once Germany was caught between these two enemy armies, things went quickly. After the breakthrough of the Allied forces in Normandy, the Germans – as someone wrote later – ‘started losing faster than the Allies could win’. The Allied Western offensive, however, soon ‘choked on its own success’: the supply lines from Normandy became overex-tended. Despite the Pluto pipeline and the thousands of Red Ball Express trucks driving bumper to bumper, supplies grew short. On the evening of 2 September, the advance positions bogged down. A few American Sherman tanks drove up the hill at the Belgian town of Tournai, but instead of entering the city they ground to a halt: out of fuel. A few more Shermans came up from behind and had just enough fuel to reach the centre of the town before their own engines sputtered and died.
    ‘My men can eat their belts,’ General Patton thundered, ‘but my tanks gotta have gas!’ The fuel crisis spread like wildfire. Only four days later were the tanks able to roll out of Tournai. At Brussels they were forced to spend another idle day. In Limburg Province they were still able to shoot, but not to advance. The Siegfried Line and the German border lay just over the horizon. In the Dutch cities, ‘Crazy Tuesday’ arrived on 5 September: in a panic, collaborators and German officials packed their bags and fled east. Victory seemed close at hand.
    The Allied leaders were ecstatic as well, and that resulted in an understandable, but fatal, error of judgement. The British had taken Antwerp, but that did not mean they could use the port: the banks of the River Scheldt were still firmly in German hands. But after all, if the war would be over by winter anyway – and even the cautious Eisenhower was counting on that – there was no need to liberate the port of Antwerp. Commander G. P. B. Roberts of the British 11th Tank Division waited in vain for orders to deal with the German 15th Army which had fled to the Dutch island of Walcheren. Almost 80,000 Germans escaped in the meantime, and in the weeks that followed they had all the time they needed to throw up a strong line of defence. For months they were able to block all shipments along the Antwerp route.
    By the time the Allies became bogged down along the Rhine a few weeks later, it was too late. Antwerp's