Chapter 2: Watch the Partners Step Away

In 1944 the smaller partners of the Axis left the war one by one.

In the second half of 1944, the smaller partners of the Axis stepped away from the war one after another, and each of them discovered that leaving a war is itself a long and difficult negotiation. If you keep that in mind, the crowded calendar of that year becomes easier to read.

You will remember the small oil lamps of the autumn of 1943, burning in kitchens where families waited for news of men who had been sent away. In the year that followed, such lamps were lit in many more homes, on both sides of the long front in the east, and the waiting grew longer. The first partner had left the war in a tent among olive trees, and its leaving had brought hard months to its own people. The other partners had watched that closely. They knew now that an armistice could bring an occupation by the former ally on the very next morning. So they moved carefully, like a ship turning in a narrow harbor, feeling for the channel and trying not to run aground.

In this chapter I will follow four of them through the calendar of 1944, from the first quiet contacts of the winter to the last signing of the autumn. You will see a parliament vote, a king act in a single evening, a regent speak on the radio, and delegations sit at night tables in the capital of the eastern ally. I will not name the countries, as you know by now, but I think you will recognise them by their stories.

A northern country searched for a way out through the winter.

As you may already guess, the first to search seriously for a way out was the northern country that had fought beside the Axis against the eastern ally since the summer of 1941. Its leaders called it a separate war, fought for their own reasons, and they had never formally joined the alliance of the Axis.

In February and March 1944, an elderly statesman travelled in secret to a neutral capital, and then on to the capital of the eastern ally, to hear what terms might be offered. The terms were hard, and on the eighteenth of April 1944 the government, with the support of its parliament, rejected them. Then, on the ninth and tenth of June, a great offensive struck the country's southern front, and the line was pushed back with heavy losses. In late June, in order to receive urgent help from its ally in the war, the country's president gave a personal promise not to make a separate peace. He gave it in a letter, in his own name only, so that the promise would not bind the parliament or the state. I would like you to notice how carefully that was done. It was a promise made in such a way that it could later be set aside.

On the first of August 1944 the president resigned. Three days later, on the fourth of August, the parliament elected the commander of the army, Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, to take his place. He was seventy-seven years old, a tall and very upright figure who had served in two different armies in his long life. His first task as head of state was to find the way out that others had failed to find.

A young king turned his country around in a single evening.

Now turn your eyes far to the south, where another partner of the Axis left the war in a very different way, all at once, on a summer evening.

On the twentieth of August 1944, the army from the east opened a powerful offensive on the southern front. Within three days the line was broken. In the capital, the young king and a small group of officers and political leaders had been preparing for weeks. On the afternoon of the twenty-third of August, the marshal who led the government came to the royal palace for an audience. The king asked him to seek an immediate armistice. When he refused, he was arrested in the palace and held in a small room behind a heavy door, a vault once used for keeping the royal stamp collection. That evening, at about ten o'clock, the king's proclamation was read on the national radio. It announced that the war against the Allies was over, and that the country would now stand with them.

You may find it, as I do, very striking that a war could end, for a whole country, between the afternoon and the late evening of a single summer day. Of course it did not really end so neatly. The troops of the former ally fought back in and around the capital for several days. The army of the country itself now turned to fight on the other side. But the decision was made in those few hours, in a palace, by a king who was only twenty-two years old.

The armistice itself, as you might expect, was signed later, in the capital of the eastern ally, in the night of the twelfth to the thirteenth of September 1944.

The northern ceasefire began on two different mornings.

The northern country, as you will see, took a slower path. On the second of September 1944 its government broke off relations with its former ally in the war and asked the troops of that ally to leave the country by the fifteenth of September.

The ceasefire was agreed for seven o'clock in the morning on the fourth of September. At that hour the guns of the northern army fell silent along the whole front. But the army from the east did not stop firing until about a day later, on the morning of the fifth of September. Whether this came from a misunderstanding in the orders or from a deliberate decision is still discussed. For twenty-four hours, one side was at peace and the other was still at war, along the same line through the same forests.

Let me ask you to do something with your hands here, and with care. Take a sheet of paper and draw a straight line across it, from left to right, to stand for one day. Mark the left end as seven in the morning on the fourth of September, and the right end as seven in the morning on the fifth. Now divide the line into twenty-four equal parts, one for each hour. As you draw each small mark, think of the soldiers on the northern side, who had been told that their war was over. They sat in their positions among the pines, under orders not to fire, while shells still fell around them through the morning, the evening and the night. Count the marks when you have finished, and you will have twenty-four of them. I think you will understand, as I did, that a ceasefire is not a moment but a promise that each side must keep in its own time.

The armistice was signed in the capital of the eastern ally on the nineteenth of September 1944. Its terms were heavy. The country had to return to the borders of 1940, give up its corridor to the northern sea, and lease a coastal area near its own capital to the eastern ally for fifty years. It had to pay reparations of three hundred million dollars in goods over six years. Above all, it had to disarm or expel the troops of its former ally that were still on its soil. That last condition meant a new war in the far north, against men who had been comrades only weeks before. It lasted through the autumn and winter, and the last of those troops left the country only on the twenty-seventh of April 1945.

A ferry at night showed me how a coastline slowly changes.

Some years ago I took an overnight ferry across a cold northern sea, and I stood on the open deck for a long time after we had left the harbor, because I could not sleep.

The coast slipped away very slowly. First the lights of the town went out of sight behind a headland, then the lighthouse, and then for a long while there was only the dark shape of the islands and the steady sound of the engines below my feet. A young deckhand in a heavy jacket was coiling ropes near the rail. When I asked him how long it would be before we lost the land completely, he smiled and said that it never happened all at once. There was always one more light, he said, one more rock, one more channel marker blinking green. I thought of those words often while I was reading about 1944. Leaving a war, for these smaller countries, was very like leaving that coast. You could not simply turn away from it. You had to pass every rock and every marker on the way out, and the old shore stayed in view much longer than you wished.

The deckhand went back to his ropes, and I stayed at the rail until the last green light had dropped below the horizon. By then it was past two in the morning, and the sea was quite black. I remember thinking that the people of 1944 had no such quiet hours on deck to watch their old shore fade. Their leaving happened in offices and on radios, in a few hurried days, while the old ally's soldiers were still in their barracks down the road. If you ever cross a sea at night, I hope you will stand at the rail for a while, as I did, and think of them.

Another partner was at war with some Allies but not with all.

The third partner had a strange position, and you may need a moment to keep it clear in your mind. It had joined the Axis and declared war on two of the western Allies in December 1941. It had never declared war on the eastern ally, and the two countries had kept their diplomats in each other's capitals all through the war.

In the summer of 1944, as the front came closer, its government sent envoys to talk with the western Allies in a city in the south, far from the front. On the twenty-sixth of August it declared its neutrality. On the second of September a new government took office and promised to leave the war. But on the fifth of September the eastern ally declared war on it, and three days later its armies crossed the border. On the evening of the eighth of September the country declared war on its former ally in the west. In the night of the eighth to the ninth of September, a coalition led by its resistance groups took power in the capital. Within a few days there was a ceasefire with the eastern ally, and the country's army began to fight on the Allied side.

I want you to feel how confusing this must have been for the people living through it. In the space of one week, a farmer in that country could have gone to bed in a nation at war with the west, woken in a neutral one, and fallen asleep again at war with the army from the east and with his country's own former ally at the same time. The armistice that settled all this was signed in the capital of the eastern ally on the twenty-eighth of October 1944.

An elderly regent spoke on the radio and was not obeyed.

The fourth partner tried and failed, and you may find its story the saddest of the four.

Its head of state was an elderly regent, a former admiral of a navy that no longer had a sea, who had governed the country for twenty-four years. Through the summer of 1944 he looked for a way out, and in early October he sent a secret delegation to the capital of the eastern ally. On the eleventh of October that delegation signed a preliminary agreement for an armistice. On the fifteenth of October, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, a proclamation in the regent's name was read on the national radio, announcing that the country would ask for an armistice. The army had not been fully prepared, and the former ally had been preparing too. Within a day the regent was forced to withdraw his statement and give up his office, and a new government was installed that kept the country in the war.

For that country, the war went on through a winter of terrible fighting in its capital, which lasted from late December until February 1945. A provisional government formed in the east of the country signed an armistice in the capital of the eastern ally on the twentieth of January 1945. The two halves of the country lived for a time under two different endings, one already signed and one not yet reached.

Please stop here with me for a moment, and remember the people of that capital in the winter of 1944 and 1945, civilians and soldiers of every side.

Leaving a war required the consent of everyone in the room.

When you lay these four stories side by side, you begin to see what they have in common. In every case, leaving the war was not a single act but a negotiation with at least three parties at once.

There was the old ally, who did not want to be left alone and still had troops in the country. There were the new partners, the Allies, who held to the demand for unconditional surrender but needed help on the battlefield. And there were the country's own people and its own army, who had to be persuaded to stop fighting one enemy and, very often, to start fighting another. A king, a regent, a president or a marshal could change the course of a whole nation only if enough of these voices were ready to move with him. When they were ready, as in the royal palace in August, the change could happen in an evening. When they were not, as in October, a proclamation on the radio could be swept away in a day. I think you will find it useful to remember this when you read about the great signings of 1945. Behind each signature there was always a room full of other people, some of them far away, whose consent made the signature possible.

The armistices of that season were all signed in one capital.

It is worth your noticing where these armistices were finally signed. All four of them, in the end, were concluded in the same capital, the capital of the eastern ally, the last of them in January 1945, and some of them late at night.

The delegations arrived by aircraft or by train, often after days of travel through a continent at war. They were received in government buildings and then kept waiting, sometimes for many days, while the texts were drafted and redrafted. Some meetings began in the evening and ran on past midnight, around long tables under bright electric lamps. On the Allied side, a representative of the eastern ally usually signed, acting for all the Allies at war with that country. Every article had to be checked in more than one language, and you can imagine the delegates following the words line by line with their pens in their hands. If you have ever sat up late to finish a hard piece of work, you will know the particular tiredness of those night sessions, when every word weighs more than it does by day.

Each armistice created an Allied control commission, which would sit in the defeated country's capital until a peace treaty could be signed. Those treaties came only in February 1947. For the people of these countries, therefore, the end of the war came in three stages: the evening of the ceasefire, the night of the armistice, and the long years of the commission before the treaty. You may find it helpful to think of these three stages as the three signals at the end of a railway line: the first turns to caution, the second to stop, and the third, much later, lets the train go home to the depot.

The delegations carried their signed copies home through the autumn.

When the night sessions were over, the delegates gathered their papers and went home again, each carrying a signed copy of a document that would shape the life of their country for years.

I sometimes picture one of those journeys in the late autumn of 1944, and I would like you to picture it with me. The train moves slowly through a flat country under low clouds, past villages where the smoke rises straight from the chimneys and the fields have already been ploughed for winter. In a compartment with drawn blinds sits a tired official in a dark coat, a leather case on his knees, holding the signed armistice. He does not open it. He has read it many times already, aloud and silently, and he knows its articles by heart. Outside, at a small station, the train stops for water, and a woman on the platform holds up a photograph to the windows, asking every passenger whether they have seen her son. The official shakes his head, and the train moves on.

I do not know if such a moment ever happened on any of those journeys, but I am certain that moments like it happened every day, on every railway line of that autumn.

And so the documents travelled home, in leather cases on slow trains, through the cold evenings of October and November 1944, while the families in the villages along the line went on lighting their lamps and waiting.