msmam
I
1
^^^i
— $24.95 until 1/31/90 $29.95 thereafter
SECOND
WORLD
WAR John Keegan, the most widely read military historian of our time and the author of The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command, now uses his extraordinary talent and resources to recount the strategies and battles of the greatest war in the history of civilization the Second World War. Keegan has investigated leadership {The Mask of
—
Command),
naval warfare (The Price of
and battlefield strategy (The Face of Battle). Combining his knowledge of these areas with his empathy for the foot soldier, the cog of the war machine, Keegan leads ^ understand more fully the the =
Admiralty),
.
human propoi i.c^ c of World War Much more than a mere chronological II.
war is recounted both perio^'cally and thematically. Treating each theater of war the war in the West, the war in the East, the war in the Pacific according to the 'strategic dilemma" faced by the leaders, Keegan analyzes five crucial narrative, the history of the
—
each of which he finds characteristic a distinctive kind of warfare of the period. By examining the airborne battle of Crete,
battles, of
the carrier battle of Midway, the tank battle of Falaise, the city battle of Berlin, and the
Okinawa, Keegan war with the perception and insight that have won him tha acclaim of both critics and readers. lohn Keegan's The Second World War
amphibious
battle of
illuminates the course of the
is
one that only Keegan could have defined and written. It's a book which will be required reading for generations to come. jxtraordinary, definitive history,
•Vr
m
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
THE SECOND
WORLD
WAR 0mgb'%
4
To
my pupils
the Royal Military
at
Academy Sandhurst
1960-1986
THE SECOND
WORLD
WAR
JOHN KEEGAN #5% VIKING
BRIGHTON
y Also by the same author
The Nature of War (with Joseph Darracott)
World Armies
Who
in Military'
Andrew
History (with
Wheatcroft)
Armies
Six
Normandy
in
Soldiers (with Richard
Holmes)
Command
The Mask of The
Price of Admiralty
VTDNG Published by the Penguin
Group
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin
Books
USA
Inc.,
40 West 23rd
New York, New York 10010, London
W8
Street.
U.S.A.
27 Wights Lane,
Penguin Books Ltd,
5TZ. England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street,
Markham.
Ontario,
Canada L3R 1B4
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd,
182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland
1
0,
New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth. Middlesex, England First
American Edition
Published in
1990 by Viking
10
Penguin,
USA Inc.
a division of Penguin Books
987654321
Copyright
© John Keegan,
1
989
All rights reserved
Photograph
credits
appear on page 608.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Keegan. John.
1934-
The Second World War/John Keegan. p.
cm.
ISBN 0-670-82359-7 I. World War, 1939-1945. II.
Title:
Title
1990
940.53—dc20
the staff of the Friends, graph
London
Library.
and colleagues
whom
I
would
past
and present,
at
Sandhurst and The
Daily Tele-
particularly like to thank include Colonel Alan Shep-
perd. Librarian Emeritus ofSandhurst, Mr Conrad Black, Mr James Allan, Dr Anthony Clayton, Lord Deedes, Mr Jeremy Deedes, Mr Robert Fox, Mr Trevor Grove, Miss Adela Gooch, Mr Nigel Home, Mr Andrew Hutchinson, Mr Andrew- Knight, Mr Michael Orr, Mr Nigel Wade, Dr Christopher Duffy and Professor Ned Willmott. I owe warmest thanks of all to Mr Max Hastings, the Editor of The Daily Telegraph and a distinguished historian of the Second World War. Among others I would like to thank are Mr AndrewHeritage and Mr Paul Murpny. The manuscript was typed by Miss Monica Alexander and copy-edited by Miss Linden Stafford and I thank them warmly for their professional help. I would also like to thank my editor, Mr Richard Cohen of Hutchinson, and the team he assembled to see the manuscript through production, particularly Mr Robin Cross, Mr Jerry Goldie and Miss Anne-Marie Ehrlich. I owe much gratitude, as always, to my literary agent, Mr Anthony Sheil, and Miss Lois Wallace, my former American literary agent. I am especially indebted to the scholars who read the manuscript: Dr Duncan Anderson, Mr John Bullen, Mr Terry Charman, Mr Terence Hughes, Mr Norman Longmate, Mr James Lucas, Mr Bryan Perrett, Mr Antony Preston, Mr Christopher Shores and Professor Norman Stone. For the errors which remain I alone am re-
sponsible. I.
2nd World War.
D743.K39
thanks are due above all to the colleagues and pupils among whom I spent twenty-six years at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. When I joined the academic staff of the Academy in 1960, many of the military instructors were veterans of the Second World War and it was from conversation with them that I first began to develop an understanding of the war as a human event. I also learnt a great deal from my pupils; because of the Sandhurst method of instruction, which requires cadets to prepare 'presentations' of battles and campaigns, I was often almost as much a listener as a teacher in the Sandhurst Halls of Study and found a great deal of illumination in hearing those episodes described by embryo officers too young to have taken part in them. A number of my pupils have subsequently become professional military historians themselves, including Charles Messenger, Michael Dewar, Anthony Beevor and Alex Danchev. Of all Sandhurst influences, however, none was stronger than that of the Reader in Military History, Brigadier Peter Young, DSO, MC, FSA, a distinguished Commando soldier of the war, the founder of the War Studies Department and an inspiration to generations of officer cadets. The Sandhurst Library contains one of the most important collections of Second World War literature in the world, and I was fortunate enough to be able to use it almost daily for many years. I would particularly like to thank the present Librarian, Mr Andrew Orgill, and his staff; I would also like to thank Mr Michael Sims and his staff at the Staff College Library, Mr John Andrews and Miss Mavis Simpson at the Ministry of Defence Library and
My
The Face of Battle
Who's
Acknowledgements
89-16682
My thanks finally to friends at Kilmington, particularly Mrs Honor Medlam, Mr Michael Gray and Mr Peter Stancombe, to my children, Lucy Newmark and her husband Brooks, Thomas, Rose and Matthew, and my darling wife, Susanne.
Printed in the United Slates of America
John Keegan
Without limiting the
Kilmington Manor June 6, 1989
rights
under
copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be
reproduced,
stored in of introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted,
in
any form
or
by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
FOREWORD The Second World War
is
the largest single event in
the world's seven continents and
all its
oceans.
hundreds of millions of others wounded
much
No
in
It
human history,
killed
mind
fifty
fought across six of
million
human beings,
left
or body and materially devastated
of the heartland of civilisation. attempt to relate
causes, course
its
and consequences
in the space
of a single volume
continuous sequence of events, therefore, I decided from the outset to divide the story of the war into four topics - narrative, strategic
can
fully
succeed. Rather than narrate
analysis, battle piece
history of the six
main
and the
as a
and 'theme of war' - and
in the East, 1941-3; the East, 1943-5;
it
sections into
War in War in
strategic analysis, centring
to use these four topics to carry forward the
which the war falls: the War in the West,
the Pacific, 1941-3; the
War
in the
the Pacific, 1943-5. Each section
on the
figure to
1939-43; the
West, 1943-5; the is
introduced by
War a
War
in the
piece of
whom the initiative most closely belonged at that
time - in order, Hitler, Tojo, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt - and then contains, besides the appropriate passages of narrative, both a relevant 'theme of war' and
a battle piece.
Each of the
been chosen to illustrate the nature of a particular form of warfare characteristic of the conflict. They are air warfare (the Battle of Britain), airborne warfare (the Battle of Crete), carrier warfare (Midway), armoured warfare (Falaise), city warfare (Berlin) and amphibious warfare (Okinawa). The 'themes of war' include war supply, war production, occupation and repression, strategic bombing, resistance and espionage, and battle pieces has
secret
weapons.
It is
my hope
that this
scheme of treatment imposes
chaos and tragedy of the events
I
relate.
a little
order for the reader on the
CONTENTS Prologue
man
1
Every
2
Fomenting world war
10
a soldier
31 Part
The War
in the
I
West 1940-1943
3
The Triumph of
4
Air Battle: the Battle of Britain
5
War supply and
54
Blitzkrieg
the Battle of the Atlantic Part
The War
88 103
II
in the East 1941-1943
dilemma
127
6
Hitler's strategic
7
Securing the eastern springboard
142
8
Airborne
160
9
Barbarossa
173
10
War production
209
11
Crimean summer,
Crete
battle:
Stalingrad winter Part
The War
220
III
in the Pacific 1941-1943
dilemma
12
Tojo's strategic
13
From
14
Carrier battle:
15
Occupation and repression
279
16
The war
290
Pearl
Harbor
to
Midway
Midway
for the islands
240 251
268
Part IV
The War
in the
West 1943-1945
dilemma
17
Churchill's strategic
18
Three wars in Africa
320
19
Italy
and the Balkans
344
20
Overlord
369
21
Tank
396
22
Strategic
23
The Ardennes and the Rhine
battle: Falaise
bombing
310
415
Part
The War
436
V
in the East 1943-1945
dilemma
24
Stalin's strategic
25
Kursk and the recapture of western Russia
458
26
Resistance and espionage
483
27
The
28
City battle: the siege of Berlin
Vistula
and the Danube
450
503
516
Part VI
The War
in the Pacific 1943-1945
dilemma
536
29
Roosevelt's strategic
30
Japan's defeat in the south
31
Amphibious
32
Super-weapons and the defeat of Japan
574
33
The legacy of the Second World War
588
Bibliography and Index
596
battle:
Okinawa
546 561
**
-^""-"^•^i
**.*4
fiw**
!
m^4
'j0-»
'>«?'
4JH
PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
I
EVERY MAN A SOLDIER The
First
[World]
War
explains the second and, in
event causes another,' wrote A.
link
War
J.
P.
fact,
Taylor in his Origins
caused
between the two wars went deeper. Germany fought
to reverse the verdict of the
\ Not even those
first
and
whether or not
is is
it
to
Second
specifically in the
it.'
Taylor's version of inter-war
The Second World War,
inexplicable except by reference to the
undoubtedly went to war
one
World War. 'The
to destroy the settlement that followed
who most vehemently oppose Mr
history will take great issue with those judgements.
nature and course,
in so far as
it,
of the Second
in
origin,
its
and Germany - which,
First;
be blamed for the outbreak, certainly struck the in 1939 to recover the place in the world
it
had
blow -
first
lost
by
its
defeat
in 1918.
However,
connect the Second World
to
accepted as the cause of the
latter, to
War with
the First
explain either of them. Their
is
not, if the
common
former
roots
is
must be
1914, and that search has harnessed the energies of scholars Whether they looked for causes in immediate or less proximate events, their conclusions have had little in common. Historians of the winning side have qn-'the whole chosen to blame Germany, in particular Germany's ambition for world power, for the outbreak of 1914 and hence to blame Germany again - whatever failing attaches to the appeasing powers - for that of 1939. Until the appearance of Fritz Fischer's
sought for
in the years
much of this
preceding
century.
heretical revision
of the national version
rebut the imputation of 'war
whatever
nationality,
of capitalism'
in
its
11
in 1967,
German
by distributing
it
historians generally sought to
elsewhere. Marxist historians, of
have overflown the debate, depicting the imperialist form,
Previous page: The kce Armistice, on
guilt'
of defeat
November 1918,
- German the
First
World War
by which the European working
prisoners-of-war in 1918. At the time of the
German army remained unbroken,
will to continue the
as a 'crisis
classes
war had disappeared.
10
but the political
were
MAN
EVERY
on
sacrificed
the altar of competition
consistent in ascribing the outbreak of the
A SOLDIER
between decaying
capitalist
Second World War
to the
systems; they are
Western democracies'
preference for gambling on Hitler's reluctance to cross the brink rather than accept Soviet
help to ensure that he did not.
These views are irreconcilable. At best they exemplify the judgement the projection of ideology into the
why
the world twice
bound
There can indeed be no
past'.
itself to
common
that 'history
is
explanation of
the wheel of mass war-making as long as historians
disagree about the logic and morality of politics and whether the
first is
the
same
as the
second.
A more
though
well-trodden, approach to the issue of causes
lies
along
another route: that which addresses the question of how the two World Wars were
made
fruitful,
rather than
possible
why
they
less
came
about. For the instances of outbreak are themselves
overridingly important in neither case.
It
was the enormity of the events which flowed
from the upheavals of August 1914 and September 1939 so long for reasons to explain them.
of the Austro-Prussian conflicts
War of
No
similar
that has driven historians to search
impetus motivates the search for the causes
1866 or the Franco-Prussian
War of
1870, critical as those
were in altering the balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, had Germany
won
it
World War, that of the Marne in September 1914, as she might well have done - thereby sparing Europe not only the agony of the trenches but all the ensuing social, economic and diplomatic is
safe to say that
embitterment - the
libraries
the critical opening battle of the First
devoted to the international relations of Germany, France,
Austria-Hungary and Russia before 1914 would never have been written.
Britain,
However, because Marne, the
First
it
was not Germany but France, with
who won
British help,
War became
- and so the Second - World
different
from
previously fought, different in scale, intensity, extensiveness and material and
They
also came,
differences
by the same measure, closely to resemble each other.
and those
similarities
apparent importance. But that
World Wars pair of
lay
is
which
all
human It
is
the
wars cost.
those
invest the subject of their causation with such
to confuse accident with substance. The causes of the
no deeper and were no more or
conjoined and closely sequential
complex than the causes of any other
less
Their nature, on the other hand, was
conflicts.
more people, consumed more wealth and more suffering over a wider area of the globe than any previous war. Mankind had grown no more wicked between 1815, the terminal date of the last great bout of hostilities between nations, and 1914; and certainly no sane and adult European alive in the latter year would have wished, could he have foreseen it, the destruction and misery that the crisis of that August was to set in train. Had it been foretold that the consequent war without precedent. The World Wars killed inflicted
was
to last four years, entail the death of 10 million
battlefields as far apart as
Palestine, later
Belgium, northern
Italy,
Mesopotamia, Africa and China; and
young men, and
that a
by the same combatants over exactly the same
11
carry fire
and sword
to
Macedonia, the Ukraine, Transcaucasia. subsequent war, fought twenty years
battlefields
and others besides, was
to
PROLOGUE
bring the death of 50 million people, every individual and collective impulse to aggression, it
might be thought, would have been
stilled in that instant.
human nature. It also speaks against the way the world A sane and adult European alive in the latter year might
That thought speaks well for
had gone between 1815 and have deplored with every
1914.
of
fibre
so,
would even have had
which surrounded him. For the the world
being the prospect foretold to him of the
however, he would have had to deny the policy, and material nature of the state - whichever state that was
human
ethos and ultimately the
- to which he belonged, fie
his civilised
To do
holocausts that were to come.
to
deny the condition of the world
truth of twentieth-century
European
civilisation
was
that
dominated was pregnant with war. The enormous wealth, energy and
it
population increase released by Europe's industrial revolution
had transformed the world.
It
in the nineteenth century productive had created and exploitative industries -
foundries, engineering works, textile factories, shipyards, mines - larger by far than any at
which the
intellectual fathers
of the industrial revolution, the economic
eighteenth century, had guessed.
It
network of communications - roads, cables - denser than even the
have foreseen. cities
and
It
and
Above
all,
and
of hope and promise,
it
in
a
and telephone
It
had
of historic
to increase tenfold the population
on millions of acres which had never
graziers
a vibrant,
the bite of
felt
- schools, universities,
built the infrastructure
churches, missions - of
libraries, laboratories,
of the
most prescient enthusiast of science and technology could
the plough or the herdsman's tread.
civilisation.
railways, shipping lanes, telegraph
had generated the riches
to plant farmers
rationalists
had linked the productive regions of the world with
creative
and optimistic world
dramatic and menacing counterpoint to the century's works
had created
the largest and potentially most destructive
armies,
instruments of war the world had ever seen.
The militarisation of Europe The extent of Europe's
means
that catch
itself is elusive
its
is
difficult to
psychological and technological dimensions as well as
had of the
which he served
his
military organisation of the
in the 1830s
military districts supplied to the Kaiser
Reich on the eve of the
scale. Scale
First
World War.
Engels' testimony
is
succeeded
in
defeating
the
armed
revolutionary he pinned his hopes of that victor)'
forces
on the
with the force
of the unified German significant.
Marxist theory, he never diverged from the view that the revolution proletariat
its
independent North German
commercial apprenticeship
which the same German
the
convey by any
enough. Something of its magnitude may be transmitted by contrasting the
sight Friedrich Engels city-states in
militarisation in the nineteenth century
of the
proletariat
A
father of
would triumph only state.
As
winning the
a
if
young
battle
of
the barricades; as an old and increasingly dispirited ideologue, he sought to persuade himself that the proletariat, by then the captive of Europe's conscription laws, liberate itself
by subverting the
states'
would
armies from within. His passage from the hopes of
12
MAN
EVERY
A SOLDIER
youth to the doubts of old age can best be charted by following the transformation of the Hanseatic towns' troops during his lifetime. In August 1840 he rode for three hours from his office
in
Bremen
Hamburg, Liibeck
to
watch the combined manoeuvres of the armies of Bremen,
and the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. Together they formed a on the side of generosity, 3000 - men strong. In the year of
free city
force a regiment - say, to err his
the
death in 1895 the same
German Army,
cities
provided most of the 17th and part of the 19th Divisions of
together with
a cavalry
and
artillery
regiment -
at
least a fourfold
increase. That accounts for only first-line troops, conscripts enrolled
Behind the
and under arms. and 19th Divisions stood the 17th and 19th Reserve Divisions to
active 17th
which the Hanseatic
would contribute an equal number of
cities
reservists
- trained
former conscripts - on mobilisation. And behind the reserve divisions stood the Landwehr
who
of older ex-conscripts
in 1914
would provide
half of another division again.
together, these units represent a tenfold increase in strength
between 1840 and
Taken
1895, far
outstripping contemporary population growth.
enormous
This
multiplication of force was nevertheless in the
first
instance
a
function of demographic change. The population of most states destined to fight the First
World War doubled and in some cases tripled during the nineteenth century. Thus the population of Germany, within the boundaries of 1871, increased from 24 million in 1800 to 57 million in 1900. The British population increased from 16 million in 1800 to 42 million in 1900; but for the Irish famine and emigration to the United States and the colonies,
producing
a
net
outflow of about
8
million,
it
would have
The
tripled.
population of Austria-Hungary, allowing for frontier changes, increased from 24 million to
46 million; of
Italy,
within the 1870 frontiers, from 19 million to 29 milion, despite
a net
outflow of perhaps 6 million emigrants to North and South America. Belgium's population
grew from
2.5 to 7 million; that
frontier of 1941 nearly tripled,
from 36
France and the Ottoman empire,
once the
largest in
of European Russia between the Urals and the western to 100 million.
show
failed to
Only two of the combatant
similar increases.
states,
The French population,
Europe, rose only from 30 to 40 million and chiefly through extended remained almost static - the result, in Professor William McNeill's
longevity; the birth-rate
view, of Napoleon's returning warriors bringing
on campaign. The all; it was 24 million
population of Turkey within in
1800 and 25 million
The French and Turkish
cases,
nevertheless significant in explaining
though it.
improved standards of living and public to agriculture,
home its
techniques of birth control learned
present frontiers scarcely increased
in 1900.
falling
outside the demographic pattern, are
The increased longevity of the French was due health, the
medicine and hygiene. The
failure
an exactly contrary explanation: the poor
at
outcome of the
to
application of scien< e
of the Turkish population
yields of traditional farming
to increase
had
and incidence of
disease in a society without doctors ensured that population, despite high birth-rates,
remained
at a static level.
Whenever increased
agricultural output (or input)
with high birth-rates and improved hygiene, as they did almost everywhere
13
in
combined Europe
in
PROLOGUE
the nineteenth century, the effect
on population
was dramatic.
size
of the nineteenth-century economic miracle,
In England, the centre
was spectacular. Despite
it
a
massive
emigration of the population from the countryside to the towns, overcrowded and often
number of the
jerry-built, the
English increased by 100 per cent in the
first
half
and by 75
per cent in the second half of the century. Sewer-building, which ensured the elimination
of cholera from 1866 and of most other water-borne diseases soon
which when
it
was made compulsory
and lengthened the
mortality
from
fertilised
and fallowed
between 1872 and
healthier people. Their intake of calories
and
especially sugar,
reduced
infant
Improved
1900.
and, in particular, the import of
fields,
North American grain and refrigerated Australasian meat, produced as tea, coffee
and vaccination,
expectancy of the adult population; death from
life
infectious disease declined by nearly 60 per cent agricultural yields
after,
in 1853 eliminated smallpox, sharply
larger, stronger
and
was increased by the cheapening of luxuries such
which made grain
more
staples
palatable
and
diet
more
varied.
The combined conscription
example, in
effect
of these medical and dietary advances on growing populations
young men liable each year for French labelled them) - by an average of 50 per cent, for France between 1801 and 1900 - but to make them better suited, decade on
was not only
to increase the size of the contingents of
(classes,
as the
decade, for military service. There soldier to bear
The
larger
on
his
and stronger the
typically
found
its
hundred
of extraneous weight - pack,
more
readily can
fit
his
men among
he carry such
a
a
marching
and ammunition. load the desirable
the town-dwelling artisan class rather than
peasant, physically undernourished
native heath.
rifle
eighteenth century the French army had
a day. In the
and
socially doltish, rarely
he was undisciplined, prone to disease and
suitable soldier;
plucked from
source of such
The
lb
soldier, the
marching norm of twenty miles the peasantry.
an apparently irreducible military need for
is
bod) about 50
liable to
made a when
pine to death
was these shortcomings which prompted Marx
It
a
years later to dismiss the peasantry as 'irredeemable' for revolutionary purposes.
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the peasant populations of Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia had so
much improved
in
physique that they were regularly
supplying to their national armies a proportion of new conscripts or give
Marx the
lie.
His analysis
large-scale emigration to the
may have been skewed by towns
left
only the
squire and parson. In the continental lands,
England - the German
rural
population
countryside which yielded the
classes
nineteenth-century armies were If
the
new
in
of
1900 was
still
strong
large
enough
to
under the thumb of
industrialising
more
49 per cent of the
total
slowly than
-
it
was the
young men out of which the
great
built.
population surplus yielded by better
European armies'
classes
standpoint in England, where
least enterprising
which were
large,
his
recruiting pool,
it
diet,
drugs and drains increased the
was the nineteenth-century
of head-counting and tax-gathering which ensured
that recruits
states'
enhanced powers
could be found,
fed, paid,
housed, equipped and transported to war. The institution of regular census-taking -
14
in
EVERY
France in 1801, Belgium
in 1829,
MAN
Germany
A SOLDIER
in 1853,
Austria-Hungary in 1857,
Italy in 1861
-
accorded recruiting authorities the data they needed to identify and docket potential recruits;
with
it
died the traditional expedients of haphazard impressment, cajolery,
bribery and press-ganging which had raised the ancien regime armies from those not fleet
enough of thought or and school
rolls
foot to escape the recruiting sergeant. Tax
documented
introduction of free education for
all
entailed a limitation as well as an enlargement of the
By 1900 every German
individual's liberties.
electoral registers
lists,
the conscript's whereabouts - the grant of the vote and the
discharge paper specifying the centre
at
example, was obliged to possess
reservist, for
which he was
to report
when
a
mobilisation was
decreed.
The enormous enlargement of European economies was meanwhile creating the tax new armies of conscripted recruits were supported; the German
base by which the
economy,
for example,
expanded by
a quarter
between
and
1851
1855 and 1875 and by 70 per cent between 1875 and 1914.
From
by
1855,
this
new
a half
between
wealth the
drew, via indirect and direct revenue, including the resented institution of income ever-increasing
share
of the gross domestic product.
In
government's share of consumption rose from 4.8 per cent 1900-14 and in
Germany from 4 per
cent to
per cent;
7.1
rises
for
Britain,
in
state
tax,
example,
an the
1860-79 to 7.4 per cent in
were proportionate
in
France
and Austria-Hungary. this increased revenue went to buy military equipment - in the broadest Guns and warships represented the costliest outlay; barracks the more significant. The ancien regime soldier had been lodged wherever the state could find room for him, in taverns, barns or private houses. The nineteenth-century conscript was housed in purpose-
Most of
sense.
built
accommodation. Walled barracks were an important instrument of social control; denounced them as 'bastions against the populace'. The sixteenth-century
Engels
Florentines similarly regarded the building of the Fortezza de Basso inside the gates of their city as a
principal
symbol of the curtailment of
their liberties. Barracks
of 1848 and the
Paris
Commune
new
certainly a
of 1871 were put down.* However, barracks were not only
the precinct-stations of the contemporary riot police.
of a
were
means of guaranteeing that ready availability of force by which the Berlin revolt
military culture in
which conscripts
of comradeship which would harden them against than any which soldiers had
known
They were
learnt habits
also the fraternity
houses
of obedience and forged bonds
a battlefield
ordeal
more harrowing
before.
The new-found wealth of the nineteenth-century state enabled the conscript not only to be housed and equipped but also to be transported to the battlefield and fed amply when he arrived. The soldier of the ancien regime had been scarcely better supplied It
was not onl) continentals
who opposed
barrack building Field Marshal
general, put the British attitude thus: 'the people of this
Wade, the eighteenth-century
Kingdom have been
Barracks and Slavery so closely that, like darkness and the Devil, though there be no
between them,
yet the)
cannot separate them.'
15
British
taughl CO associate the idea of
manner
oi
conned
PROLOGUE
than the little
Roman
ground
supplemented by a The nineteenth-century conscript was fed in on preserved food; margarine and canning were both the products of a legionary; flour
beef driven on the hoof, was
the field
competition founded by Napoleon
However, the necessity
pack.
for
in the regimental hand-mills,
his staple.
III
him
to invent rations that
to carry his
own
would not
rot in the soldier's
supply of rations was in any case
sharply diminished by the subordination of the burgeoning railway system to military uses.
Troops were transported by Austria in northern
Italy,
rail as
early as 1839 in
deployment by
Germany. By
1859,
seemed commonplace.
rail
underlay Prussia's victories against Austria and France. In the
network, only 469 kilometres in 1840, had increased to
kilometres, the greater part of it (56,000 kilometres) under state
France fought
In 1866
and 1870
it
German rail would total 61,749 management. The German year the
latter
by 1914
17,215;
when
it
government, heavily prompted by the Great General Staff, had early grasped the importance for defensive - and offensive - purposes of controlling the railway system;
much
of
particularly in
it,
had been financed by
such sectors of low commercial use
and
state-raised loans
laid
out
as Bavaria
and
East Prussia,
the direction of the General Staffs
at
railway section.'
Railways supplied and transported the soldier of the steam age railhead;
weapons with which
that built the railways also furnished the
armies would
not deliberate,
of the
first
inflict
mass
at least
not
casualties at
on each
other.
to kill
the
the outset; later
successful machine-gun,
is
make your each other more
may have been. Hiram Maxim,
it
faster-firing,
more
between 1850 and 1900 was the capability
Four
which made factors
their
were
production
new mass
said:
will
'Hang your
the inventor in electrical electricity! If
allow those fool Europeans
however, the reason for the appearance of the
accurate
weapons
particular conjunction
significant.
who
something which
quickly." Initially,
longer-range and
up experiments
alleged to have given
fortune, invent
to
the soldiers of the
The development of such weapons was
engineering in 1883 on the advice of a fellow American,
you want
(at least as far as
beyond, the old marching and portering imperatives persisted). The technology
that
equipped the conscript armies
of human ingenuity and industrial
feasible.
The
first
was the spread of steam power, which
supplied the energy to manufacture weapons by industrial process. The second was the
development of the appropriate process
itself,
originally called 'American'
origin in the 1820s in the factories of the Connecticut Valley,
by reason of its
which were chronically short
of skilled labour. This industrial process resulted in 'interchangeable
machined by
parts',
a
refinement of the ancient pantographic principle, and achieved an enormous surge of output.
which
The Prussian manufacturer, Dreyse, inventor of the revolutionary 'needle-gun' (in a bolt-operated firing-pin struck a metal-jacketed cartridge), managed to turn out
only 10,000 units a year by traditional methods in 1847, despite holding It
is
evidence of the military importance the
the personnel of the Reichsbahn
German
were not allowed
state
and army attached
to the free use
to unionise. Understandably so; the
from the Belgian railwaymen's practice of unseating
rails
from
16
a
firm contract
of the railways that
word
'sabotage' derives
their shoes (sabots) during the great strike
of 1905.
EVERY
from the Prussian government
MAN
to re-equip
A SOLDIER
whole army. By
its
1863, in contrast, the British
Enfield armoury, rejigged with automatic milling machines, turned out 100,370 in 1866 the
French government re-equipped the armoury
at
machinery capable of producing 300,000 of the new Chassepot
parts'
Advances
rifles,
and
Puteaux with 'interchangeable
each year.
rifles
metal engineering would have been pointless without improvements in
in
the quality of the metal to be worked; that was assured by the development of processes for smelting steel in quantity - notably
was encouraged by third
significant
Krupp, began
a prize offered
by the
engineer Bessemer
British
by Napoleon
III).
advance. With similar furnaces, the
in the 1860s to cast steel billets
German cannon-founder,
all
contemporary infantrymen
weapons of
decisive
in
a larger scale
advanced armies were
the Franco-Prussian
Alfred
from which perfect cannon-barrels could be
machined. His breech-loading field-guns, equivalents on
which
after 1857 (he also
Bessemer's 'convenor' marked the
War of
1870-1.
now
of the
issued,
rifles
with
proved the
The fourth ingredient of the
firepower revolution was supplied shortly afterwards by European chemists, notably the
Swede
who developed
Alfred Nobel,
projectiles to a greater distance
propellants and bursting-charges which drove
and detonated them with more explosive
before. The effective range of infantry weapons, for example -
1900.
mechanism of
to the
When
a
thousand yards
the recuperation of chemical-energy discharges was applied
small arms and artillery in the period 1880-1900,
machine-gun and the quick-firing dealing
than ever
function equally of
a
engineering and propellant developments - increased from a hundred to
between 1850 and
effect
artillery piece,
it
produced the
the ultimate instruments of mass death-
at distance.
Surplus and war-making capacity Long-range, rapid-fire weapons constituted the threat by which offensive force assembled by the industrial
all
the increments of
and demographic revolutions of the nineteenth
century were to be negated. There lay an irony. The material triumph of the nineteenth century had been to break out of the cycle of recurrent lean and plenty which had life even in the richest states, and permanent surplus - of food, energy and raw materials (though not of capital,
immemorially determined the condition of
cash).
Market fluctuations perpetuated
boom
and recession
Surplus transformed their war-making capacity.
of raid and ambush
at
had always required surplus for
surpluses had rarely been large decisive victory of
War
one
enough
historically to
any its
in the peaceful
level
opposed unfamiliar
ideologies,
germ
as
of
above the primitive
states. ritual
fund wars that culminated in the in
which the
conquest sustained the impetus of a victorious campaign, had been rarer
or,
credit or
waging. However, accumulated
side over another; self-funding wars,
factors - gross disparity in the
life
to create
opposed technologies of war-making or
still.
in the
spoils of
Extraneous
dynamism of
Professor William McNeill has suggested, susceptibility to
strains transported
by an aggressor - had usually explained one society's
17
PROLOGUE
triumph over another; and they certainly underlay such military sensations
as the
Spanish
destruction of the Aztec and Inca empires, the Islamic conquests of the seventh century
and the American extinction of Red Indian warriordom.
Europe between the Reformation and the French Revolution,
In the warfare of
waged between resistance to
occupying
states
common
a level
plateau of war-making
skills,
war and
will to
such extraneous factors had played no decisive
disease,
part;
while
the surpluses available for offence had been heavily offset by the diversion of funds into
means of defence,
particularly siege engineering.
had been dedicated
to
A
great deal
the destruction of the feudal strongholds from
magnates had defied central authority once the fashion
European land-holding
eleventh century.
class in the
had been added those of replacing
costs
of such siege engineering
It
which
local
for castle-building seized the
was extremely
costly;
and
to the
local with national fortifications in the frontier
zones throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Investment in
investment in
have
and constructive, had the
destructive
siegecraft,
made
civil
infrastructures - roads, bridges
the passage of armies
on
for example, while the British road
military
purposes
offensive campaigns swift and decisive. As late as 1826, network - much of it in Scotland deliberately built for
after the Jacobite revolt
France (three times the
most
size)
was no
strategically significant terrain in
miles,
most of it
in
collateral effect of securing underand canals - which might otherwise
of 1745 - extended to over 21,000 miles, that of
greater, while Prussia,
northern Europe, had
which occupied much of the a
road network of only 3,340
her Rhineland provinces. Her eastern lands were virtually roadless, as
Poland and Russia were to remain - to Napoleon's and then
Hitler's cost
- well into the
twentieth century.
The surplus created by
the
economic miracle
in
nineteenth-century
Europe
cancelled out the effects of under-investment in road-building and over-investment in frontier fortification.
Mass armies, transported and supplied along the new
of railways,
swamped
changed sea
levels. In
strategically significant territory as if
by
tidal force
infrastructure in
an era of
1866 and 1870 the armies of Prussia overflowed the frontier regions
of Austrian Bohemia and French Alsace-Lorraine without hindrance by the costly fortifications
that
guarded them.
Strategic
movement
in
Europe achieved
a
fluidity
equivalent almost to that which had characterised the western campaigns of the American Civil
War, fought by mass armies in a landscape
free
from
artificial
obstructions of any sort.
Regions disputed by Habsburg and Bourbon generals in two hundred years of toothpick
campaigning for advantage
in
each cavity and crevice of each other's borderlands went
under the hammer of steam power
in a
few weeks of brutal resculpturing.
second
'military revolution', equivalent to that
cannon
at
seemed
that a
dawn of the Renaissance and Reformation, stood at hand. Blood, iron and more copious than any of which the richest king had ever promised victories swifter and more total even than those which had been
the
gold - available in quantities
disposed -
It
brought about by gunpowder and mobile
achieved by Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.
18
EVERY
Such
victories
A SOLDIER
were promised but could not necessarily be delivered;
do not
materia] riches
MAN
avail if the
human
qualities necessary to
for the greatest
animate them are lacking.
But here too the nineteenth century had wrought a sea-change. The eighteenth-century
had been a poor creature, the liveried servant of his king, sometimes - in Russia and Prussia - an actual serf delivered into the state's service by his feudal master. Uniform soldier
was, indeed, a livery, which reigning monarchs conspicuously did not wear. Those
who
mark of surrendered rights. It meant that they had succumbed to 'want or hardship', the most common impulse to enlistment; that they had changed sides (turncoat prisoners of war formed large contingents in most armies); that they had accepted mercenary service under foreign colours (as tens of thousands of Swiss, Scots, Irish, Slavs did bore
it
as a
and other highlanders and backwoodsmen did throughout the 'plea-bargained' out of
imprisonment
simply that they had failed to run almost the rarest
if
fast
enough from the
they had
ancien regime); that
crime or attachment for
for petty
civic debt;
or
The volunteer was
press-gang.
many of his comrades-in-arms were
the best of soldiers. Because so
unwilling warriors, the penalties for desertion were draconian and the code of discipline ferocious.
The eighteenth-century
for indiscipline,
both
sorts
The nineteenth-century was.
A
willing, often
soldier
was flogged
soldier,
by
was
contrast,
be performed with cheerfulness
from mid-century onwards and and foremost, but to
follow
suit.
nevertheless. Perhaps
a its
of duty and hanged
man who wanted
most
most advanced
Austria, with the smaller difficult
is
tangible manifestation
a conscript
be what he
who
but one
obedience. This was the case
as well as
change of attitude
to
subtraction from his years of
a just
in the armies of the
and
also France
Such
a
an enthusiastic, soldier, he was usually
accepted his term of (admittedly short) service as liberty, to
for infractions
of offence being loosely interpreted.
to
states
at least
- Prussia
first
and more backward hurrying
document but
real
enough
was the appearance of the regimental
souvenir which began to be manufactured in tens of thousands towards the end of the
nineteenth century. The souvenir, typically in Germany a china drinking mug, decorated with pictures of regimental
members, some couplets of 12th Grenadiers' -
young
soldier
his service
whom
names of the
conscript's fellow platoon
doggerel verse, a salutation to the regiment - 'Here's to the
and the universal superscription
who had been
strikingly different farewell
century, for
usually bore the
life,
'In
memory
of
my
from
that given to the Russian serf conscript
a
place of
This remarkable change of attitude was
honour
in the family
literally
revolutionary.
change were manifold, but the three most important led
directly to the
and the principal slogans of Military service equality.
wrote of the army
its
The
of the eighteenth
the village priest said a requiem mass - bore back his souvenir
time was over to stand in
experience of
service time'.
sent off garlanded with flowers by his neighbours - a
when
home. The
roots of the
French Revolution
ideology: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
became popular
in
the nineteenth century
'Cook's son - Duke's son - son of
Britain sent to fight the
Boers
19
a
in 1900,
first
because
it
was an
belted Earl,' Rudyard Kipling
with
some
accuracy. Popular
PROLOGUE
enthusiasm for the war did sweep
common
classes into the ranks as
all
soldiers; but they
were, of course, volunteers. Universal conscription in the European armies took
- in Prussia from
willy-nilly
them
two or three
to service for
and fluctuations
enlisted
classes
1814, in Austria
1867, in France
There were variations
years.
in
from
all
classes
from 1889 - and bound
in the
proportion of annual
of service. There were alleviations of
the length
obligation for the better educated; typically, for example, high-school graduates served
only one year and were then transferred to the reserve principle of universal obligation that generally held
as
potential officers. Yet the
good was
also accepted as persisting.
Reservists during their early years of discharge returned annually to the colours for retraining; as they
Army
Territorial
Home
the
grew older they moved
in France);
and
from manoeuvres
military first
wartime reserve
Germany,
(Landvvehr in
manhood were
of able
spent on the
Guard. Reserve training was borne with good humour, even regarded
of all-male holiday. Freud, friend
to a
their final years
with
life
its
list
of
as a sort
reserve medical officer in the Austrian army, writing to a
a
in 1886,
observed
inescapable "must"
is
that
good
'it
would be
ungrateful not to admit that
for neurasthenia.
It all
disappeared in the
week.'
Conscription was also relatively egalitarian in
its
outreach. Jews, like Freud, were as
Habsburg army automatically became
liable as Gentiles
and
qualified; in the
German army, Jews could become
in the
officers if educationally
were barred by
reserve officers but
regimental anti-Semitism from holding regular commissions, though Bismarck's financier,
managed
Bleichroder, officer
to get his
who recommended
a regular
commission
Hitler for his Iron Cross 1st
This was 'emancipation' in universality
son
its
and
military aspect,
of conscription swept up
it
in the
Class was
household
were
also to
Habsburg
lands, Poles
applied to it
all at
the
same moment of
their lives
and
fraternity.
in principle treated
all
forged bonds of brotherhood young Europeans had never before
compulsory education, their families
and
by being
All,
be Austrians, Germans or Frenchmen.
Conscription was an instrument not only of equality but also of
way,
The
The
applied not only to Jews.
ever)' nationality in the
Alsace-Lorrainers in German), Basques, Bretons and Savoyards in France. soldiers,
cavalry.
a Jewish reserve officer.
a
Because
in the
felt.
it
same
Universal
simultaneous innovation, was currently taking children outside
and plunging them into
a
common
experience of learning. Conscription
took young adults from their locality and plunged them into the experience of growing up - confronting them with the challenge of separation from home, making new friends, dealing with enemies, adjusting to authority, wearing strange clothes, eating unfamiliar food,* shifting for themselves.
not
of
least
nation',
much
'Often very
in the
It
was
a
genuine
rite
de passage, intellectual,
physical. Nineteenth-century armies, told that they
emotional and,
were 'schools of the
took on many of the characteristics of contemporary schools, not only testing and
arm\ intake day
all,
1.4.
better in the
army than
at
The contemporary Flemish
home.
In the 1860s the
French national intake was
1.2
conscripts' refrain, reflecting the hardship of peasant
army meat and soup without working.'
20
kilograms, the life,
ran: 'Every
EVERY
MAN
A SOLDIER
heightening literacy and numeracy but also teaching swimming, athletics and cross-
country sports
as well as
Germany, was
physical education in ideas
de
were propagated while in
Joinville,
which was
shooting and the martial
in
military
lived
life,
Western world. The healthy
round the campfire and under
German youth movement and
eventually develop into the ideals of the
rite
de passage
of the Bataillon
Captain Caprilli founded a school of military horsemanship
Italy
Boy Scouts and so make
military training; his
specialist athletics instructors
to transform the art of riding throughout the
outdoorsmanship of
The
on Prussian
a potent influence
France through the
Turnvater Jahn, the pioneer of
arts.
way back
its
and
into social
military
of universal conscription was not
by
life
a
canvas,
the code of the
convergent route.
a liberating. experience for
Professor William McNeill has pointed out, individuals drafted into the society
which was
plough and the
rapidly urbanising
and
would
all.
As
army from
a
marching them away from the
industrialising,
pump,
village
found themselves
in a simpler society than the
soldier lost almost
all
one they knew
in civil
life.
The
private
personal responsibility. Ritual and routine took care of nearly
every working hour. Simple obedience to the orders that punctuated that routine
from time
to time,
and
inherent
anxieties
set activity off in
in
incontinently in urban society, alternatives as to
attention.
how
Paradoxical as
it
where
made
is
direction, offered release
-
leaders,
anxieties rival
loyalties
of one's time competed
living
from the
multiplied
that
and
practical
insistently for
may sound, escape from freedom was
not yet been able to assume
Even when allowance
rival
part
at least
young men
liberation, especially for
who had
spend
to
some new
decision-making
personal
often a real
under very rapidly changing conditions,
fully adult roles.
for the force
of this percipient observation, however,
the ultimate importance of universal conscription in changing attitudes to military service
was
that
it
ultimately connected with
liberty,
in
its
political if not
its
personal sense. The old
armies had been instruments of oppression of the people by kings; the to be instruments of the people's liberation from
narrowly institutional in the
states
kings,
even
if
new
armies were
that liberation
was
to
be
which retained monarchy. The two ideas were not
mutually contradictory. The French National Convention had decreed in 1791 that 'the battalion organised in
each
district shall
"The French people united in the
United
a
banner bearing the
States Constitution that 'the right to bear arms',
guarantee of direct freedoms.
had
be united under
articulated the
soldier a citizen, or
Two
shall
in legal
a
years earlier the revolutionary leader, Dubois-Crance,
never have
The tension between the and extracting them
once made common, was
congruent proposition: 'Each citizen should be
we
inscription:
against tyranny".' That decree encapsulated the idea inherent
a soldier,
and each
a constitution.'
principles of winning freedoms by revolutionary assault
form by performance of
21
military duty
was
to transfix Euro-
PROLOGUE
pean
much
political life for
of the nineteenth century. The excess of freedom
won
by force
of arms in France provoked the reaction of Thermidor and diverted the fervour of the ex-
The
tremist sans-culottes into conquest abroad.
1795 firmly under the control of their
then had the
chists)
victories
officers,
of the 'revolutionary' armies
many of them,
(after
returned monar-
ironically,
of provoking their enemies, particularly the Prussian and
effect
Austrian kings, into decreeing a variation of the levee-en-masse or general conscription, the original manifestation of the
French Revolution
duced popular forces - Landwehr. Landsturm,
home
in
its
military form.
Freischutzen
Such conscription pro-
- to oppose the French on their
territories.
Landwehr and Freischutzen
With Napoleon
safely
on
St
became an embarrassment
with their liberal-minded bourgeois
tended never
to call
on
revolutions',
when
their
soon
as
as their
of reserve contingents, and
officers, to the status
in-
their services again. Nevertheless they survived until 1848, 'year
members
actively participated
in
of
the street battles for con-
Vienna and Berlin - where the uprising was put
stitutional rights in
work was done.
Helena, Prussia and Austria consigned these popular forces,
down by
the Prussian
Guard, the ultimate bastion of traditional authority. They had meanwhile been replicated
whose National Guard would keep
in France,
under the Second Empire and, against the regular
would
after the
alive the 'liberal' principle in military life
withdrawal of the Prussians from Paris in
army of the conservative Third Republic
cost the lives of 20,000 of
its
in a
bloody
1871, rise
commune which
members.
'No conscription without representation' The
struggle
of these
citizen forces with the armies
of reaction, though ending in physical
defeat, nevertheless indirectly exerted the pressure
which extracted
constitutional
and
from the conservative European regimes. The demand for such rights was and the impot du sang - 'blood tax', as conscription laws were called in France -
electoral rights in the air;
could not be levied
neighbour
states
if
constitutional rights continued to
were enlarging
be refused,
when
particularly
armies and reserves through the
their
process of
conscription. Prussia, the military pace-setter, granted a constitution in 1849, as a direct result
of the
institute a
vote to
it was caused by armed revolutionaries the previous year. By 1880 both German Empire had introduced universal male suffrage, and France would
fright
France and the
common
all
males
three-year term of service as a quid pro quo in 1882. Austria extended the
in 1907;
even Russia, most autocratic of
states
and most exigent
in
its
conscription laws, which imposed a term of four years, had created a representative
assembly in 1905, following the defeat of
subsequent revolution of
its
army by the Japanese
'No conscription without representation' had, of European politics
indeed
a
tax,
in the half-century
on the
in
Manchuria and the
that year.
individual's time
in short,
become an unspoken
slogan
before the First World War; since conscription if
not money,
22
it
exactly
is
echoed the American
EVERY
colonists' challenge to
granted to fettered
George
III
men
or most, free
all,
MAN
A SOLDIER
in 1776. Paradoxically, in the states
where votes were
but where military service was
restricted to those
by 'want or hardship' - the United
and
States
Britain
still
-
passion for
a strange
volunteer soldiering seized their citizenry during the great era of military expansion
through conscription in nineteenth-century Europe. The opening stages of the American
War could not have been
Civil
fought without the prior existence of a network of entirely
amateur regiments, with names
like the Liberty Rifles
of New Jersey, the Mechanic Phalanx
of Massachusetts, the Republican Blues of Savannah, Georgia, and the Palmetto Guard of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1859 a nationwide war scare caused by French naval
expansion had brought into being
Tennyson's
though much
a similar
stirring verses, Form, Riflemen, Form,
amateur military
service. This
was
a serious
not stop them designing and buying their
had helped
network
larger
embarrassment to the government,
own
in Britain.
to call 200,000 civilians into
who
could
uniforms but was reluctant to see or help
them arm. They did so none the the
less;
and the government,, which
establishment of public order
energetically carried out the
them with
from the
rifles
like
all
others in Europe since
beginning of the eighteenth century had
disarmament of its population, was eventually obliged
to issue
The issue of the modern rifle, rather than the significant. The musket, like the uniform livery of the
state arsenals.
obsolete musket, was crucially dynastic armies that used
the
at
it,
was
a
mark of servitude. So
short was
its
range that
its
effect
could be harnessed to battle-winning purposes only by massing the musketeers in dense rank,
and keeping them 'closed up'
individual
skill. It
could
kill a
at
common
500 yards; in the hands of a marksman
Communards were
convinced, as
pike point. The
it
could
Thomas
rifle,
without
soldier,
kill
by contrast, was
much
a general at 1000 yards.
Carlyle put
it,
a
weapon of
discrimination by
that 'the rifle
its
Hence
made
all
user, at
the Paris
men
tall'.
A
good as any man. The British Rifle Volunteers, in weapons gave them, chose to dress not in the tight scarlet of the soldiers of the line, enlisted from 'want and hardship', but in the loose tweed shooting-suits of country token of the
rifleman was as
gentlemen; to that garb some added 'Garibaldi' revolutionaries.
In different
them.
No
to clothe
this
the armies of Europe (with the
would arm
badge of military proficiency would be worn with more ostentation than the
Jager in Austria, chasseurs in
themselves
however,
modernity of the
all
states to
rifle earliest
the soldiers
free
to
war
which they belonged. They were
men who,
in free activity
23
would
Schiitzen in
arrogate to
of modernity.
who marched
and equipped, armed with weapons of unparalleled
were
- designated as
France, greenjackets in Britain -
a particular esprit de corps as soldiers
In truth,
that they
all
1914, just as the long-range, high-velocity rifle
marksman's; and those units which had carried the
Germany,
or the 'wideawake' hats of the 1848
of cut and colour - field-grey or khaki -
varieties
grousemoor or deerstalker garb would come exception of the French) by
shirts
status their
on the
in 1914 fit,
lethality,
formed
a
badge of the
strong, faultlessly
clothed
and inspired by the belief
battlefield,
would win prompt and
PROLOGUE
decisive
Above
victories.
No
were numerous.
they
all
society
on
had ever
earth
proportionately put forth soldiers in such numbers as Europe did in August 1914. The
German
intelligence section of the
Great General Staff had evolved a rule of
thumb that some
every million of a nation's population could support two divisions of soldiers, or 30,000 men.
The
rule of
thumb was narrowly borne
out on mobilisation: France, with 40
million population, mobilised 75 infantry divisions (and 10 of cavalry); Germany, with 57 million, 87 divisions (and 11 of cavalry); Austria-Hungary, with 46 million, 49 divisions (and 11
of cavalry); and Russia, with 100 million, 114 divisions (and 36 of cavalry). Since each was
formed from
Lower
Silesia,
from the
In the
of Linz
(Hitler's
home
town), the Russian
home
districts
1st,
2nd and 3rd from the
of their young
manhood
Baltic
overnight.
some 20 million Europeans, nearly 10 per cent of the donned military drab and shouldered rifles to take and most believed that they would be back 'before the
fortnight of August 1914
first
populations of the combatant the train to war. All had leaves
9th and 10th Divisions, for example, from
the French 19th and 20th from the Pas de Calais, the Austrian 3rd and 5th
vicinity
- their departure denuded their
states
been
states,
told
fell'.
It
would be four
battlefields
the
German
a particular locality - the
fruit
forces
some
years
five
autumns before the survivors returned, leaving on the
The
vast
crop of fit and strong young
men which formed
of nineteenth-century Europe's economic miracle had been consumed by the
which gave them
had 'turned over' divisions
and
10 million dead.
their
life
and
The
health.
personnel
at least
had suffered comparable
original divisions
twice and in for
losses,
its
new
in 1914
cases three times. War-raised
conscription
the
throughout the war's course, not only consuming military age but also spreading
some
which had mobilised
classes as
machine drove on
each came annually of
jaws to swallow the older, younger and less
fit
whom
it
would have rejected in peacetime. Ten million Frenchmen passed through the military machine between 1914 and 1918; out of each nine enlisted, four became casualties. German fatal
casualties
exceeded
3 million, Austrian a million, British a million,
which entered the war only 600,000; the seize
in
May
1915
those of
and fought on the narrowest of
dead of the Russian army, whose collapse
Italy,
fronts,
over
in 1917 permitted the Bolsheviks to
power, have never accurately been counted. The graves of the Russian dead, and
those of the
Germans and
Carpathians to the
Baltic;
the Western Front
Austrians
were concentrated
cemeteries which have
who opposed
those of the French, in a
them, were scattered from the
British, Belgians
narrow
belt
and Germans
of frontier
become major and permanent landmarks
Those constructed by the
British
-
for
which Edwin Lutyens, the
unidentified dead,
'A
liveth for
soldier of the Great War,
fell
on
forming
in that countryside.
great neo-classicist,
designed the architecture and Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved Great
wrote the funerary inscriptions, 'Their name
who
territory
War
parent,
evermore' and, on the tombs of the - are places of
known unto God'
heartrending beauty. 'Cities
of the dead' they have been
called,
24
though 'gardens of the dead'
is
more
apt;
EVERY
MAN
A SOLDIER
they are supreme achievements of that romantic landscape
donations to world culture. But they were
filled
art
which
from zones which
is
one of England's
in their
time were
more
cities
of
activity,
emotional and
than any Europe had
known
since the French Revolution. 'The front cannot but attract
of the
living, foci
intellectual as well as physical,
the French Jesuit philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, had written, 'because
between what you
the extreme boundary
it
aware of and what
are obviously
is
in
is
intense us,'
one way
still
in the
process of formation. Not only do you see these things that you experience nowhere else
but you also see emerge from within yourself an underlying stream of
freedom
that
is
be found hardly anywhere
to
else in ordinary
life.'
clarity,
energy and
Teilhard de Chardin's
rhetoric harks back directly to that of the barricades, those of 1871, 1848, ultimately of 1789;
and with good reason. The trenches of the Western Front were indeed Seeger, a poet
and victim of the trenches,
called
them
the emancipated youth of Europe levelled their citizens, in
given these values to
all,
meaningfully only in the
of nations
state to gift
Even
nationality alone;
when
freely given to
dawn
at its its
their status as free
The nineteenth century had
which he belonged. Revolution,
of people.
as well as
internationalised.
fraternity.
but nationalism had persuaded each citizen that they inhered
genuinely believed, would be a a fraternity
symbols of
rifles,
defence of the values of liberty, equality,
barricades. Alan
'disputed barricades' - across which
values
it
came
none
had,
It
had manifested to be
whose
a gift
all,
the
less,
itself as
more widely
its
fathers
had quite
would be
effect
to foster
never been successfully
the dynamic of a single
diffused, their transmission, by a
bizarre perversion, succeeded only in reinforcing the amour-propre of each nation
which they rooted. The French Revolution persuaded the French they were unique in their devotion to equality;
commitment
to fraternity;
already possessed
more
it
its
its
as
it
still
among
does -
that
influence reinforced the Germans'
proclamation of liberty convinced the British that they
fully
than latecomer claimants to their freeborn rights ever
could.
The The
states to
which the
First
fruits of victory
World War brought both
victory
and
its
fruits
- France and
Britain foremost - were able to adjust the sense of suffering they had undergone to their
belief in the higher values that their national psyches.
had animated
For each of them,
their
war-making without grave damage to
in a real but
unexpressed material dimension, the
World War had been worth the sacrifice. Despite the human and, in the case of France, material cost, the war had re-energised and expanded their home economies, even First
if
much
goods Britain
in
overseas investment had been liquidated to purchase raw materials and finished the process;
and France,
imperial
powers
(a
more
important,
in that order,
major factor
in
it
had
greatly
remained
expanded
in 1914 the
motivating
Germany
distribution of the defeated powers' possessions
25
their overseas possessions.
most important of the world's
to attack them); by 1920, after the
under League of Nations mandate,
their
PROLOGUE
empires had become larger
added
and Lebanon
Syria
still.
to
France, already dominant in North and
Mediterranean holdings.
its
had ever seen, extended
imperial association the world
colonies of German Tanganyika, thus making the the Cape' a reality;
at
same time
the
it
Britain,
West
Africa,
head of the
largest
by the addition to
dream of an
its
East African
Africa British 'from Cairo to
acquired the mandates for Palestine and
it
ex-Turkish territories, and so established
its
power over
a 'fertile crescent'
Iraq,
running from
Egypt to the head of the Persian Gulf.
Crumbs from West
Africa
the table of the
and Papua
islands to Japan - a
German and Turkish empires
South Africa and Australia, Rhodes to
to
sop which only time would reveal
as
ill
fell
Italy,
elsewhere; South-
Germany's
considered.
Italy
Pacific
and Japan
allies picked up crumbs too. would feed dangerous rancours in the years to come. But the rancour of these unfavoured victors was as nothing compared to that of the vanquished. Both Austria and Turkey, ancient contestants for master)' in Europe's middle lands, would develop the resignation to adapt to reduced circumstances. Germany would not. Its sense of humiliation bit deep. Not only had it lost the trappings of an embryo colonial power as well as the marches of its historic advance into central Europe in West Prussia and Silesia. It had also lost command of a strategic zone so extensive and central that as late as July 1918 its possession had promised victory, and thereby control of a new empire in the European heartland.
believed they deserved more, particularly since the greater
Their sense of being skimped
On the
13 July 1918, the eve
of the Second Battle of the Marne,
whole of western Russia up
the Black Sea
of Russian
at
which touched the
Rostov-on-Don. enclosed Kiev,
civilisation,
and cut off from the
population, one-third of line,
to a line
its
agricultural land
capital rest
German armies occupied
Baltic outside
Petrograd and
of the Ukraine and historic centre
of the country one-third of Russia's
and more than one-half of its
industry.
The
moreover, was one not of conquest but of annexation, secured by an international
treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk in
Georgia
in Transcaucasia
plain of the
Po
in Italy.
and
March. German expeditionary forces operated
as far
south
as the Bulgarian frontier
Through her Austrian and Bulgarian
satellites
as far east as
with Greece and the
Germany controlled power as far away
the whole of the Balkans and, by her alliance with Turkey, extended her as
northern Arabia and northern
neutral, while
-
Persia.
In Scandinavia,
Germany was helping Finland
as Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia were
to gain
its
Sweden remained
a friendly
independence from the Bolsheviks
also shortly to do. In distant south-east Africa a
its size. And in the west, on German armies stood within fifty miles of Paris. In five great offensives, begun the previous March, the German high command had regained all the territory contested with France since the First Battle of the Marne fought four years earlier.
German
colonial
the war's
A
army kept
critical front,
in play
an Allied army ten times
the
promised to carry its spearheads to the French capital and win the war. months later the war had indeed been won, but by the French, British and Americans, not by Germany. Her soldiers, beaten back to the Belgian frontier by the Allied sixth offensive
Five
26
EVERY
MAN
A SOLDIER
November of
counter-offensives of July, August and September, had learned in armistice their leaders
had accepted, had marched back across the Rhine
to
home
the
territory
and had there demobilised themselves. Within days of their
return, the largest army in the numbering over 200 divisions, had returned its rifles and steel helmets to store and dispersed homeward. Bavarians, Saxons, Hessians, Hanoverians, Prussians, even the
world,
still
immortals of the Imperial Guard, decided overnight, in defiance of every imperative by
which the German Empire and the European preceding
towns and
them
fifty
villages
had been
and resume
which since 1914 had been empty of young
in cohorts; but the Berlin
availability
military system
years, to stop their ears to superior orders
men
built
civilian
over the
life.
Cities,
suddenly repossessed
government, which had counted unreflectively on the
of boundless military force for a hundred years, disposed of none whatsoever.
The Freikorps phenomenon States
cannot survive in
This truth was
a military
vacuum; without armed forces
soon discovered by the
socialists
who came
a state
power
to
does not
after the
fall
exist.
of the
committed though they were to popular instead of autocratic government. Confronted by armed communist insurrection and Russian Bolshevik intervention - in Kaiser,
Bavaria, in the Baltic
government took
and North Sea
military help
and the choice was not lifelong socialist,
delicate. Friedrich Ebert,
announced,
have liked the soldiers
'I
whom the
really
congregated
at
a type
Cape Taenarum
the Greek city-states - landless
them during the
crisis
threw
republic's
It
German
was not
Chancellor of the
his way.
first
belong to their homes
he was one of them - were
it.
hate the Social Revolution like
von Salomon wrote of the young They would never
ports, in Berlin itself- the
wherever they could find
men
The
again.'
Peloponnese
men
new
republic and a
but he can scarcely
would never
let
them
go.
of whom he spoke - and
great military convulsion.
They had
ad after the wars of Germany had been full of
in the fifth century
looking for mercenary hire.
Thirty Years War, as
Democratic
Social
time to be choosy
'War had taken hold of them', Ernst
protectors, 'and
thrown up by any
in the
sin!';
a
had the whole of Europe
after the
fall
of Napoleon,
when many had made a living by going to fight for the Greeks in the war of independence against the Turks. In November and December 1918 they called themselves Frontkdmpfer 'front fighters',
men who had
learned in the trenches a
way of life from which
the onset of
peace could not wean them. General Ludwig von Maercker, organiser of the republic's Freikorps,
around the
spoke of forming
flag for the
'a
vast militia
first
of the
of bourgeoisie and peasants, grouped
re-establishment of order'. His vision harked back to a pre-
in which artisans and farmers united to repress anarchy and no such system had ever existed. The Freikorps were a manifestation of a much more modern principle - the post-1789 belief that a political being was a citizen armed with a rifle which he was trained to use in defence of the nationality to which he
industrial military
system
sedition. In truth
belonged and the ideology
that nationality
embodied.
27
PROLOGUE
was
It
Corps
significant that Maercker's original Freikorps, the
(das
included a
Landesjagerkorps),
Freiwillige
of 'trusted men'
tier
intermediate between officers and rank-and-file, and that
of a volunteer corps must never
that 'the leader
man's honour'. The
in
Landesjagerkorps,
ultimately military in origin, that citizenship
should be freely given and mitigated by the
inflict a
short,
to
him
punishment capable of touching
Maercker's original in addition, Freikorps
historic claims to
Freikorps
a
the idea that statehood was
was validated by
as a warrior.
(Vertrauensleute)
military service, that service
duty of obedience should always be
Here was the ultimate
realisation
philosophy proclaimed by the fathers of revolution in France 130 years
political
Rifle
code stipulated
disciplinary
its
embodied
that the serviceman's
honour owed
Volunteer Territorial
was rapidly replicated
all
new German
over the
of the
earlier.
republic;
sprang up in the regions over which Deutschtum ('Germanness') had
dominate,
in the
borderlands disputed with the
new
of Poland, in
state
the Baltic lands winning their independence from Russia and in the German-speaking
remnants of the Habsburg Empire. The a direct reference to the
adopted by such
popular units raised
indicative of their ethos: the Rifle Brigade, the
titles
German
Freikorps
in Prussia against
- the
Napoleon
Rifle Division, the Territorial Rifle
word was
in 1813-14 -
Corps, the Border
Guard-Cavalry Rifle Division, the Yorck von Wartenburg Volunteer
Corps. There were
many
others,
and some would go
to
form
itself
were
Rifle
brigades, regiments or
would eventually allow the on clandestine existence as the political militias of the parties of the extreme right in Weimar Germany; their defeated leftwing equivalents would survive as the camouflaged street-fighting units of the Red Front. The Freikorps phenomenon was not confined to the German lands alone. Wherever
battalions of the
German
'hundred thousand men' army
republic. Others
would
naturally disband but take
peoples were divided by ideology,
of Russia in the era of Civil War,
was awash with
knew how
rifles,
that Versailles
it
as the}
-
were
in Finland
with rootless and rancorous
to lead them; but
it
was
in Italy that
men and
the
in
Hungary, to say nothing
It
with freebooting officers
who
most purposive form.
Italy
its
had benefited
little
by
its
blood
the acquisition of Trieste, the South Tyrol and the Dodecanese islands was
recompense
for 600,000 dead.
war drove post-war and
liberal
took
it
seethed with rancours, diplomatic and domestic. sacrifice;
and
appeared, and often hydra-headed. The post-war world
The
Italy into
religious alike,
Fascio
di
an economic
were unable
the Freikorps-type Benito Mussolini,
problems. His
survivors benefited from victory not at
who
Combattimento
to deal.
crisis
all.
The
with which the traditional
The only leader
to
little
costs of parties,
promise salvation was
advocated military-style solutions to the country's
drew
its
activists
from ex-servicemen, among
whom
(stormtroopers) were foremost. Their programme, proclaimed on the eve of on Rome' which delivered the government to the Fascists in October 1922, was 'to hand over to the King and Army a renewed Italy'. The idea of the army as a social model - centrist, hierarchical and supremely nationalist - was to energise politics over a wide area of Europe throughout the post-war
former
arditi
the 'March
years.
It
took no root in the great victor nations, France and
28
Britain,
nor
in the settled
MAN
EVERY
A SOLDIER
bourgeois democracies of northern Europe and Scandinavia. But
underdeveloped countries on the European
in the
There the
strains
it
proved deeply
of the dismembered empires and
attractive in the defeated nations, in the successor states
fringe, particularly Portugal
and Spain.
of adaptation to democracy or self-government and to the unfamiliar
market forces of a suddenly unstable international economy seemed best solved by a halt to
competition between
and often uniformed
militaristic
between the Russia,
classes, regions
military
and
where much of the
to a
command. The polarisation of politics would even manifest itself in Bolshevik
high
political
principles
political
calling
and minorities and consigning authority
victorious revolutionaries' bureaucratic energies after the defeat
of the Whites in 1920 would be devoted to emasculating the Red
Army
an alternative
as
political force.
Uniforms and then
hovered
them
of rank were pushed to the margin of political
titles
Stalin's Russia.
dominated the
In Italy they
life
in Lenin's
poised to occupy the stage at the moment the drama of events gave Elsewhere - in Hungary, in Poland, in Portugal, in Spain - career colonels
in the wings,
their cue.
and generals took over and exercised power without the hesitations in states of
owed
they
liberal tradition felt
that their equivalents
to the conventions of representative rule.
strange transvaluation of the ideal of 1789 took possession of the public countries. Military service
was seen no longer form
validated his citizenship but as the
and took a
and
and Germany they
centre; in Austria
part in
its
which the
in
functions. 'Every citizen a soldier
and even beneficent meaning
creative
as the
in
life
A
of these
token by which the individual
citizen
tendered his duty to the
and every soldier
a citizen'
state
had borne
society like that of France before the
a
Revolution, where the two states of being were historically and sharply separate. In societies
where they had become
supplanted
be
undifferentiated, soldierly obedience
civic rights in the relationship
in Italy after 1922; so
No European
it
would
comprehensively and
be,
all
between masses and government. So
Germany
fatally, in
too easily it
came
to
after 1933.
of his time had more potently imbibed the soldierly ethic than Adolf
of the Habsburg Empire, he had evaded conscription into its army because that entailed service with the non-Germans - Slavs and Jews - whom he despised. Hitler.
As
a subject
August 1914 offered him the chance to
and he eagerly seized
it.
He
throughout the war, an event greatest of
all
volunteer in
that
produced
in
him
good 'a
a unit
of the German army
and served bravely stupendous impression - the soldier
experiences. For that individual interest - the interest of one's
could be subordinated to the
people demonstrated
him
enlist as a
quickly proved himself a
as intensely as
in
common
overwhelming
any of those
Instead he found a position
who
fashion.'
joined
The
defeat of
a Freikorps
which better suited
November
his talents
Republic's VII District
Command,
29
1918 outraged
and exactly encapsulated
would
himself the supreme practitioner. In the spring of 1919 he was appointed
Weimar
ego -
- as he might himself have done.
interpenetration of political by military principles of which he
the
own
interest - that the great heroic struggle of our
eventually
that
make
a Bildungsoffizier in
with the task of instructing soldiers of the
PROLOGUE
new army the
army
in their
duty of obedience to the
purpose of inoculating the
for the
state. It
men
was
a propagandist's job, created
against contagion
by
by
socialist, pacifist
or
word of manifold meanings ranging from 'formation' through 'education' to 'culture' and 'civilisation'. The self-taught and dreamily romantic Hitler would have been aware of all of them and conscious of his responsibility not merely to democratic ideas.
warn
Bildung
is
a
dangerous influences but also to form minds and
against
attitudes.
It
can have
him not at all that the army command in Munich simultaneously encouraged him to join an embryo nationalist movement, the German Workers' Party, nor that his superior, Captain Ernst Rohm, not only fed it with members drawn from the Freikorps but surprised
also joined
it
himself; so too did other veterans of Hitler's wartime regiment, Lieutenant
Rudolf Hess and Sergeant-Major Max Amann. soldiers
and
Freikorps
men
its
communist
antithesis, the
Combattimento, the Nazi Party outset.
It
chose brown
quickly organised the toughest ex-
into a party street-fighting force, the Sturmabteilung (SA).
the essential elements of the Nazi Party
Like
Rohm
as
was
its
were
Red
Front, and
Italian equivalent, the Fascio
its
military in ethos, organisation
uniform colour, from
that
on the march differentiated
it
it
On
parade
it
of the victorious British army, rifle
regiments
formed ranks behind legionary banners; rifles
would bring it revolution would abolish the and subordinate every German
but, in Hitler's vision, political victory
The triumph oi the National Socialist between party and army, citizen and soldier, and everything in German) - parliament, bureaucracy, courts, schools, business,
weapons
it
boots, an age-old
stepped out to the beat of the drum. Only the absence of
from an arm) proper;
di
and appearance from the
whose Sam Browne belt it also adopted; from the elite mountain borrowed the peaked ski-cap; and its members wore knee-length symbol of the rough-riding warrior.
By 1920
in place.
also.
distinction
industry,
trades unions, even churches - to the Fuhrerprinzip, the principle of military leadership.
30
FOMENTING
WORLD WAR Military life
leadership implies military action.
was
government of the German years.
'I
The
first
to lead a Putsch - an attempted military
thought of nothing else than
a coup d'etat.'
against the constitutional
He had been contemplating
republic.
can confess quite calmly', he disclosed
public act of Hitler's political
coup -
at
Munich
in 1936, 'that
During those years Hitler had led
a
for five
it
from 1919
to 1923
double
I
life.
As the leader of a party seeking members and support he had spoken constantly, tirelessly - and electrifyingly - to any audience that he could command throughout the area of his political
base in Bavaria.
World War, of her
the
presumptions of the
German
He spoke
of the 'criminals of Versailles', of Germany's sufferings in
losses of territory, of the iniquity of the
new
states
disarmament terms, of the
- Poland most of all - which had been raised on historic
of the extortion of reparations, of the national shame, of the part played by
soil,
the enemies within - Jews, Bolshevists, Jewish Bolshevists and their liberal republican
puppets -
in bringing
Germany
to defeat in 1918.
On
Day' in Munich, in a speech which might stand for
25 January 1923, all
his others,
at
the
first
Nazi 'Party
he proclaimed:
'First
of
German Fatherland, November Down with perpetrators of the crime [the must be done away with. the We signing of the armistice). And here the great message of our movement begins. all,
the arch-enemies of German freedom, namely, the betrayers of the .
.
.
.
must not
forget that
government
in Berlin]
message: that
.
.
'Germany disarmed was prey
fought honourably, suffered and died
to the lawless
neighbours included the Poles, against
defend the Reich
Slav
states,
.
.
German manhood had
had ended by denying the succeeding generation the
to
.
between us and those betrayers of the people [the republican there are two million dead.' This was the central theme of his
territory in 1920,
right to bear arms.
demands of her predatory
whom
in a
As
war a
that
result,
neighbours.' Those
the Freikorps had fought a frontier campaign
and behind them the Bolshevik Russians and the new
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia,
31
as
well
as
the
unstable remnants of the
PROLOGUE
Habsburg Empire, Hungary and
Austria,
which had been threatened by communist
takeover and might be again. They also included the French, the most rapacious of the victors,
who had
not only taken back the Reich provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, but
maintained an army in the Rhineland and openly threatened to use military force to back
up
their
demands
the Allies
demands. once
for
full
payment of the form of
Versailles in the
at
reparations.
Hitler endlessly reiterated, could only
be
set aside
100,000-man force allowed
again, not the paltry
stripped
which had been determined by The menace of these threats and
costs of the war,
of tanks and aeroplanes and almost of
commensurate
it
when Germany had
under the Treaty of
artillery,
Versailles,
but a true national army
with that of the largest and most populous
in size
an army
state
on
the continent.
This was a message that magnetised Hitler's audiences, which grew steadily in size
throughout 1919-23.
He had become
increased, so did the
numbers who heeded them.
1932, 'to the time
when
with
spoke before eleven, twelve,
how
after a year
I
had
won
six
a brilliant
other
speaker and, as his power with words cast
'I
unknown men
I
my
eyes back', he was to say in
founded
thirteen, fourteen, twenty, thirty,
[the
members of the movement,
sixty-four
which has today been created, when
a
stream of millions
German
Nazi
persons.
fifty I
when
Party],
When
must confess
I
recall
I
that that
flowing into our movement,
is
The stream of millions had not yet begun to flow in 1923; his followers were still only numbered in thousands. They responded ecstatically, however, to his call for revenge. 'It cannot be', he said at Munich in September 1922, 'that two million Germans should have fallen in vain and that afterwards one should sit down at the same table as friends with traitors. No, we do not pardon, we represents something unique in
demand -
Some of them
vengeance!'
other side of Hitler's double
Republic
as
a
life
was
conspirator against
uniformed men, with access moreover. Hitler believed
it
to
also
as it.
history.'
responded
to his call for violent action; for the
an organiser of a
By 1923 the
'parallel'
Sturmabteilung
army within the Weimar (SA)
numbered
had the promise of support by the legitimate army of the
the Bavarian division of the Reichswehr. Hitler had been encouraged in that belief by the division's officers, most importantly by Captain Ernst
who the
until 1923
was
impression that
wing Kampfbund such
also a serving soldier.
army commander
a Putsch
if
the
in
15,000
an ample store of hidden arms, including machine-guns;
Bavaria,
SA and
(Battle League),
its
Rohm,
Through him, but
state,
many of
the future head of the SA,
also because
of the attitude of
General Otto von Lossow, Hitler had formed the
associated militias, together forming the extreme right-
were
to stage a Putsch the
needed was leadership and
it. What would supply the
army would not oppose
a pretext for action. Hitler
leadership - though he conceded the role of figurehead to General Erich Ludendorff, the retired First
World War chief of
staff (technically First
Quartermaster General),
who had
put the Kampfbund under his patronage. The pretext was provided by the French. In January 1923, in order to force the it
insisted
it
German government
to sustain
its
reparations payments, which
was incapable of meeting, the French government sent troops
Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, to extract payment
32
at
source.
to
occupy the
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
This intervention intensified a currency
own
its
treasury to substantiate the
inflation that destroyed
payment
within Germany, in part engineered by
crisis
and
difficulties,
had the
it
effect
of fuelling an
both the working man's purchasing power and the middle
classes'
The value of the mark, which stood at 160,000 to the dollar in July (in 1914 it had exchanged at four), declined to a million to the dollar in August and 130,000 million in savings.
November. Gustav Stresemann, the German Chancellor,
at first
declared a campaign of
passive resistance in the Ruhr, but this did nothing to deter the French, while the
of
illegality
it
and
Rhineland
disobedience.
example
gave encouraged communists in Saxony and Hamburg, separatists in the
former
When,
men
Freikorps
and
Pomerania
in
Prussia
moment had come. On
passive resistance campaign, Hitler decided his
threaten
to
civil
Stresemann announced the end of the
after quelling these disorders,
prearranged public meeting in the Biirgerbrau Keller
8
November,
at a
Munich, which General von
in
Lossow and the Bavarian Commissioner of State had unwisely agreed to attend, Hitler arrived armed, with armed men outside, put Lossow and the other notables under arrest and announced the formation of a new German regime: The government of the
November
criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed.
Government will be nominated will be formed immediately. .
Ludendorff
.
The direction of policy
Rohm
arrival;
A new
National
National
Army
be taken over by me.
National Army.'
Army, the Kampfbund,
building, with Hitler
set
out
and Ludendorff at
and the SA had taken possession of the War Ministry and were awaiting
its
their
interposed between were armed policemen, barring Hitler's way across the
Odeonsplatz. Hitler bargained his way through the
ground, opened
fire,
dying grasp), put
killed the
a bullet into
man
at Hitler's
first
reached the
War
Ministry to find only one other
cordon. The second held
(who pulled
side
Goering, the future
Hitler to the
commander of
Ludendorff untouched. He marched ahead, indifferent
had
will
1923, the nucleus of the National
march on the former Bavarian War Ministry
head.
German
over the leadership of the
will take
Next day, 9 November to
.
A German
very day, here in Munich.
this
in his
the Luftwaffe, but
left
bloodshed about him, but
to the
The German National Army
his side.
at
ground
its
disintegrated.
The immediate consequences of the 'Beer
were
Hall Putsch'
banal:
nine of the
conspirators were tried; Ludendorff was acquitted and Hitler was sentenced to five years'
imprisonment, of which he served only nine months,
Rudolf Hess (an old comrade of Hitler's regiment) the Kampf.
The long-term consequences of the
speech to the court, first
a
was the police and not the
when is
Reichsvvehr',
he
had
a
of his
deeper
political manifesto, Mein
significance. In his closing
speech reported throughout Germany and which made him,
time in his career as a demagogue,
'The
trial
long enough to dictate to
just
text
Reichsvvehr,
said, 'stands as
the Reichsvvehr will stand
growing from day to day.
our
at
...
I
a national figure, Hitler
the army, which had fired
untarnished as before. side, officers
and men.
expressed his
on him and the
One .
.
.
day the hour
it
Kampfbund. will
come
The arm) we have formed
nourish the proud hope that one day the hour
33
for the
relief that
will c<
ime
PROLOGUE
when
grow
these rough companies will
to battalions, the battalions to regiments, the
regiments to divisions, that the old cockade will be taken from the mud, that the old will
we
wave
again, that there will
be
a reconciliation at
the
last
great divine
flags
judgement which
are prepared to face.'
This was both Hitler's public and his private verdict
thought to carry through with
it
we
achieve
we should
believed
He
decisively.
succeed.' After the
never again undertook
power
credits for
rearmament. In the ten years
War
aim
this
of the army and the
'We never
Munich
'It
Munich
at
Putsch
in 1933.
he changed
was
tactics
The point of seeking power,
constitutionally through the ballot box.
command
his Putsch tactics.
action against the state but sought instead to
illegal
however, though he did not disclose
on
he disclosed
a revolt against the army,'
publicly,
was
to acquire constitutional
Ministry and budgetary authority to vote military that
followed the
failure
of the
Putsch Hitler
did
nothing to discourage the growth of the SA, which on the eve of his seizure of power in
Nor did he would put off
1933 had reached a strength of 400,000, four times the size of the Reichswehr.
discourage the stormtroopers from believing their
brown, put on
promised
and emerge as soldiers of the 'National Army' he had Munich in 1923. He did, however, take care to see that the discipline, that its boasts of being ready to seize power by force
field-grey
were
deflated,
as military rather
and
that
to
its
be
a
replacement rather than
leaders
above
party'),
were
had provided
in 1930,
and between then and
chancellorship in January 1933 he used
it
Economic
his
stabilised, credit restored, industry revitalised
successfully contained.
The sudden world
a
brought
much of
that
crisis
again
skill.
In
good recover)'. and unemployment a
of 1929, which destroyed credit across
achievement
to
naught.
Unemployment
in
nation of 60 million people, rose from 1,320,000 in September 1929 to 3
million a year
later,
4.5 million the year after that
and over 6 million
in the
first
of 1932. Hardship once again spread through the land and the moderate
Weimar
crisis
assumption of the
Germany had made
The currency had been
Germany,
in the land
with discreet and consummate
the six years after the catastrophic inflation of 1923.
Europe,
power
and the Nazi revolution
Hitler with a false opportunity in 1923.
provided him with opportunity
central
a
to alienate.
Hitler crisis
reinforcement for the
than political figures. After Munich Hitler remained in no doubt that the
he could not afford
Economic
a
were dissuaded from representing themselves
generals, with their creed of Uberparteilichkeit ('being
German
the day came, they
to bring into being in
SA was kept under strict were silenced, that its pretensions Reichswehr
when
that,
two months
parties
of the
Republic, committed to orthodox, pre-Keynesian policies of budget balancing,
could find no means to redress accordingly
at
the
it.
The
parties
parliamentary elections
of the extreme right and
called
as
one government
left
after
benefited
another
collapsed under the pressure of events. In the election of September 1930 the Nazi Party
34
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
polled 18.3 per cent of the vote, but in July 1932
winning 230
seats
and becoming the
it
increased
share to 37.3 per cent,
words of Alan party membership of over a
Bullock, 'with a voting strength of 13,700,000 electors, a
million and a private
its
largest party in the Reichstag. In the
army of 400,000 SA and
SS [Hitler] was the most powerful political on the doors of the Chancellery at the head of the most Germany had ever seen.' The parallel success of the Communist .
.
.
leader in Germany, knocking
powerful
political party
Party positively reinforced Hitler's appeal to those voters
of Bolshevism, which they believed had been 1919; the
when
it
Communist
won
Party
laid
enormously increased
6 million votes
and
The communists too had
hundred
a
who were
terrified
by the spectre
by the violent defeat of the Spartacists in support in 1930 and again
its
in 1932,
seats.
their private army, the
Red
Front,
which fought
street
battles
with the SA that frequently ended in death. Nazi street violence tainted the Nazi
cause;
communist
eight Nazis that
and
- which in July 1932 alone caused the deaths of thirtycommunists - raised the prospect of communist revolution. Though
street violence
thirty
could not win Hitler
a
parliamentary majority - which he failed to achieve by 6.2 per
cent even after the seizure of politicians
in 1933 -
power
accepting Hitler as
into
a
it
could and did frighten the moderate
counterweight
who
might be used to
offset
revolutionary with merely radical extremism, as they believed Nazism to be. In January 1933, after a
number of makeshift
war hero, was advised by
ministries
had
fallen,
President Paul
von Hindenburg, the
his ministers to offer Hitler the chancellorship.
was
installed.
and
military revolutions ever carried
What followed was one of
the
On
most remarkable and complete economic, through by one
Between 30 January 1933 and 7 March 1936 he
man
in a
itself,
and used
expanded German army, the
this force to
effectively restored
nation while he was
Hindenburg
in
still
a
German
prosperity,
rule, re-created,
symbol of the nation's pride
abrogate the oppressive treaties defeat had imposed
humble
August 1934, and
February 1933. The Reichstag
principal
political
comparable space of time.
destroyed not only opposition but also the possibility of opposition to his in a spectacularly
30 January he
fire
soldier.
He had
in
on the
luck, notably in the timely death
of
on the Reichstag building in conjure the fiction of a communist threat
in the incendiary attack
allowed him to
and so panic the moderates into voting with the Nazis for a suspension of parliamentary powers: the Enabling Bill they enacted conferred on Hitler the right to pass binding laws by appending his signature to the necessary document. to parliamentary institutions,
Hindenburg's death opened the way for him to combine the his
own
as
Chancellor under the
authority of both head of
title
of
office
Fiihrer, a position in
government and head of
state.
of the presidency with
which he exercised the
But Hitler did not succeed
economic policy was not based on theory, certainly not Keynesian theory; but it amounted to a programme of deficit budgeting, state investment in public works and state-guaranteed industrial re-equipment of which Keynes between 1933 and 1936 purely by
luck. His
would have approved. This was accompanied by
35
a calculated
destruction of the trade-
PROLOGUE
union movement, which removed
blow
at a
between jobs and workplaces, and the January 1933 and
many of
December 1934
network of motorways
economic
the
new workers
the 3 million
restrictions on free movement of labour on unemployment was startling: between
all
effect
number of unemployed which were the
(Autobahnen)
declined by
more than
half,
finding jobs in the construction of the magnificent
outward symbol of the Nazi
first
miracle.
Moreover, he succeeded
in his plan to
rearm Germany not by rushing bullheaded
at
the disabling clauses of the Versailles Treat) but rather by waiting until the victor nations
gave
him
March
pretext.
1935,
when
Thus he did not announce the reintroduction of conscription the French, beset as before the First
World War by
until
a falling birth-rate,
themselves announced that the) were doubling the length of their conscripts' military service. Hitler
was able
to represent this
move
as a threat to
German
which
security
enlargement of the 100,000-man army; on 17 March he also announced the creation of an air force - another breach of the Versailles Treaty. Even so he blurred his justified the
which would
intentions by offering France a pact
and
that
of his new
air
limit the size
of his army to 300,000
force to 50 per cent of hers. France's refusal permitted
him
men to
fix
larger totals.
and the generals
Hitler
The reintroduction of conscription gave him by 1936 an army with thirty-six divisions, a fivefold increase fully
equipped or manned, and,
strength to resist any
from the seven of the
as his generals
armed reaction
a
skeleton strength of
Reichsvvehr.
warned him, he
Few were
as yet
certainly lacked the
to his anti-Versailles policies. In seeking to realise his
deeply held ambition to remilitarise the Rhineland, therefore, he waited once again
he could find the semblance of
a legal cause,
which he claimed
parliament's ratification of a mutual-assistance pact with the Soviet
Since the pact
bound France
to take action against
German)
aggression against the USSR, Hitler was able to represent
provision that France
League of Nations -
a
it
Union
March of
1936.
German
as a unilateral violation
would never make war on Germany except by creation of Versailles from
in
in the event
until
French
to see in the
of the
resolution of the
which he had withdrawn
in 1933
- and to
measures to improve Germany's defence of March 1936 he accordingly ordered the reoccupation of the Rhineland, where no German soldier had been stationed since November 1918, correctly confident that the French would not move to expel the force he sent, even though it numbered not even one division but a mere three battalions.
allege that its
such
a violation justified his taking
frontier with France.
Although they
On
7
Hitler's generals
had been apprehensive about the Rhineland adventure,
were not fundamentally disposed
judgements, since the armed forces,
moment been
among
to all
argue
with
his
diplomatic
or
the other institutions of state, had
the principal beneficiaries of the National Socialist revolution.
36
strategic
up
to that
They had
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
been spared
Gleichschakung, the process by which every organ of German life was brought under Nazi control; moreover, the leaders of the body which had threatened them with Gleichschakung, the SA, had been summarily and brutally killed in June 1934. Hitler's
directly
would one day become soldiers of the after March 1935 the younger of them received their call-up papers and found themselves embodied in the Wehrmacht as conscripts among hundreds of thousands of others who had never worn the brown uniform. The armed forces had also benefited more generously than any other body from the programme of state investment. Tanks and aeroplanes - enough to equip a Panzer force of six divisions (soon to be raised to ten) and a Luftwaffe of 2000 combat aircraft were now coming out of the new armaments factories in a steady stream. The design work which underlay their development had been done in Russia during the brief period of Russo-German friendship in the 1920s. In an ill-calculated act of appeasement in 1935 the British Admiralty had agreed that the German navy should also be partially liberated from the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and it had begun to acquire capital ships and even U-boats, in numbers equivalent to 33 and 60 per cent respectively of the Royal Navy's half-formulated promise that the stormtroopers
new Germany had been made good
only in the sense that
This material largesse enormously enhanced the institutional amour propre of the
fleets.
Wehrmacht which, suddenly found
after fifteen years in
which
had starved
it
for
both
men and
strong as the largest and better
armed than
any.
moreover,
Professionally,
rearmament programme transformed the career prospects of individual the average age of a
colonel was
fifty-six;
by 1937
it
had been reduced
many in the Reichswehr who had reconciled themselves to 1937 commanding regiments, brigades, even divisions. Hitler's
rightly attached
SA had always been
political fighting force
too
much
as
Hitler's
officers: in 1933
to thirty-nine, while
retirement found themselves by
seduction of his professional officers was as calculated as any other part of his
programme, though he the
equipment,
advanced to the front rank of the armed forces of Europe, almost
itself
it
more importance
to
it
than the
had given him
in the 'time
many
respects, a military
War from beginning
fought in the First World
His attitude to
of struggle' before 1933, he was himself
the true veteran, the seasoned 'front fighter', to reckon
military material. Hitler was, in
rest.
though he had needed and been glad to use the
duplicitous;
its
street bullies
proper
snob - and with reason: he had
to end, suffered
wounds and won a high a model of the one in
decoration for bravery. The army he wished to re-create would be
which he had served, not Purge of June 1934, paramilitary radicals
a disorderly political militia reclothed in field-grey.
when
Hitler organised the
who had
murder of
Rohm
thought to leap to general's rank by
and the
political
The Blood rest
of the
hopscotch, had
One consequence of the purge of the SA was the rise of the arm of the Nazi Part) - the blackshirted Schutzstaffel (SS), a highly disciplined corps led by Heinrich Himmler.
ensured that he had his way. rival military
elite
Although the generals had been careful to know nothing of the 1934 murders, the results
had none the
less
put Hitler high in their favour; but the reverse was not the case.
37
PROLOGUE
There was
a
limit to Hitler's military
strict
worshipper of rank or General Staff officers
World War,
First
He was
snobbery.
who were now senior commanders, had their
a
combat snob, not
As he well knew, many of the Wehrmacht"s
title.
being
brains
thought
too
not fought
valuable
be
to
a
the Great
elite,
the front in the
at
beyond
risked
One of when General no more than 'a
headquarters. Their military as well as their social hauteur therefore grated with him.
Munich he regarded him
the innumerable rancours that he nursed dated back to the
trial,
von Lossow,
as
his fainthearted ally,
had
testified that
that the
drummer boy'; the wound had been salted by the state prosecutor's statement drummer boy had 'allowed himself to be carried beyond the position assigned to
him'.
was
political
It
Hitler
who now
which retained control of continued to choose
assigned positions everywhere - except within the army,
own promotion
its
officers
timorous
as
However, since the generals
structure.
they
as
themselves had been over the
of the Rhineland, Hitler decided to end the system. He wanted a war army, commanders determined to take revenge on the victors of 1918 and their creature states erected on the back of Germany's defeat. Werner von Fritsch, the arm) commander-in-chief was a particular bugbear among the fainthearts; in November 1937 he sought a private interview with Hitler to warn against policies that might provoke war. Two months later, the indiscreet remarriage of the remilitarisation
led by
Minister of War, General W'erner von Blomberg, provided Hitler with an opportunity to get rid of
both men: Blomberg's young bride was discovered
while the unmarried Fritsch, his obvious successor,
to
have been
speechless
fell
a prostitute;
when confronted by
trumped-up charges of homosexual behaviour. Their enforced retirement did not im-
him
mediately bring
generals of the bellicose temper he wanted; but
with the pretext to establish the Oberkommando
a
der VV'ehrmacht
new
(OKW), of which
OKW w as given responsibility for the 7
move,
was
for 1938
to
command
supra-service
be the year
Hitler
in place
it
of the
made himself
provided him
War
highest level of strategic planning. This in
which
Ministry,
the head, and the
was
a crucial
moved from rearmament to the intentions to his service commanders on
Hitler
He had already outlined his when he had argued that Britain and France were unlikely to oppose with military force German moves to strengthen its military position in the east. His first priority was to take advantage of the enthusiasm among German nationalists in Austria for diplomatic offensive. 5
November
union
1937,
with the Reich; his second was to attempt the annexation of the German-
(Anschluss)
speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Further, he hoped that protector,
would
shortly be brought to
his fellow dictator. Poland,
Germany's side by
on which he had longer-term
Italy,
Austria's
formal alliance with Mussolini,
a
designs, he believed
would be
immobilised by the speed of Germany's action. In
November
Comintern Pact earlier),
1937 Mussolini did indeed accept
against the Soviet
Union
a
(originally signed
German
alliance,
the Anti-
by Germany and Japan
thus reinforcing the 'Rome-Berlin Axis' agreement of October 1936. By
1938 Hitler
felt
free to act against Austria.
He
first
38
demanded
that Austrian Nazis
a
year
March
should be
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
GERMAN AGGRESSION:
1936-39 LATVIA
NORTH
The
steps to war: the
Munich
crisis of
abandoned caution installed in
key government posts.
September 1938 marked the point where Hitler
in foreign policy for outright risk-taking.
When
Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor,
refused, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Nazi leader,
the head of a provisional
was instructed
to declare himself
government and request German intervention.
On
12
March
German troops marched in, Anschluss was declared the following day, and on 14 March Hitler made a triumphal entry into Vienna, where he had spent his unhappy and aimless youth. Britain and France protested but did no more. Their inactivity was the confirmation Hitler
needed
that
he
could
safely
Czechoslovakia. In April he ordered
meanwhile
demands
instructing the
for secession. In
proceed
OKW
Nazi groups
to
his
diplomatic
offensive
against
to prepare plans for a military operation,
among
August he fixed October
39
the Sudetenland
Germans
as the date for military action
to
sustain
and on 12
PROLOGUE
September,
moved
when he
delivered a fiery anti-Czech speech
at
Nuremberg, German troops
to the frontier.
crisis' seemed to threaten war, even though it was not clear who would The Czechs were not powerful enough to resist the rearmed Wehrmacht without help, but the Red Army, the only nearby source of assistance, could come to their aid only by crossing Polish territory (or Romanian, but the Romanians were pro-German), a manoeuvre which the Poles, with their deep hostility to and well-founded suspicion of the
This 'Czech
fight
it.
Russians,
see
were not disposed intervening
Russia
in
The
to permit.
British
and the French were
Europe and,
central
also disinclined to
though France had
a
with
treaty
Czechoslovakia, and both Britain and France recognised that honour and prudence
demanded
that they
should not allow Czechoslovakia to be dismembered, they could see
no way of protecting her except by government and people forces,
in
military action
though the) had begun reluctantly
developed the
will to
own
of their
in the west,
from which
both countries shrank. Neither had yet modernised to rearm;
back protest with force,
as
more
to the point, neither
their
had
was lamentably demonstrated by
yet
their
succession of failures to implement collective action against aggressors through the League
of Nations machinery - against Japan for in 1937, against Italy for
Neville
its
its
aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and in China
aggression against Ethiopia in 1936. Edouard Daladier and
Chamberlain, the French and British Prime Ministers,
therefore
counselled
President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia to acquiesce in Hitler's demands, even though the
cession
fortifications;
of the Sudetenland
meant the cession
also
of the country's frontier
once surrendered, Czechoslovakia would have no protection whatsoever
against further
German demands.
Nevertheless Benes
felt
obliged to agree, since the
Western democracies would not stand by him. The crisis seemed to be settled, but on 22 September Hitler decided to harden his terms. Instead of waiting for an international
commission this
to delimit the revised frontier,
he demanded the Sudetenland
turning of the screw which provoked the
crisis called
'Munich', since
it
It
was
was there
that
at
once.
a series of treat with Hitler again on him even more than he had initially demanded. Munich, it is generally said, marked 'the end of appeasement'; certainly it sent Daladier and Chamberlain home, superficially relieved, but convinced - Chamberlain more strongly than Daladier - that rearmament must henceforth proceed apace. More accurately, however, Munich marked the moment when Hitler abandoned caution in his campaign of aggressive diplomacy and began to take the risks which would stiffen the will
Chamberlain and Daladier went to
29-30 September, in
craven meetings that conceded
of the Western democracies to meet challenge with firm response and eventually force with force. The turning-point was Hitler's treatment of browbeaten Czechoslovakia.
Having seized the Sudetenland only the
pro-German
announce
six
months
before,
separatist party in the Slovakian half
their secession
and request
Czech President, Emil Hacha, arrived
that
on
he become
March 1939 he arranged
their protector.
in Berlin to protest,
40
11
for
of what remained of the country to
When
the
new
he was physically bullied into
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
commander
Goering,
on
requesting a
of the Luftwaffe, inspects the
their return in
German
1939 from
German
volunteers of the
Condor Legion
Spain, where they fought for Franco.
protectorate over the
whole of Czechoslovakia. The following day, 15 just in time to form a guard of honour and a
March, German troops marched into Prague
when he entered the city on their heels. The rape of Czechoslovakia drove the democracies to act. The French cabinet agreed
protective screen for Hitler
that
when
Hitler next
announced
moved he must be
that if there
utmost of its power',
were further
a clear
warning
stopped.
attacks
on
that Hitler
On
17
March Chamberlain
small states Britain
now
would
publicly
resist 'to
the
risked war. Hitler did not believe or
did not fear the threat. Since January he had been menacing Poland, to which belonged the largest slice of territory that had
which divided
East Prussia
been German before
1918, in particular the 'corridor'
and the German-speaking Free
City of Danzig
from the Reich
do so even when on 23 March, as an earnest of intentions, he occupied the port of Memel, a former League of Nations territory on Poland's border which had been German until 1918. They were chief!) sustained by the knowledge that Britain and France were now preparing to extend them a heartland.
The Poles doggedly
resisted his threats
guarantee of protection; and on
31
and continued
March, eight days
would defend Belgium, Holland or Switzerland
41
to
after publicly
announcing
against attack, Britain
that they
and France issued
a
-
THE CAMPAIGN «"
POLAND
IN
ST
r «^c
*.
^
EAST PRUSSIA
^
*^
•
ESTONIA
/ /
V* A
B/U77C5E4 *
/
—
.
c ..-•..
,#.-"
>\
»«
V
«.^ To
.V-o'-V
Russia
Warsa*
i{!
1
»—>
s
V
%*&
LATVIA
POLAND
•
\
f y
To G«**many
i
>>/v<
4
-";;-.
r *
GERMANY*^
r*
V*'
\ i
.
A-x %»
LITHUANIA
***.. »
f
/
,-..-Si
'•" r»Konigsberg
Fourth
j
y
/
L
\
Army Group North
/
I f
EAST PRUSSIA
J
<
Army Group North
".w/am?
Army omeranl
GERMANY
?
Bydg
•
*j'
iBroi [berg
./"
f
•
<
Bialystock
J
?
IKutno Group
V .
V^**'^-^
Kallz
m
Eighth
L
J\^
'
m. • Lodz
I
*
Gora
POLAND
A Cheli
S
Tenth
J*"*^
Arm
/ Army Group South Fourteenth
\
Army
Key
r J ^^ ,
giJi i
i
^
"^
Polish front line armies Polish reserves
German
attacks. 1-14
September 1939 ISO Miles
j
-
——
"
*"\
HUNGARY
42
'*>—
V\
RUMANIA
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
joint declaration guaranteeing the
to
Romania and Greece
Two weeks
independence of Poland.
demonstrate the general hardening of their
later,
on
13 April,
attitude, they issued similar guarantees to
of
after Mussolini, in imitation
Poland, however, was the focus of the growing
annexed Albania.
Hitler, crisis,
which France and
Britain
now
hoped best to solve by drawing the Soviet Union into a protective agreement, even though they knew the Poles were reluctant to accept any help from their traditional enemy. The French and dislike
of their
resistance,
were themselves
British
mistrustful of the Soviets, besides harbouring a
political system, feelings
which were
exactly reciprocated.
deep
Without Polish
however, an agreement might have been reached; but the Poles adamantly
Red Army operating on their soil, since they rightly suspected annex large parts of Polish territory and might hold these
refused to contemplate the
that the Russians desired to
as their reward for intervention. The British and French could offer no compensatory inducement to act with them in a hypothetical crisis; during the summer of 1939 the negotiations between the Western democracies and Stalin hung fire.
under occupation Stalin
Hitler,
on the other hand, could
been negotiating
offer powerfully
had no
hints that Russia
taste
gamble with to
would
progress, since neither side
impede
keen
a
German
and the
as
its
of eastern Poland
if
he agreed not
The Russians responded with
settled
on
to
annex eastern Poland up
Latvia, Lithuania
of
now doomed. On
(OKH), had
secret clauses effectively permitted the Soviet
Its
German-Polish war,
Baltic states
Poland was Heeres
country
and on 22 August the two Foreign Ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop,
Union, in the event of a Vistula
a
The discussions seemed to make hand. Then in late July Hitler decided to
invasion of the country from the west.
non-aggression pact in Moscow.
a
too had
as Poland.
a thinly veiled offer to let Stalin take a slice
interest
signed
reveal
He
and summer, encouraged by
even over the future of
for risking war,
important to the security of its western border
no
tempting inducements.
desultorily with Stalin during the spring
a
15
to the line of the
and Estonia.
June the German army
staff,
the Oberkommando
des
plan which provided for two army groups, North and
South, to attack simultaneously with their objective as Warsaw. Because northern Poland
was dominated by the German province of East
Prussia, while
on Czechoslovakia, now an extension of German Bohemia-Moravia and the puppet the
whole length of
state
covering the industrial region of Lower
frontiers. Its fortified
Silesia,
Czechoslovakia time had not allowed for
new
fortifications
government the country;
it
its
remained ignorant of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
army's
The campaign
rear;
in
and
it
counted on the French, with
Poland, 1-27 September 1939, the swiftness
the
Protectorate
of
first
and power of Blitzkrieg
43
zone
lay in the west,
and since Germany's annexation of
was naturally concerned to protect the richest and
threat to
(as
of Slovakia), Poland was deeply outflanked across
two most vulnerable
its
southern Poland bordered
territory
Pact,
be
built.
The
Polish
and so of the Russian
British assistance, to attack
full-scale tactics.
to
most populous region of
demonstration of the
PROLOGUE
Germany's western border
in
order to draw off German divisions from the east
as
soon
as
Wehrmacht marched.
the
Hitler's calculations
were
He
different.
believed, correctly as
it
turned out, that the
French would not move against him in the west, which he left defended by only forty-four divisions - to oppose the nominal hundred of the French arm) - and that the British could
do
little
fill.
to hurt
He had
had
Germany during
more
even
the
the brief span of time he intended the Polish campaign to
the advantage of being mobilised, whereas the British and French were not.
of deplo)ing
advantage
important
immeasurably superior equipment against the
Poles.
mobilise in July as war
were
Polish tanks
935
aircraft
of the
old, light air
force
fort)
models,
divisions, of
sufficient to
the
news
needed
still
that Britain
On
were armoured and ten
fully
deployed
all
their
men
to
by
1
which none was armoured; the few
equip only
a single brigade;
and half the
a
Poland
in
a pretext to attack.
had entered into
protection against aggression by sparring followed.
six
Although the Poles had begun
were obsolete.
The campaign Hitler nevertheless
aircraft.
became imminent, they had not
September. Together the) formed
He and
The German Army Group North and
South together numbered some sixty-two divisions, of which
mechanised, supported by 1300 modern combat
numbers
superior
He was
briefly deterred
on 25 August by
formal alliance with Poland which guaranteed
a third party,
and
a
few days of inconclusive diplomatic
28 August, however, he formally abrogated the 1934 non-aggression
at a time when her army far outnumbered the Wehrmacht, and on the evening of 31 August received news of Polish aggression near the Silesian border town of Gleiwitz; the incident had in fact been carefully staged by his own SS. Next
pact with Poland, signed
morning,
at
4.45 am, his tanks began to cross the frontier. Since
it
was
Hitler's
pretence
Germany had been attacked by Poland, he issued no declaration of war. By the end of September the Polish air force had largely ceased to exist, many of its aircraft having been caught on the ground and destroyed by the Luftwaffe, which also bombed Polish headquarters, communications and cities. All the Wehrmacht ground that
1
forces
made
rapid
both ultimatums expired that
Germany. By
On
progress.
delivered separate ultimatums
that date,
3
September the French and
British
governments
demanding the withdrawal of German troops from Poland; day and a state of war therefore existed between them and
however, the Fourth Arm) advancing from Pomerania had made
contact with the Third advancing from East Prussia and had cut off the 'Polish Corridor' to
Danzig and Gdynia, Poland's outlet to the stand
on the
line
of the
river Warta,
Above: German infanttymen
sea.
By 7 September,
west of Warsaw, had
take cover behind a Panzer
Mark
Warsaw, 25 September 1939. Below: Horse-drawn German
German
artillery
remained horse-drawn
44
until the
after a Polish
attempt to
the Tenth
Army had
failed,
III
on the outskirts ot
artillery in Poland.
end of the war.
Most
PROLOGUE
Hitler in Poland, September 1939.
On
his left
is
Rommel, then
Fuhrer's escort battalion, and on his right
advanced from the south to within driving
now
a
down from
the north,
was on the
German change of plan.
be entrapped west of the
thirty-six miles
river
is
of the
capital,
while the Third Army,
however, large numbers of troops got across the
most of the Polish army would
that
on which Warsaw
Vistula,
of the
Narew, twenty-five miles away. There was
had been expected
It
commander
the
Keitel, his chief of staff.
stands.
By rapid disengagement,
and marched
river
to concentrate
on
the
The German commanders therefore ordered a second and deeper envelopment, aimed at the line of the river Bug, a hundred miles east of Warsaw. While it was in progress, the one and only crisis for the Germans occurred. The capital to fight a defensive battle there.
Polish
Poznan Army, one of those entrapped west of the
German
Vistula,
turned and attacked the
Eighth and Tenth Armies from the rear, inflicting heavy casualties
30th Division in the
first
impact.
capture of 100,000 Polish troops
Warsaw had been resistance
by
terror,
capitulated. All
3
and
across the frontier
the campaign
on
bitter
19
fell
was heavily bombed
until
27 September,
after
when
17
100,000 Poles escaped into Lithuania,
all
garrison's
difficult
country bordering
appeals for assistance from the
moved its White Russian and September. Some 217,000 of the 910,000 Poles By 6 October
its
the defenders finally
10 September, finally
into Russian hands.
the surprised
September.
encircled by 17 September; in an effort to reduce
were ended when the Red Army,
on
on
encirclement battle ensued, ending with the
hopes of escaping eastward into the remote and
the Pripet Marshes
Germans on
it
A
Polish resistance
Ukrainian Fronts taken prisoner in
had ended. Some
Hungary and Romania, whence many would make
46
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
way
their
and
to France
later Britain, to
form the Polish armed
forces in exile
and continue
the struggle - as infantrymen in the Battle of France, as pilots in the Battle of Britain, and
on other
later
-
fronts
day of the war.
until the last
At the conclusion of the campaign the Wehrmacht, which had suffered 13,981
immediately began to turn
casualties in Poland,
the Siegfried Line or
West Wall and prepare
who had made no
attempt
between
activity
at
for a
campaign
1
immediate military outcome of the Polish campaign There Russia
once
at
basing rights for
capitalised
all
moved
territory
fighting against Russian
frontier
demarcation which
and the Soviet treaty,
and
Baltic ports.
the Soviet
between 1809 and
less
when
1917;
it
On
12
decided ran too close for
October
Union confronted
1940, a
east.
demand
Pact to
convenient
won
its
eventually
week
the Finnish
strategic
after Latvia
results.
Finland
independence
War,
local Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil Stalin
of
The only
Offensive'.
War
though with altogether
against Finland,
and French,
a manoeuvre which Union in June 1940.
three countries to the Soviet
fatal
man
for a small flurry
on the terms of the Moiotov-Ribbentrop
The Winter had been Russian
to
not in the west but in the
troops in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia,
its
led to the annexation of
Stalin also
lay
westward
against the British
German forces, except October known as the 'Saar
to divert
all
September and
8
victorious divisions
its
it
after
had obtained
a
comfort to Leningrad
had signed
its
government with demands
dictated
for naval
basing rights and the cession of a large strip of Finnish territory in the Karelian isthmus leading to Leningrad.
The Finns stonewalled
staged a border incident.
deploying
30
until 26
November
thirty divisions; for this blatant act
League of Nations on 14
men
On
to the campaign.
17S,000, fought
December. The
The
back with
Finns, skill
in the
snowbound
tactics
to cut off
demoralised by the
Union was
their total
made
eventually to
circles
a style
their
enemies,
commit
most warlike of around
a
million
who were
all
European
their Russian attackers
wastes of their native forests, employing so-called
and encircle
Union
mobilised strength never exceeded
success. Perhaps the
peoples, and certainly the hardiest, the Finns
Soviet
of aggression they were expelled from the
Soviet
though
and
November, when the
the Russians attacked with four armies,
regularly
or 'logging'
motti
disorientated and
of warfare for which their training had not prepared them. While
main strength of the Finnish army defended the Karelian isthmus on the Mannerheim named after the country's commander-in-chief, who had won the war of
Line,
independence divisions In series
by
a
their
in
1918,
independent units attacked, encircled and destroyed Soviet
on the long eastern
December
flank
between Lake Ladoga and the White
Sea.
the Finns actually counter-attacked from the Karelian isthmus, after a
of operations by the Soviets described by Mannerheim
as 'similar to a
performance
badly directed orchestra'. By January, however, the Russians had taken the measure of
opponents, recognised their
own
underestimation of the Finns' military prowess.
47
THE RUSSO-FINNISH WAR (1939-40) THE CAMPAIGN IN NORWAY
AND Barents Sea
15
April
British.
Br 24
f
9 April 1940
German
French. Polish
Gds Bde
forces land simultaneously
at Oslo, Kristiansand, Stavanger,
Bergen
Trondheim and Narvik
is
MayVi(^ /
m m jqt^ j\
l8A P ril Br 148
Group
a
II
q
Bde
Inf
French
forces ai Narvik
Trondheimj"
^^•V5DV *
f
"TW
& Andalsnes^
a
V/
Grouping^
i
OsloaCk/
ns^~
A
^NORWAY P
^
/
Group V
GERMANY Key
/
^^^^
^ Group
GERMAN
Russian attacks: 20
Seaborne landings and attacks
Finnish counter-attacks: 27
Paratroop landings I
Naval Groups
POLAND
ALLIES I
Div
<"—+ -——
Norwegian
dispositions
Landings and attacks
Withdrawals 150 Miles
48
Nov
1939
-
31
Jan 1940
Dec 1939
-
5 Jan
1940
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
overwhelm them. During February they broke their Mannerheim Line by main force, inflicting casualties which the Finnish government recognised its tiny population could not bear. On 6 March it treated for peace and on 12 March signed a treaty which conceded the demands Russia had made in October; they had lost 25,000 dead since the war had begun. The Red Army, however, had and brought up
way through
lost 200,000,
sufficient forces to
the
of whom perhaps the majority had died of exposure while surrounded or out
of touch with base. The experience of the 'Winter War', which would be renewed
as the
'Continuation War' after June 1941, conditioned the Soviet Union's carefully modulated policy towards Finland
when
the issue of peace
came round
Finland had briefly been an inspiration to
which, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop 1940. Britain
all
again.
enemies of the Axis powers, with
Pact, the Soviet
and France had even considered affording her
Union was
identified during
military assistance,
and winter-
warfare units from both countries were earmarked to join the Finnish army; fortunately for the future of Soviet-Western relations, the Finns had sued for peace before they
were
sent.
The Scandinavian campaign The end of the Winter War did volvement
in
however, terminate Anglo-French military
not,
northern Europe. According to the German navy, which kept
a close
in-
watch
would most probably have passed through Norway, and in doing so would not only have violated Norwegian neutrality but menaced German access to the Kiruna-Gallivare iron ore fields in Sweden
on Scandinavian
affairs,
Western
military assistance for Finland
which supplied Germany's war economy with
a vital
commodity.
Hitler's
Grand Admiral,
Erich Raeder, was in any case anxious to acquire north Norwegian bases from which to
operate against the Royal Navy, and therefore urged Hitler throughout the autumn and
winter of 1939
pre-empt the
to
Allies
by authorising an
Preoccupied by his plans for the forthcoming attack interest to
be aroused, though
in
December,
after
intervention
in the west, Hitler
dissipated by a
blow
Norway.
would not allow his for the Norwegian
Raeder had arranged
Nazi leader, Vidkun Quisling, to be brought to Berlin, he did authorise
whether Norway would be worth occupying.
in
In
mid-February
OKW to investigate
his
indifference was
to his pride.
At the outbreak of the war the Graf
Spee,
one of Germany's 'pocket
commerce-raiding campaign against
battleships',
merchant shipping
in the
had
South
undertaken
a
Atlantic but
had eventually been cornered off the coast of Uruguay by three British commander had been forced to scuttle it at Montevideo after the Battle of the
cruisers. Its
The Red Army's lamentable performance both Hitler and western strategists
German
in the
to write off
invasion. In their view
it
'Winter War' against Finland encouraged
the Soviet Union's capacity to resist a future
would be
49
British
all
over within a matter of weeks.
PROLOGUE
on
River Plate
13
December
consonantly infuriated by Hitler Spee
this
The
1939.
was even more outraged when the
during
its
cruise,
British
humiliation of the
people were heartened and Hitler
German
surface
Altmark, a supply ship
was intercepted by
HM
On
fleet.
16 February
which had tended the
Destroyer Cossack in Norwegian
waters and 300 British merchant seaman taken by the Graf Spee were liberated.
decided
that
Norwegian
preferably by invasion
territorial
be desirable also to occupy Denmark
to
He
once
at
waters must be denied to the British for good,
and occupation, and instructed General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst,
mountain-warfare expert, to prepare
had assigned
Graf
territorial
a plan.
Falkenhorst quickly concluded that
as a 'land bridge' to
a
would
it
Norway, and by 7 March
Hitler
eight divisions to the operation. Intelligence then indicated that Allied plans
on which
intervene in Norway, providing the legal pretext for aggression
normally insisted, had been called that the operation
was
off.
Raeder nevertheless succeeded
strategically necessary
in
Hitler
persuading him
and on 7 April the transports
sailed.
Denmark, quite unprepared for war, almost unarmed and with no suspicion that Germany harboured hostile intentions against her, surrendered under the threat of an air bombardment of Copenhagen on the morning of the troops' landing on 9 April. The Norwegians were
also taken
by surprise. They were, however, ready
the ancient guns of the harbour fort held the invaders Blucher
at
to fight
and
at
Oslo
bay - sinking the German cruiser
- long enough for the government and royal family to escape and
make
their
way
to
The survivors of the small Norwegian arm) then gathered as best they could to oppose the German advance up the coast towards the central cities of Andalsnes, Trondheim and Namsos, and to counter the German landing in the far north at Narvik. Britain.
German infantrymen advancing behind
a Panzer
Norwegians, with British and French assistance,
Mark
II in
Norway,
bitterly resisted the
recovering from Hitler's surprise attack.
50
May
German
1940. The invasion after
FOMENTING WORLD WAR
They did
not,
however, have to
both the
Between
and 23 April 12,000
18
British
British
made to intervene move and debark.
Because of the preparations
fight alone.
and the French had contingents ready
in Finland,
to
and French troops were put ashore north and south
of Trondheim and advanced to meet the Germans
who were making
their
way north from
Oslo up the great valleys of the Gudbrandsdal and the Osterdal. The Germans defeated the leading British brigade in the Gudbrandsdal sea from Andalsnes, then
made
on 23
and compelled
April
own
it
withdraw by
to
Trondheim and forced the evacuation of the rest of the Allied troops through Namsos on 3 May. In the north the fortunes of war swung the other way. The German navy suffered a serious defeat in the two battles of Narvik, fought on 10 and 13 April between a superior British force
contact with their
landing party
and the destroyers transporting General Eduard
of the destroyers, with
a
Dietl's
mountain troops. Ten
high proportion of Dietl's force, were sunk in the Narvik fiords.
Died escaped ashore with only 2000 mountain infantry and 2600
oppose 24,500
at
Allied troops, including the resolute
sailors
Norwegian 6th
whom
with
to
He found
Division.
himself besieged in Narvik from 14 April onwards and was eventually forced to break out
and
retreat to the
Swedish border, which he reached
at
French and the suffered in the Dietl,
Blitzkrieg battles
though
1939-40, was to
many
in
become
among whom
a
'Continuation War' of 1941^4,
both the
German
lest
discourage
it
news of his death from the
towering
a
By then he had come to regard
tragedy.
to conceal the
established
generals of
death in an aeroplane crash in June 1944 was
wounding personal
had
to an end, since
through Narvik to replace the losses
respects the least successful of the
and he attempted
Dietl
end of May. The collapse of the
with the Wehrmacht which began on 10 May.
Hitler's favourite; his
regarded by the Fiihrer as Dietl as irreplaceable
home
ordered their troops
British
the
campaign
Allied front in France, however, then brought the
them
reputation
further
at a
during
the
when
time
Finns,
Finnish
defeat by the
them in the face. Hitler liked Dietl because he argued with him in an way that perhaps reminded the Fiihrer of his own army service. He liked him even more because at Narvik he had rescued him from humiliation. So alarmed had Hitler been by the miscarriage of the landing that he had been on the point of ordering Dietl to escape into Sweden and intern his soldiers rather than risk having to Russians again stared explosive, soldierly
He had
eventually been dissuaded from sending the signal,
surrender them to the
British.
and
dogged conduct of the
in
any case
Dietl's
was the model of what
Hitler
forward to recruiting and training creation of the
in
Wehrmacht. The proof of his
unblemished the record of German
quality
the dimensions of
had taken possession of the arm)
was
Norway
made
in the west,
German itself.
51
There
the
of victory from the
June 1940, and so sustaining
however, not even
victory.
he had looked
moment he embarked on
his snatching
in
unnecessary. Dietl
it
to be, the type
military success since the beginning
campaign simultaneously unfolding a jot to
retreat
thousands from the
jaws of defeat in the mountains of north
added
and
siege
wished every German soldier
Blitzkrieg
of the war. To the
a Dietl
seemed
a
could have
magic which
V '
'A-
.i
V
PARTI
THE WAR IN THE WEST *
1940-1943
«
i
-1 d*~ J
4
'
_
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1940- 1^43
3
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG Blitzkrieg -
'lightning war' -
A
before 1939. their readers
a
is
German word
but not
coining of Western newspapermen,
it
known
German army
to the
had been used
to
convey to
something of the speed and destructiveness of German ground-air
operations in the three-week campaign against the ill-equipped and outnumbered Polish
army. However, as the
had not been the
German
of the army's
a fair test
Wehrmacht had not shown
which drove
at a
Polish infantry divisions
Despite allegations by
the equal of the old imperial
meeting
in the
Reich Chancellery on 5
had offered no match
Kleist. Blitzkrieg aptly
Would
capabilities.
itself
Hitler to a frenzy of rage against General Walther
commander-in-chief,
and
generals themselves readily conceded, the Polish campaign
to the
some of them army -
that
allegations
von Brauchitsch, the
November -
the plodding
mechanised spearheads of Guderian
described what had befallen Poland.
Blitzkrieg avail
against the
West? Hitler persisted into October
in
hoping
that
its
would persuade France and Britain to accept his Polish victory; but their rejection, on 10 and 12 October respectively, of his peace tentatives, offered in a speech to the Reichstag on 6 October, persuaded him that Germany must make war again. His ambitions required at least the defeat of France, which might persuade Britain to sue for spectacle
separate terms and inaugurate that
empire for which
him
unrealistically to
Schmundt,
that
to negotiate; that
his
upbringing
hope.
On
accommodation of her maritime with
as a subject
12
his continental
of the old landlocked Danubian empire led
September he had told
his
Wehrmacht
he believed France could be conquered quickly and
adjutant,
Britain then
Rudolf
brought
on 27 September he warned the commanders-in-chief of the three services in the west shortly; and on 9 October, even before France and
he intended to attack
Previous page: Instruments
Mark IV
oi Blitzkrieg
-
Junkers
87
during the Battle of France,
54
dive-bombers overfly a Panzer
May
1940.
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
had rejected
Britain
peace
his
he issued Fiihrer Directive No. 6
offer,
for a
western
offensive.
accompanying memorandum, which accused France and Britain of having kept Germany weak and divided since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, he announced that In an
nothing in
less
was
how
described
An
stake than 'the destruction of the
at
room
order to leave
for the
that destruction
was
offensive will be planned
must be launched
at
predominance of the Western powers
expansion of the German people'. Fiihrer Directive No. 6 to
.
.
.
be achieved:
through Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland
the earliest possible
moment
[since]
any further delay
[and]
will
.
.
.
end of Belgian and perhaps of Dutch neutrality, to the advantage of the Allies. The purpose of this offensive will be to defeat as much as possible of the French army and of the forces of the Allies fighting on their side, and at the same entail the
much
time to win as
territory as possible in Holland,
Belgium and northern France
serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air
and
as a
wide protective area
The plan of detail
for the
codenamed
attack,
Fall
economically
and sea war
vital
Gelb ('Case Yellow'),
against
to
England
Ruhr.
was
worked out
to be
in
command of the army, the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH). Although Supreme Commander laid down broad strategic aims, he did not as yet involve
by the high
Hitler as
himself in technical military
he wanted 'Case Yellow'
which would
set Fiihrer
German army, and head of
state
affairs.
Hitler nevertheless
Here was
to achieve.
and army
the Prussian
was warlord -
at
to
had strong
loggerheads for the next
army before
Feldherr.
it,
and
1914,
five
a strategic
imbroglio
months. Historically the
had always deferred
to the fiction that the
and the Holy Roman Emperor had
state actually interfered in his generals' planning. Kaisers
in 1870
not clear ideas of what
However, not since Frederick the Great had led
soldiers in person against those of the tsar
war with France
if
be the making of
had transferred
Wilhelm
I
and
II,
at
a
his
head of
the onset of
their courts to the army's headquarters;
but they had both then surrendered detailed control of operations to their chiefs of staff -
Hindenburg in sequence. Hitler would have been willing to do the same had the successors of those men shared his vision of what the reborn German army could, with the Luftwaffe, achieve; but the commander-in-chief, Brauchitsch, was a doubter and his chief of staff, General Franz Haider, a quibbler. Haider was a man of the Moltkes, Falkenhayn and
brains, a
product of the Bavarian General
tellectually
more
flexible than those
however, had been
as a staff officer
Staff
Academy whose
of the Prussian
graduates were thought
Kriegsakademie. His
employing the step-by-step
in-
war experience,
tactics
of the Western
arm of the service had been the artillery, also dominated by step-by-step and he was a devout member of the State Lutheran Church and thereby con-
Front; his original thinking;
ditioned to recoil from Hitler's brutal philosophy of domination, national and international, yet not to defy constituted authority
form
for 'Case Yellow' which, as
by opposing
it.
As
a result,
he proposed
a
he admitted elsewhere, would postpone the mounting of
55
THE WAR
France
a decisive offensive against
IN
THE WEST
until 1942.
1940-194?
As outlined on
19
October, his plan was de-
signed to separate the British Expeditionary Force from the French army and to win
ground
in
Belgium which would provide
and
navy's
air force's
Thus he acquiesced its spirit.
and North Sea ports
airfields
German
for the
operations against Britain, but not to achieve outright victory.
of Fuhrer Directive No. 6 but succeeded
in the letter
The expedient temporarily
him argue
establishment able to help
in
denying
who lacked allies among the military Haider. On 22 October he unsettled his chief
baffled Hitler, against
of staff by demanding that 'Case Yellow' begin
as
soon
as 12
November; on 25 October he
confronted Brauchitsch with the suggestion that the army attack directly into France stead of northern Belgium;
and on 30 October he proposed
operations
Wehrmacht's tanks be Hung
officer, that the
where the French would
least
in-
to General Jodl, his personal
into the forest of the Ardennes,
expect them. Without expert military support to endorse
these proposals, however, he could not jog 'Case Yellow' forward.
General Staff resistance rested on solid ground. Late autumn was no season for undertaking offensive operations,
Europe. The Ardennes, even side north of the fortified
deployment of tanks. until Haider's plan
came
if its
argue that
in believing that a
late
the
way of
on the Western
open French country-
autumn was
in the
Front.
its
limita-
which saved any revision of 'Case
time, time
the
wrong season
for the attack
bold strategy would not yield large
most senior generals
plains of rainy northern
resulted ultimately in a fruitful outcome; for Haider
it
Hitler's side
his chief
of Rundstedt's defection from the General
force
on the sodden
fellow professionals and their rejection of
The process took
The professionals who took Group A, Gerd von Rundstedt, and the
all
valleys led directly to the
Line, was not the obvious terrain for the wishes therefore seemed beggars looking for horses to ride -
Yellow' from miscarrying, and right to
of
zone of the Maginot
Hitler's
tions reached Hitler's ear.
least
narrow
on France but mistaken
results.
were the commander-in-chief of Army
of staff, Erich von Manstein. The significance
Staff plan
was
army and commander
The
was
his
degree of influence,
as
one of
of the strongest concentration of
significance of Manstein's opposition to Haider's 'Case
Yellow' was that he enjoyed Rundstedt's support and possessed one of the best military
minds
in the
Haider's plan. told
him was
Wehrmacht. At the outset he knew nothing of It
merely affronted him
plan, each converging as if
Somme,
31
October the
to
first
at
the
advance one criticism
same time
a
problem
after
with
that instinct
autumn weather worsened
by steps in blind-man's-buff with
come of 'Case Yellow', and each come to be called 'the Manstein
On
him
Hitler's dissatisfactions
approach to
susceptible of a full-blooded solution. As
winter, however, his instinct led
that the
as a half-hearted
into
another of the Haider
Hitler's desires for the out-
laying the foundations for
what would
plan'.
of six
memoranda he was
to write arrived at
aim of 'Yellow' must be to cut off the Allied forces by
a thrust
OKH.
It
argued
along the line of the
thus chiming in with Hitler's idea of 30 October for an attack through the
Ardennes. Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, rejected
56
it
on
3
November
but conceded
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
more armour should be
that
allotted to Rundstedt's
Army Group
weather forced one postponement of the Haider plan in
person against
warned
at
as
bad
He was determined on victory, he November, and 'anyone who thinks otherwise is
his generals for their half-heartedness.
on 23
the Reich Chancellery
irresponsible'.
Meanwhile,
A.
another, Hitler vented his rage
after
Manstein called support from other middle-rank professionals, notably
Guderian, the tank expert, to endorse his conception of a knockout blow into northern France. Even discounting the possibility that the French and British
would do him the
favour of throwing too strong forces into Belgium - precisely what they were con-
know
templating, though he could not
that
- he was moving over more certainly to the
enemy
conviction that a drive to divide the
forces along the line of the
correct strategy. Guderian's assurance that a tank force,
Meuse and
negotiate the Ardennes, cross the
deliver the
if
made
Somme
was the
strong enough, could
knockout blow reinforced him
in
that view.
with Haider, was
Hitler, despite his differences
overcome
his
doubts
fixed four times in
two Luftwaffe
a final
officers crash-landed in
Enough survived
case.
which would have
in Haider's plan. 'A-Days',
December and after their
one
allowing his urge to victory to
still
for 17 January 1940.
set
On
it
in
motion, were
10 January,
Belgium with parts of the 'Yellow' plan
attempts to incinerate the documents, the
however, in a brief-
German
mili-
Holland discovered, to compromise the offensive and to oblige the army to clean breast of things to Hitler. After his rage subsided - it resulted in the dismissal
tary attache to
make
a
commander of the Second Air Fleet and his replacement by Albert Kesselring, who was to prove one of the most talented German generals of the war - Hitler postponed of the
'Yellow' indefinitely
and demanded
new
a
plan
'to
be founded particularly on secrecy and
surprise'.
Here was Manstein's opening. However, the Haider's patience that he had arranged in
given sia,
command
of a corps,
a theoretical
last
December promotion
for
six memoranda had so tried Army Group A's chief of staff to be
of his
but, since the corps
an effective dismissal of his troublesome junior from
quired, however, that corps
Hitler's
to
Wehrmacht
he got wind of the Manstein plan. in a 'significantly
more
morning with the
Fiihrer
It
have been
a formality; but
adjutant, by Manstein's
so uncannily
was
in East Prus-
post of influence. Protocol re-
commanders on appointment should pay
head of state. The ceremony ought took Schmundt,
a
on
their respects to the
this
occasion chance
Coblenz headquarters where
matched the Fuhrer's
aspiration,
though
precise form', that he ensured Manstein should have a
on
17 February. Hitler
whole
was entranced, converted, and thereafter
did not rest until Brauchitsch and Haider too had accepted the Manstein plan - which he
passed off as his
OKH
own
conception.
then demonstrated
Prussian Great General
Staff,
it
its
institutional strengths.
worked merely
as the
a clear
expression of
its
master's voice,
it
57
direct
descendant of the old
handmaiden of a strong
had thitherto shown the strength of will but not of mind had
The
to call forth
concentrated
all its
its
master. Hitler
talents.
efforts
Now
that
it
on transforming
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1940-1943
the elements of the Manstein-Hitler conception - for an attack by strong
armoured
forces
through the Ardennes forest into the rear of the Franco-British field army north of the Somme - into a detailed and watertight operation order. It worked fast. Only a week after Hitler's
morning of enlightenment by Manstein, it produced a proposal, codenamed 'Sickle Stroke', which was a transformation of their half-formed ideas. The
Sichelschnitt,
theme of its plan was
a reversal
of Schlieffen's from
1914.
That great chief of staff- already
dead by the time
conception was tested on the
field
of battle - had based his victory
his
would push into Germany south of the Ardennes, them through Belgium. 'Sickle Stroke' was based on the expectation that in 1940 the French, with their British allies, would push into Belgium, allowing the German armies to outflank them through the Ardennes. It was a brilliant exercise in double-bluff, all the more so because it reinsured against the expectation's miscarrying. For, even if the Franco-British army did not push into Belgium, the unexpectedness of the Ardennes thrust and the power and mass of the armoured force with which it was to be mounted promised an excellent chance of catching the enemy in the plan on the expectation that the French
German armies
allowing the
rear
and toppling him
to outflank
off-balance.
'Sickle Stroke' allotted the three
Group
B, the
northernmost,
German army groups
commanded by
the following missions.
General Fedor von Bock, was to attack into
Holland and northern Belgium, with the aim of tempting the Franco-British far
eastward
and seizing
as possible
territory
from which
Army Group C (commanded by General Wilhelm
north.
most, was stedt's
it
A, in the centre,
was
field
army
as
could be outflanked from the
Ritter
von Leeb), the southern-
to engage the garrison of the Maginot Line, penetrating
Army Group
Army
if
it
possible.
Rund-
advance through the Ardennes, seize crossings
to
over the great water obstacle of the Meuse between Sedan and Dinant, then drive northwest, along the line of the River
was
to
leaving
command none
for
Somme,
Leeb and only three
Amiens, Abbeville and the Channel
You
are
cramming
role,
emphasised to Haider the
risks
of the plan
in
that the
French
will
watch
in-
the mass of the tank units together into the sparse roads of the
Ardennes mountain country,
hope
It
withering 'worst case' analysis. 'You will be creeping by, ten miles from the
Maginot Line, with the flank of your breakthrough and hope ertly!
coast.
for Bock.
Bock, displeased by his secondary a brilliantly
to
seven of the ten available Panzer divisions to spearhead the advance,
as if there
airpower! And you then open southern flank 200 To German officers of their gener-
were no such thing
as
to be able to lead an operation as far as the coast with an
miles long,
where stands the mass of the French army.'
ation, Bock's
warning
to
Haider recalled the German army's
into France, in 1914 - the long dusty roads
nowhere
to
be found, the unprotected
wailed fortress of until, like a
Marne
lost,
Paris,
last
'open
lines
German spearheads
operation
of communication ever lengthening, the great
bulging with troops and
artillery,
looming unreduced
thunderclap, the French counter-stroke was launched, the the
flank'
overcrowded with marching troops, the French
first
in the rear
Battle
of the
sent trundling into reverse and the urgent footfalls of
58
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
manoeuvre warfare drowned by
the thud of spades digging the
first
trenches of the
Western Front.
Bock was
Wehrmacht
Schlieffen Plan Paris in 1914,
was not
in 1914.
a place d'armes
German army's
garrison within
its
which
attack,
it
that the stagnation
of another Western Front awaited the
he was wrong
Stroke' miscarried;
had done
like against the
prisoned
warn
right to
if 'Sickle
to
warn
that
it
might miscarry
as the
For one thing, the Maginot Line, unlike the fortress of
from which
On
flank.
a counter-attack force
the contrary,
its
could spring panther-
conformation and structure im-
consigning them to a purely frontal defence against frontal
it,
was not Rundstedt's role
not be 'creeping by' the Maginot Line;
to deliver. its
For another, the German army would
tank spearheads,
Ardennes and cross the Meuse, would be driving onward they had in Poland and as the French army, wherever
if
they could negotiate the
at thirty
or forty miles a day, as
mass stood, was not organised
its
to
do. As to airpower, there was certainly 'such a thing', but the Luftwaffe was superior in quality of aircraft
bers and
Hermann its
of ground-air operations, considerably superior in num-
in tactics
de 1'Air
and the Advanced Air
Strik-
RAF combined.
ing Force of the
1940
and
superior in fighting experience to the Armee
far
Goering's Luftwaffe
strengths
would
reveal
its
deficiencies later in the war; but in
and French equivalents, which had and procurement - trying to build too many types at
were paramount. Unlike
over-diversified in aircraft production
British
its
home and
then being forced into purchasing from America to replace unsatisfactory
models -
had concentrated on procuring
it
of which was finely adapted to cellent
its
example of what today would be
able, heavily
armed and with
a
tive
medium bomber,
number of a few
types of aircraft, each
The Messerschmitt 109 was an
called an 'air-superiority fighter',
fast,
ex-
manoeuvr-
high rate of climb. The Junkers 87 was a formidable ground-
attack dive-bomber, particularly
defence depended upon
a large
specialised function.
when
the visually
at least for
protected by the
aimed
daylight operations.
Me
109 and as long as ground-air
gun.
anti-aircraft
Some
The Heinkel
alternative
111
was an
German
effec-
types - the
Dornier 17 bomber, the Messerschmitt 110 heavy fighter - were to prove misconceptions; but in 1940 the Luftwaffe was burdened with none of the obsolescent or obsolete types
which equipped the French and
number of army
first-rate
men
to the air force
French and
was
British
squadrons. Moreover,
its
senior officers included a
- Milch, Jeschonnek and Kesselring - whose transfer from the a
British air forces,
token of their competence; too by comparison, were also-rans
many
senior officers of the
who had
forsaken the army to
restart frustrated careers.
The commonality of training shared by German nek had passed
first
ground-air operations were fine-tuned. The
when
they called for
air
force
and army
officers
-Jeschon-
out of the Kriegsakademie - ensured that the Wehrmacht's
air
support
it
would
staffs
arrive
on
of
its
time,
ten Panzer divisions
tactics
knew
of
that
where and how they required
it.
This ensured a massive increment to the Panzers' power, which was in any case form id able.
German
tanks were not,
model
for
model, notably superior
59
to those
of the
British
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
and French armies. The Mark IV Panzer, the army's future main
battle tank,
was well
armoured but undergunned. The Mark III, its workhorse, was inferior in protection both to the British Infantry Tank Mark I and the French Somua, the latter an advanced design
whose all-cast hull would influence that of the American Sherman of 1942-5. However, the German tanks were integrated into 'all-tank' formations, the Panzer divisions, which were not only 'tank-heavy' - that is. unencumbered by unmechanised infantry or artillery - but also trained to
maximise the tank's
dence of action. By
characteristics: speed, manoeuvrability
contrast, the British
had only one armoured
the process of forming; while the French, with
had distributed half
2400),
(1500)
among
more
division,
tanks than the
slow-moving infantry
their
and indepen-
which was
still
in
Germans (3000
to
divisions, allotted
others (700) to bastard 'cavalry' and 'mechanised' divisions, and kept only 800 to form five
armoured
divisions,
of which
in 1940 three
ward Charles de Gaulle - was
homogeneous
in
still
composition,
commanded
active
and one - commanded by the way-
forming. Germany's ten Panzer divisions were not only
as a result
divisions since the Polish campaign; the)
quarters
were
of the reorganisation of the
were
'light'
into true tank
also subordinated to higher Panzer head-
by Hoepner (XVI Panzer Corps), Hoth (XV), Guderian (XIX) and
Reinhardt (XLI). Guderian's and Reinhardt's Corps, with Wietersheim's XIV Mechanised Corps, a formation of motorised infantry divisions which included integral tank battalions, actually
was
composed
a
Group von Kleist. At the time of its creation it armoured force existing in any army and the tank armies which were to sweep across the battlefields of the
separate entity. Panzer
a revolutionary organisation, the largest
forerunner of the great
world
in 1941-5.
The Maginot mentality It
was these dense concentrations of tanks which made the German army so menacing an
opponent of those of the Western
Allies, as the
two
sides
watched and waited
of the Franco-German frontier in the spring of 1940. The French army,
from
scarcely differed in character artillery,
of
its
the venerated 75
commanders had been
terrible
of
that
earlier.
it
wore
to the
staff officers to
August twenty-six years
same boots, manned the same as under 'Papa' Joffre; many the generals who had led it to war in that
1914;
mm, and marched
either side
101 divisions strong,
Moreover,
the
same tunes
it
was
still
a
marching army,
its
pace of
manoeuvre determined by the age-old rhythms of soldier's stride and horse's walk. So too was that of the bulk of the German army, whose 120 infantry divisions were as roadbound as those of the enemy. But the ten German Panzer divisions were not roadbound; the Luftwaffe squadrons that supported
them were not even earthbound. Together they
indeed threatened 'lightning war' against the groundlings of the Western Alliance.
How
hope to give them check 7 The strategy of the West was founded first, of course, on its belief in the inviolability of the Maginot Line, that 'Western Front in concrete' which had consumed the disposable did the Western generals
60
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
margin of the French defence budget since the
first
However, the French commitment
in January 1930.
long predated that
role.
should never again,
As early
as in 1914,
as
funds for
its
construction were voted
to an 'impermeable' military frontier
1922 the French army had determined that
have to
fight a
defensive battle in the
open
demographic and economic development since - the declining industrial base -
had only reinforced
that resolution.
The
soldiers
its
field;
and every
birth-rate,
the static
original vote for the
Maginot
Line was for 3000 million francs; by 1935, 7000 million had been spent, one-fifth of the year-on-year military budget, but only 87 miles of fortification had been completed.
were
Fortification experts
the
money had bought
satisfied (rightly, as the events
of 1940 were to demonstrate) that
effective protection as far as the line ran,
Franco-German border - but there remained 250 miles of
which was along the
totally
unfortified frontier,
where France abutted Belgium. Not only had the money lacked
to extend the line.
maintenance of good relations with Belgium had argued against
its
reoccupation of the Rhineland
Hitler's
in 1936,
Belgium had revoked
France, declaring itself 'independent' - though not neutral - but to being
left
on the wrong
In the event of a
territory,
its
mobile
offensive,
military treaty with
made
clear
its
resistance
if it were extended northwards. which seemed certain to be based on the
command would
therefore
army, with the British Expeditionary Force, into Belgian
field
without having been able to co-ordinate plans with the Belgian General
beforehand or reconnoitre the ground on which
were obliged battle.
its
On
The on
for,
side of the Maginot Line
German
exploitation of Belgian weakness (as in 1914), the French high
have to launch
being found;
it
was
to accept this highly unsatisfactory basis
to fight. Nevertheless the
on which
Staff
French
to prepare a defensive
24 October 1939 General Maurice Gamelin, the French commander-in-chief,
issued orders for an advance to the line of the river Schelde in Belgium in the event of a attack. Three weeks later, on 15 November, when the disadvantages of that scheme had been realised, he issued an amended Directive No. 8 which set the line of advance on the river Dyle, a shorter front which connected the two big Belgian water obstacles, the Schelde estuary and the Meuse, from which river-mobile troops would hold
German
the gap
between
it
and the Maginot
Line.
had the advantage of bringing the Franco-British force closer behind the projected positions of the Belgian army, which was twenty-two divisions strong on mobilisation and had an excellent military reputation; for all the scorn the Allies were later Directive No. 8
to
heap on the Belgians, the Germans had regarded them since 1914 as tenacious to do so even after the debacle that was to come. Their
opponents and would continue front
was also protected,
as in 1914,
on which much money had been Could the Belgians, even
Germany?
Directive No. 8
if
by strong
fortifications, particularly
fighting independently,
promised
an effective strategy.
win Its
a
delay on their frontier with
success
operational efficiency of the Franco-British forces of manoeuvre.
Expeditionary Force
composed
a
along the Meuse,
spent.
homogeneous element, though
61
of
would depend on the
Of
these the British
mixed
quality.
'It
was
THE WAR
no
use', the British
Ambassador
IN
THE WEST H40-1943
had written
in Paris
in January 1940, 'pointing to the size of the British
to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, Navy and Air Force French public .
.
.
opinion wanted large numbers of troops in Europe.' The British had done their best; by
December 1939 they had
sent
all
five
of
home-based
their excellent
regular divisions to
France. However, because the British military system was indeed regular, and yielding trained reserves in very small
numbers by comparison with
France and Germany, that almost exhausted
found from the voluntary reserve, the
were known
the conscripted armies of
military resources. Extra divisions
its
Territorial
Army, 'Saturday night
had
to
be
soldiers' as they
home, high in enthusiasm but low in experience and skill. The five extra between January and April were all Territorial; a final three sent in were so deficient in training and equipment that even the British categorised them as at
divisions sent to France April
'labour' formations. Further,
tank formation, the
1st
all
thirteen
Armoured
were
Division,
infantry divisions; in
was
still
May
1940 Britain's only
not ready for action. Nevertheless
there was an impressive consistency of organisation and spirit in the British Expeditionary
The
Force.
had mobilised with
regulars
Tommy
Atkins's
traditional
and cheerful
indifference to the identity of the King's enemies - or allies ('going to fight
Belgiums', a
aped
eagerly
By
Tommy
to Siegfried Sassoon in 1914) -
and
French army was
plain bad.
which were kept
at full
a
piecemeal collection of divisions and
The good included the ten
reservists;
were
good were the category
some of the
militarily inert
British chief
of
staff,
category
'B'
'A'
'active'
good,
d'Afrique
which had been brought
to
divisions, mobilised
from
reservists
of over thirty-two,
and even insubordinate. Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, the future recalled a march-past of such
complete lack of pride
in
themselves or their
men
in
November
saddler)' that did not
units.
the look in the men's faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks
were of better
.
.
.
man bothered to do so.' The French human quality, but organised on no coherent
cavalry divisions (DLC) included horse
(DLM) armoured
cars
and
fit,
1939 with disgust: vehicles dirty
and
What shook me most, however, was
give the "eyes left", hardly a
divisions
units,
conscript infantry divisions,
reserve divisions mobilised from the younger
'men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and
divisions
Territorials
strength in peacetime, the seven regular divisions of the colonial
arm) and those North African divisions of the Armee France. Less
them bloody
and the
their sang-froid.
contrast, the
indifferent
had explained
and armoured-car
light tanks, the four
although ordered to tank and motorised system; the five light
units, the three light
mechanised
armoured
(DCR) tanks
divisions
only and the ten motorised divisions of track-borne infantry. They were distributed
haphazardly
among
the armies, providing none of the commanders with an equivalent of armoured troops which would form the cutting-edge of Rundstedt's Perhaps the only French units logically trained and equipped to perform
the solid mass of
Army Group
A.
an allotted function were the fortress divisions in the Maginot Line, which included units
of Indo-Chinese and Madagascan machine-gunners; but they, by definition, were prisoners of their positions and unavailable for deployment elsewhere.
62
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
The German army which opposed this miscellaneous Allied host impressed above all by the homogeneity of its composition. It maintained only three types of division: armoured (Panzer), motorised and infantry. The parachute divisions formed part of the Luftwaffe. By May 1940 all ten of its Panzer and all six of its motorised divisions were deployed differed
were
in the west; so too
little
The only oddities
in the
divisions
drawn from the
Poland
tendency to
differed
elite
SS,
which, since the Polish campaign,
whether they were pre-war
German order of battle were
motorised formation), the
a
118 infantry divisions,
in fighting efficiency,
mountain
The
from those of the army only
in
was
it
or wartime reserve.
Cavalry Division (effectively a
1st
infantry divisions
the Nazi Party militia.
illegal brutality that
the
'active'
and the two motorised
had already demonstrated
SS
to amplify in France.
Otherwise
an evident determination to excel
in
its
in
units
courage on
the battlefield.
The
German army's
simplicity of the
arrangements.
Authority
OKW
over
organisation was reflected in
formations
its
from
ran
Hitler
command
its
through
personal
his
Supreme Command), as yet an undeveloped instrument of control, to the army high command (OKH) and then directly to the army groups. In practice, as foreshadowed in Poland, Hitler would deal directly with headquarters,
the General to
The
On
der
Wehrmacht, the
locating his headquarters close to
Staff,
experts.
its
the army's.
(Oberkommando
Luftwaffe's liaison staff at
OKH
it,
but leave direct operational control
directly co-ordinated air operations with
the Allied side, by contrast, operational authority rested with the French
Supreme Commander, General Maurice Gamelin, but was exercised
first
through
a
Doumenc) and then by the commander for the northeast, General Alphonse Joseph Georges, under whom came not only the French Army Groups 1, 2 and 3 but also the British Expeditionary Force. The BEF's commander, General
Commander Land
Forces (General
Lord Gort, answered operationally
May
1940,
to
because Gamelin answered
Georges but
politically to the British cabinet;
politically to his
own
cabinet,
but by
he had developed the
habit of dealing directly with Gort rather than through Georges, while Gort ultimately
looked to London
for orders rather than to La Ferte (Georges'
or Vincennes (Gamelin's).
It
was
a further structural
system that Gamelin's headquarters were near
Georges
in
and French
air
forces separate again.
air
Advanced
Air Striking
squadron headquarters, and Structural deficiencies
a
who had won
wound
and those of both the
British
answered
to
RAF component of the BEF, but the much Force came under Bomber Command in Britain. The French
command
above
liaison staffs with
its
operational squadrons, three separate
both elements of the RAF.
were compounded by personal the Victoria Cross in the First
closely with his fighting battalion
from
his,
Air Force in France actually
directly controlled the
force had three levels of
brave officer
The Royal
command
those of Doumenc halfway to those of
northern France, those of Gort separate from
two headquarters: Gort larger
Paris,
HQ), Montry (Doumenc's)
weakness of the Allied
failings.
Gort was
World War but
a
famously
identified over
commanders. Georges had never properly recovered
suffered during the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia
63
at
Marseilles in
THE WAR
once operations
1934. Gamelin,
was worse,
by
tired
headquarters
De
age.
IN
THE WEST
officer to Joffre,
who
Gaulle,
1940-1943
was simply old -
visited
him
in
- and, what
sixty-eight
remote 'convent-like'
his
Vincennes during the phoney war, brought away the impression of
at
a
researcher testing the chemical creations of his strategy in a laboratory. Air Marshal Arthur
commander of the
Barratt,
British Air
Forces in France, had
button-eyed, button-booted, pot-bellied read like philosophical
tracts.
men
carried fire to the
Perhaps only
a
No
little
more
a
caustic judgement:
grocer'. Gamelin's operational directives
word, written or spoken,
that issued
from Vincennes
the front.
at
Prometheus could have done
Promethean about Gamelin. Even the
British
army,
and eager amateurs, approached the war with
a
a
- and there
that
was nothing
brotherhood of professional warriors
sense of
dejd vu; 'as
we have
Germans once, why do we have to do it again might have encapsulated their French army, drawn from the whole of the nation, scarred by its terrible 7
1914-18 and divided by the extremism of pointless repetition, but
more
still
its
'
politics,
was touched by
acutely. Albert Lebrun, the
his visit to the front a 'slackened resolve, relaxed discipline.
the pure and
'a
enlivening
air
beaten the
attitude.
The
sufferings
a similar
of
sense of
French President, noted
after
There one no longer breathed
of the trenches.' Winston Churchill,
Lord of the
First
Admiralty, was 'struck by the prevailing atmosphere of calm aloofness, by the seemingly
poor
quality of the
work
in
hand, by the lack of visible
activity
of any kind' on the French
General Edouard Rub), of the Second Army, found that 'every exercise was
front.
considered
as a vexation,
all
work
as a fatigue. After several
months of stagnation, nobody
believed in the war any more.' part the
In
common and
The
indecisive.
Poland
French did not believe because the war was foreseen, not only by
soldiers but also
a vision
by the generals,
common
soldiers
of the trenches, long-drawn-out
as a repetition
and generals of the German army had been given
of a different outcome;
they as yet lacked the
if
faith to believe
repeated in the west. Hitler had no doubts. 'Gentlemen,' he told his 'Case Yellow', 'you are about to witness the
persuaded by
Norway
that
neutrality,
his reading
most famous
he could not be condemned
for his
on
victory in history!'
of captured Allied documents relating
he announced to Haider
staff
imminent
that the attack in the
it
in
could be
the eve of
On
27 April,
to their intervention in
violation of Dutch
and Belgian
west would begin in the
first
week of May. Weather forecasts enforced postponement of the date from 5 to 6 May, then 8 May. Finally on 7 May he postponed it again to 10 May 'but not one day after that'. He held to his resolve.
evening of Friday 9 May from the Dutch frontier to Luxembourg,' wrote Guy Chapman, 'outposts facing Germany became aware of a vast murmuring on German side as of the gathering of a host.' A warning of impending attack from the 'Late in the
Professor the
Belgian military attache in Berlin, delayed in deciphering, was received in Brussels just
before midnight. The Belgian high
German vanguards were
already
command
moving
at
once put
its
army on alert; but by then the on the morning of 10 May,
to the attack. At 4.30
64
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
airborne units began landing near The Hague and Leyden in Holland and
of the Meuse fort
in Belgium.
The most daring of the airborne
attacks
on
the crossings
was against the Belgian
of Eben Emael, guarding the junction of the Meuse with the Albert Canal, both key
German glider-borne infantry crash-landed on the penned the defenders inside and, using concrete-piercing charges, overwhelmed them by the sheer surprise of their descent. Surprise afflicted no one worse than the Dutch, who were genuine neutrals. They had taken no part in the First World War, wanted no part of the Second and commended obstacles in the Belgian defence plan.
roof of the
themselves
fort,
as
an
enemy
only because parts of their
territory,
notably the strip
known
as
way round the Belgian water obstacles. The ability of the Dutch to defend their territory was minimal. Their army, only ten divisions strong, had not fought a war since 1830. Their air force had only 125 aircraft, half of which were immediately destroyed on the ground by surprise attack. Their best hope of delaying the 'Maastricht appendix', offered an easy
defeat, as they earlier,
and
was
had
War
learnt in the Eighty Years
network of its canals and
trust to the
against the Spanish three centuries
zone around Amsterdam and Rotterdam
to retreat inside their waterlogged
rivers to delay the invader.
The
had cost Spain decades of campaigning was unhinged by German airpower
strategy in a
which
few hours.
By overflying the water defences of 'Fortress Holland' with streams of Junkers 52 transport aircraft
on the morning of
Division in
its
10
May
the Luftwaffe landed the
heart, there to await the arrival
resistance of the
of Army Group
Dutch army, the blowing of several
of German surprise
attacks,
whole of the 22nd Airborne
vital
brave
B's tanks. Despite the
bridges through the miscarriage
and the intervention of the French Seventh Army, the German
airborne troops did not have long to wait.
armoured spearheads reached out
to join
On
the
morning of
hands with them
May,
13
as they
as the
German
were on the point of
capturing Rotterdam, the Luftwaffe misunderstood a signal from the ground announcing their success and bombed the city centre flat. It was the first 'area' operation of the Second World War and a raid which killed 814 civilians. But it effectively ended Dutch resistance, prompting the Queen of the Netherlands to embark on a ship of the Royal Navy for a British port - she had asked to be taken to another part of her kingdom - and causing the
Dutch high
command
to capitulate the following day. As
Queen Wilhelmina
left,
she
due course, with God's help, the Netherlands will regain their European The Dutch people, who were to pass through the cruellest of German occupations in western Europe, were not to foresee that the Dutch empire in the East
forecast that 'in territory'.
Indies
would
also be lost to
No word
them before
liberation eventually came.
of criticism has ever been levelled against the Dutch by either victors or
vanquished of 1940. Not so the Belgians. Although the German army found stalwart in action - the
official
'extraordinary bravery'; the
historian of the
German opponent of
'among our adversaries the Belgians fought the chief of staff of the
German
best';
German armies defending France
65
18th Division
Hitler, Ulrich
von
their soldiers
spoke of
Hassell,
while Siegfried Westplul, against invasion in 1944,
their
judged that later to
noted
that
be it
THE WAR
was astonishing
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
to see that the Belgians fought with increasing tenacity the nearer the
of the war approached' - the
on
afterwards, insisted
laying
British
and French, both during the
blame
for
much
of what
befell
crisis
them on
end
of 1940 and ever the Belgian army,
King and government. King Leopold's chief military adviser. General Robert van Overstraeten, has been characterised as the British before the
something
certainly
genius' of the 1940 campaign, resisting liaison with the French
'evil
German in
attack
and succumbing
to defeatism as
both charges; but the truth was
that
soon
as
it
Belgium found
impossible position. Short of allowing France and Britain to garrison
its
and
began. There
territory
is
an
itself in
from the
onset - which
would have compromised the neutrality it still believed to be its best hope of averting invasion - it had no option but to keep its military distance from the Allies, while fortifying its eastern frontier as best it could against the Wehrmacht. Even so, van Overstraeten did allow British and French officers wearing civilian clothes to reconnoitre the positions they intended to take up if Germany attacked; and, though he refused to coordinate defence plans with the Allies, he did transmit to
German
9 January, British
them Belgian
intelligence of
intentions, including details of the original 'Case Yellow' captured at
and subsequent indications of their scheme
army on the Western
to closer co-operation with the Allies lay in
nothing would induce them to defend the whole of Belgium. His (correct)
judgement was
that the)
intended to advance no further than the centre of the kingdom;
judgement was
his equally correct but harsher
it
that they
would allow
the Belgian
army
to
forward positions on the Albert Canal while they consolidated their
'sacrifice' itself in its
own behind
envelop and destroy the Franco-
to
Front.
Van Overstraeten's professional objection his belief that
Mechelen on
on the Dyle
In the event, they did not
Line.
even win the time
to
The French Seventh Army, though commanded by Henri Giraud, a genuine fighting general and future rival of de Gaulle for leadership of Free France, made poor time along the North Sea coast on its mission to bring support to the Dutch and the Belgian left flank. It had further to advance than the Germans of Army Group B coming from the consolidate.
who proved more
opposite direction,
when
defended.
Its
attack.
By 12 May
its
day
it
was ordered
to
adept than
it
in negotiating
water obstacles even^
motorised reconnaissance elements also came under German advance was blunted near Breda, fall
back to guard the
left
its
objective,
air
and on the following
flank of the Dyle Line near Antwerp.
It
did
so pursued by the advance guard of the 9th Panzer Division.
The was
Allied
in train.
deployment on
As the Dutch army
to the Dyle fell
was already going wrong. A 'domino
back from
around Amsterdam and Rotterdam,
it
its
effect'
forward positions into Fortress Holland
uncovered the
left
flank of the Belgians
on
the
where they were outflanked by the 9th Panzer Division. On the right they were outflanked by the 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, which were about to be let across the Albert Canal,
Meuse - the most formidable of military obstacles German airborne troops' descent on Eben Emael. While
north-west
precipitous defile of the
in
Europe - by the
the Royal Air
66
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
Force tried vainly in
them
a series
German
the face of the
of suicidal bombing missions to destroy the Meuse bridges
advance, the Belgians began to
Army and
the support of the French First
BEF advancing
the
to the Dyle.
dream'
'Steps in a
Both these forces were in forward motion, the BEF passing by Brussels, the French
Army by Maubeuge, with their
British
line
Army of General Andre Corap on
the Ninth
was
of advance
country.
familiar
Ypres and Mons.
Middleton,
'as if they
was
'It
almost',
in a
they were advancing, was scarcely a natural obstacle
been led
had erected along
to believe the Belgians
Marlborough's
dream. They saw again faces of friends
them, and for their French
for
First
For the
wrote the American war correspondent, Drew
were retracing steps taken
become nightmare
right.
of their military
battlefields
long dead and heard the half-remembered names of towns and shortly to
its
through
ran
It
campaigning ground, past Waterloo and across more recent history,
in
back, hoping to feel behind
fall
the
at all;
villages.'
allies too. artificial
The
Dream was
Dyle, to
which
obstacles they
had
were scattered or absent altogether
it
would encounter those that they had emplaced a few years later; collected and to Normandy, they would form a principal element in the German fortifications of the D-Day beaches). The French had two 'cavalry' and one mechanised division with them; the British had almost no armour at all. Opposite were the 3rd and 4th Divisions of Hoepner's armoured corps, with over 600 tanks, their crews battle-hardened and trained for rapid advance by the experience of the Polish campaign. No wonder that (the British
transported
an eerie cynicism suffused
Hitler's
reminiscence of
of the campaign:
this stage
'It
was
wonderful the way everything turned out according to plan. When the news came through that the enemy were moving forward along the whole front, could have wept for joy; I
they had fallen into the trap Schlieffen Plan.' Hitler's
own
.
.
.
first
they had believed
.
.
.
that
we were
striking to the old
experience of battle had occurred only It
and bloody baptism. Now: 'how lovely Felsennest
his
headquarters] was!
The
birds in
me
...
I
could have wept for
There were soon to be
'Sickle
Edmund
whose troops on
11
tears
of anguish
May were
I
is
with
us'
who remained
day delegated
his
Gaston
Billotte, to
'above
all
powers of command
whom
whose
and looked forward
from Gamelin,
Stroke'
was sure everything would go
in his adversaries'
digging in cheerfully
Ironside, the British chief of staff,
the advantage
a bitter
joy.'
headquarters - but not
from the hard-boiled Major-General Bernard Montgomery commanding the Division
miles from
the morning, the view of the road up which the columns
were advancing, the squadrons of planes overhead. There right for
Nest,
[Crag's
fifty
had been
the Dyle, in the dying stage of the 'old Schlieffen Plan' in October 1914.
Georges had
to
diary 'a
on
tells that
really
hard
British 3rd
the Dyle Line; nor from Sir
he judged 'on the whole
fight all this
summer'; nor
preoccupied with Holland' and had the previous in
Belgium to Georges; not even from General
in turn delegated authority
67
on the northern
front
WEAPONS OF BLITZKRIEG Right:
A
Junkers
87
dive-bomber,
the dreaded 'Stuka' of the Battle of
France.
Its
limitations were exposed in
the Battle of Britain,
where
pulling out of to its
its
dive.
Heavy
withdrawal from the
16 August 1940, but
it
it
proved
moment
highly vulnerable at the
of
losses led
battle
on
subsequently
proved highly successful in an antishipping role, particularly in the
Mediterranean, and as a 'tank-buster'
armoured
in the
on the Eastern
battles
Front.
rr
S?fc Above: The MG-42 heavy
crew of a
German
machine-gun on the
Aisne during the advance into France.
Right: German
infantry in inflatable
assault boats cross a
under
fire at
Dutch waterway
the start of the
offensive. This
was how
crossed on 13 May Opposite: A column
was
Mark
Ills
the
1940. of Panzer
exploiting the break-out
from the Meuse bridgeheads,
1940. The of the first
Western
Meuse
Mark
III
was
German armoured
May
the mainstay force for the
two years of the war.
68
.
THE WAR
and who, with force to
cover
thirty divisions to
On
his mission.
fulfil
the disturbing developments
IN
THE WEST
fifty-five
1940-1943
miles of
had more than adequate
line,
the 'line of engagement' along the Dyle, the Allies, despite
on
their flanks
and the softening of Belgian resistance
in front
of them, had reason to believe that they outnumbered the approaching Germans did - and would be able to check their advance.
The the
German
(in
which
offensive
was then
Hitler
and confronted
intelligence resources
was the French
of the situation
appreciation
Allied
misapprehension
had
their
in
main concentration of force. As
failed to establish
where the German of the Ardennes
roaming Flanders, which missed the German spearheads; forces, flailing vainly at the
German spearheads
been overflying the Ardennes, which had seven Panzer divisions of Army Group
if
lost
that
Schwerpunkt
when
in 1940
it
it
main
of
axis
in 1914, their lay.
In 1914
it
should have been
was the
Allied air
when they should have essentials. From 10 to 14 May, the
in Belgian Flanders
touch with
A nudged forward nose
dense
defiles in a traffic concentration so
however, rested on the
Belgium,
exulting) that there they faced the
cavalry, beating the thickets
as they
to
tail
along the Ardennes
General Giinther Blumentritt calculated that
a single-tank 'front', the tail of the column would have been in East Prussia; up towards the weakest spot on the Allied front co form an irresistible force.
deployed on
the\ breasted
These seven Panzer divisions front
of them they found
old-fashioned
When
elite
in
1,
first
2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10
line the
- deployed between them 1800 tanks. In
two Belgian
divisions of Chasseurs Ardennais, an
of forest riflemen whose braver) counted for nothing against armour.
they had been brushed aside, the Panzers found themselves opposed by Corap's
Ninth Arm) and part of Huntziger's Second. Although neither formed an estimation, with the able to hold, as the
Meuse
at least in
at
their front their reservists
elite
by any
should nevertheless have been
normal times; but May 1940 was not normal times. Almost
as
soon
German vanguards of Army Group A made touch with the Meuse defences, they to find a way across. Corap's and Huntziger's outpost guards took fright, the
were able
banks of the
river
were abandoned and the breach
in the Allied defensive
dyke was
opened. General Andre Beaufre, then described the impression the Ferte early in the
morning of
The atmosphere was was
terribly pale.
a
junior staff officer
at
French general headquarters,
news made on General Georges
that
14
at his
command
post
La
at
May:
of
a family in
which there had been
'Our front has been broken
at
a death.
Sedan. There has been
Georges
.
.
.'
a collapse.
.
.
He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears. He was the first man I had seen weep in this campaign. Alas, there were to be others. It made a terrible impression on me. Doumenc [Georges's subordinate] - taken aback - reacted immediately. 'General, this is war and in war things like this are bound to happen!' Then Georges, still pale, explained: following terrible bombardment from the air the two inferior divisions [55 and 71] had taken to their heels. X Corps signalled that the position was
70
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
penetrated and that
German
tanks had arrived in Bulson [two miles west of the
Meuse, and so inside the French-defended another flood of
happened.
map and
Everyone
tears.
'Well, General,' said
about midnight. Here there was
area]
remained
else
Doumenc,
'all
silent,
shattered by what had
wars have their
costs. Let's
look
at
the
see what can be done.'
is much in Beaufre's description of this scene that yields to exegesis. First, Sedan: the name of the town where Napoleon III had surrendered to the Prussians in September 1870
There
was
in
French ears synonymous with
disaster.
Second, the 'two inferior
divisions': the 55th
Army were both composed of older reservists, and both had indeed taken to their heels at the approach of the German tanks. Third, what the map suggested might be done: the German penetration of the French line had and
of Huntziger's Second
71st Divisions
occurred
at a
point so sensitive - as Manstein had intended - that any counter-measure
adopted would have
to
be massive and almost instantaneous
if it
were
to stop the rot.
week would be one of seeking
story of Allied strategic decision in the next
The
the telling
blow.
The
details
of the story from the German
Georges than he had grasped. For the Meuse had
side, first
however, boded even worse
been crossed
for
he believed, on
not, as
the day before he had his nervous collapse, but the day before that, 12 May. As darkness fell,
of Sedan. Creeping across
weir across the Meuse
'Sickle Stroke'
had already struck
Rommel's engineers began
at
to lay
bridges were completed and the at this
them
pontoon bridges
first
on the other
told, 'the incident at
dealt successfully with this bridgehead.
Houx
is
a
Panzer formation
at
It
was
However, the tanks withdrew
in hand'.
intact, if
not yet
a
burgeoning
13
main
Sedan. They had been deploying in the open flood plain of the
river,
May. General
The French
first
P.
P.
J.
artillery
Gransard observed
was
17s,
'the
all
through the
enemy emerging from
the
of infantrymen, of vehicles either armoured or
brought them under
by high-level Dornier
infantry regiments
Mean-
A's
forest ... an almost uninterrupted descent
motorised'.
Game-
after taking a
threat.
Army Group
days of nose-to-tail driving through the defiles of the Ardennes,
morning of
as yet pre-
tank battalion, and
while French attention was diverted southwards by the assault of
bombing,
By evening the
side with gunfire.
of his tanks had crossed the river - only 120 yards
few prisoners, leaving Rommel's bridgehead
after three
May
13
across the river, while his tanks,
carious. They tried a counter-attack, with a force that included
was
by
The next morn-
point.
The French might have lin
there, so that
the foundations of the Gamelin plan.
waiting to cross, destroyed French bunkers
wide
Houx, north
at
they reached an island in midstream from which a lock-gate
it,
led to the west bank. During the night reinforcements joined
ing
com-
patrols of the motorcycle reconnaissance battalion of the 7th Panzer Division
manded by Erwin Rommel had found an unguarded
fire;
but
it
was answered by German
then by diving Stukas. The
effect
on the French
shattering. 'The noise, the horrible noise', repeated the
71
wounded
y
-*
*
if
I
'
^
>
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
brought to
a field
throughout
this
ambulance; better troops were to
and subsequent wars.
'Five
same
feel
the
hours of
this
terror
By three
pioneers of the
in the
1st,
afternoon the Stukas drew
2nd and
off.
air attack
nightmare', wrote General
Edouard Ruby, deputy chief of staff of Second Army, 'were enough nerves.'
under
As soon
to shatter [the troops']
as they did so, the assault
10th Panzer Divisions began dragging their inflatable boats to
enemy fire - the French saw the danger they faced - the boat crews suffered heavy
the water's edge. Setting off under a suddenly amplified hail of
manned
their
weapons
as they
and were here and there driven back, but along the whole
casualties
Donchery
to Bazeilles, established a series of footholds
place of legend in French military history;
it
was there
on the
far
line
of assault, from
bank. Bazeilles was a
in 1870 that the elite coloniales
had
Germans in 'the house of the last cartridge'. In 1940 it was the Germans who were ready to do or die at Bazeilles. Hans Rubarth, a pioneer sergeant of fought to the death against the
the 10th Panzer Division, ordered his
men
to
throw
their entrenching tools out
we
overloaded boat in midstream: 'No digging for us - either end.' Before the day
had taken
its
was
out, nine
objective. Rubarth
of his eleven
get
men had become
was promoted lieutenant
through or
of their
that's the
casualties but the
in the field
group
and awarded the
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, Germany's highest decoration for bravery.
Such
exploits,
divisions across the
many
times repeated, carried the storming parties of
Meuse during
posts of French infantry held their
tanks - sometimes
at
the afternoon of 13 May. In front
ground with
all
three Panzer
of them
isolated out-
great courage; but others ran at the sight
the sight of French tanks, often merely
French tanks did appear towards evening; they belonged
to the
of
rumour of tanks. 3rd Armoured and 3rd
at
the
Motorised Divisions, but the counter-attack they had been sent to deliver was not driven
home. As they withdrew from
the river's edge, the
Germans reinforced
their
own
units,
for the
coming breakout.
That evening Gamelin,
still
at
Vincennes, 120 miles from the crisis-point, issued an
enemy
order of the day: 'The onslaught of the mechanical and motorised forces of the
must
now
the high it
tank
which by pontoon bridges had been transported to the French bank and prepared
be faced. The hour has
command. One
is
must not only be sealed
come
no longer
to fight in
depth on the positions appointed by
entitled to retire. If the
off but counter-attacked
and
enemy makes
a local
breach,
retaken.'
During 14 May Gamelin's troops - who were far too widely dispersed to 'fight in depth' - did attempt counter-attacks against the German bridgeheads. None was successful,
in part
because the
target
was
delivered had not yet formed.
Its
The blade with which 'Sickle Stroke' would be component elements were still struggling out of their
diffuse.
bridgeheads: the 6th and 8th Panzer Divisions north of Sedan; the 2nd, south.
The danger posed by the
5th
and Rommel's 7th
at
1st
Dinant had not
and 10th to the yet
impressed
Refugees from the war zone arriving in an area not yet overrun by ihe Germans, France,
May
1940. Columns
of refugees seriousl)
73
hampered
allied troop
movements.
THE WAR
itself
THE WEST
IN
1940-1943
on the French high command's consciousness. In a strict military sense, it would until the Panzer divisions had coalesced and started inland, before supporting infantry had crossed the river to join them. Then the armoured column
have been best to wait their
Armoured on 14 May seeking ineffectively whom it might devour. While the Panzer bridgeheads were enlarged, the German tanks refuelled and reammunitioned and the start-lines were drawn for a plunge into the French heartland. might have been caught
wandered about the
Division
Which of
and decapitated. As
'in flank'
around Sedan was the stronger, but
men
like
and
the Pour
le
him because he
On
division in the process.
tentative 'stop-line' before fifteen
jovial colonial soldier
with
making
a talent for
German
it
15
only for beating the enemy.
clearly cared
Germany's highest
Merite,
May
by
1940,
could be
Rommel had
military decoration, as a captain by a brilliant
stroke of personal initiative during the First
of
Dinant faced the poorer troops of
at
him, was opposed, moreover, by the wiry and ascetic Erwin Rommel, whose
soldiers idolised
won
fat
away? The Panzer concentration
first
north
that further
Corap's Ninth Army. Andre Corap, a his
was, the French 3rd
battlefield
German spearheads would be
the
it
World War, and destroyed much of an a similar initiative,
Italian
he broke through Corap's
manned and advanced seventeen
miles for the loss
dead. During the afternoon the 6th Panzer Division, crossing
at
Mon-
therme, north of Sedan, joined in the Ninth Army's destruction. The Indo-Chinese
who had defended
machine-gunners
were bypassed
(their soldierly qualities
would be contested by rades-in-arms,
the crossings with devoted bravery for three days
whom
Ho
portended of the bitterness with which Vietnam
Chi Minh's followers
the 6th Panzer Division
in the
met
as
post-war years). Their French com-
drove forward, showed no such
it
tenacity - nothing, indeed, but pitiful demoralisation. Karl
von
respondent accompanying the German tanks, was astonished
to
Stackelberg, a
war
cor-
encounter formed bodies
of French troops marching to meet them:
There were
finally
20,000 men,
were heading backward scenes there.
on French follow 7
It
who
was inexplicable.
How
territory, after this victory
How
was
it
here
... in this
as prisoners. Unwillingly
was
it
one sector and on
one had
to think
possible that, after this
on the Meuse,
this gigantic
this
one
first
major
battle
consequence should
possible these French soldiers with their officers, so completely
downcast, so completely demoralised, would allow themselves to go more or voluntarily into
Not was
still
all
French soldiers would give up the
first
less
imprisonment?
resisting steadily, as
The
day,
of Poland and the
it
would do
until
its
fight
so
easily. In
the north the First
remnants were completely surrounded
phase of the Battle of France. The second phase began on 5 June, following the
Dunkirk evacuation. B\
10 June the
first
German
tanks had crossed the Seine, and Paris
four days later.
74
Army
fell
at
75
THE WAR
And on
Lille.
Armoured at
IS
May
German
Panzers' path,
de Gaulle, long an enthusiast
country was
fortified,
too stupid! The war wide.
If
I
is
'I
felt
for
command
appointed to
I
as
will fight
'gain time' for a
Division was
still
armoured warfare and its
the 4th
badly as
it
wherever
new
front to
in the
be estab-
process of form-
whose
a patriot
love of
army's current demoralisation, accepted the
myself borne up by
beginning
live,
and
Armoured
not diminished, by
challenge with ardour.
is
1940-1943
who had been
Charles de Gaulle,
lished north of Paris. Although the 4th
world
THE WEST
Division four days previously, received orders from General Georges to attack
Laon, which lay in the
ing,
IN
a limitless fury,'
could. Therefore I
must
defeated and the national stain washed clean." All
as I
long as
he wrote
later.
'"Ah!
it
must go on. For
I
must
until the
it's
this the
enemy
have managed to do since was
is
re-
upon that day.' De Gaulle managed to do little when he finally brought his division into action on 17 May. His tanks made inroads into the positions of the 1st Panzer Division, one of whose staff officers, Captain Graf von Kielsmansegg, who thirty-five years later would command the NATO forces in Germany, decided on showing them that 'discretion was the better part of valour'. However, they were too few to do more than frighten the Germans and by solved
evening the) turned about and withdrew to
refuel.
The Germans had grown collectively nervous that da) - although Guderian, commanding the 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions, champed at the bit and sought by every means to get forward. But Hitler,
want to
risk
concerned
recorded Haider,
'is
anxious about our
anything and would therefore be happiest to have us
to line the 'walls'
was lagging behind the
own
halt.'
of the developing 'Panzer corridor' with
were converging into
a solid
armoured mass of seven
which
his infantry,
was adamant
tanks; Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief,
Meuse
should. The Panzers had advanced fort) miles since the crossing of the earlier,
success, doesn't
Haider himself was
divisions
that
he
four days
and had the
clear
evidence of the collapse of the French Ninth and Second Armies everywhere before their eyes.
The French
First
Arm), the BEF and the Belgians were giving ground
to the north,
while the French to the south, immobilised in the Maginot Line and unable to manoeuvre for lack
of transport, were clearly unable to intervene against the Panzers. Nevertheless the
German high command, prompted by
Hitler's anxieties,
on
17
May imposed
a halt
on
the
advance.
German second time
anxieties paled by
comparison with those of the
in the century, faced the prospect
Allies.
The
confronted by the fear of losing their only arm) - and large parts of their
continued to stand by their
on
allies
breaking into two, the better part
the
on
crisis
the approaches to Paris.
air
in
were
if
they
The French foresaw their army encirclement in Belgium and the north-
falling victim to
The
a
potential for disaster
new and loomed
doubtfully defensible as large as in 1914
was actually more acute. Then the French army had suffered defeat
of the Frontiers but retreated
British
force -
a collapsing battle line.
ern departments, while the remnants struggled to form front
Belgians, for the
of defeat and occupation. The
good order under an imperturbable commander;
76
but
in the Battle in 1940
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
it
was
which grew worse
retreating in disorder, a disorder
command
but not the effective
of
a general
who was
Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, sent for
Philippe Petain, hero of Verdun, to join
him
as his
daily
under the nominal orders
On
surrendering to events.
new men:
16
May
Madrid embassy
to the
for
Maxime Weygand,
deputy; to Syria for
chief of staff to Foch in the victory campaign of 1918, as a replacement for Gamelin. Both were very old - Weygand, at seventy-three, five years older than Gamelin, Petain older still - but
moment
at this
of agony their heroic reputations seemed
reassurance that some-
a
thing might yet be snatched from the yawning jaws of defeat.
Gamelin was now discredited. In Paris on 16 May he conferred with Reynaud and Winston Churchill - Prime Minister since 10 May, when the House of Commons had with-
drawn
confidence from Neville Chamberlain - and admitted that he had no troops
its
available to
stem the German onrush.
'I
then asked, "Where
me
Churchill recorded. 'General Gamelin turned to shrug, said
"Aucune" ["There
the Quai d'Orsay clouds of
venerable
the
a
Second World
to
unprovided with
Churchill
left
fighters to join the iority that fighter
smoke
a
and, with a shake of his head and a
long pause. Outside
arose from large bonfires and
token of apprehended defeat War.)
commanders having selves
none"]. There was
for
was dumbfounded.
'I
defend
five
garden of
It
.
.
had never occurred
in France.
strategic reserve
on
May
21
to
me
that
army
.
England promising to send
reinforcements could
Plan')
and headquarters throughout
at capitals
...
squadrons of
six additional
However, so complete was German
make no
difference
at this
stage
he had discovered did not
assumed command from Gamelin on 20 May, attempted
Weygand
in the
saw from the window
hundred miles of engaged front would have left themWhat was the Maginot Line for?'
a [strategic reserve].
few already
was needed was the ('the
I
pushing wheelbarrows of archives on to them.' (The burning of official
officials
papers was to be
is
'
the strategic reserve?"
is
exist.
to improvise
that the encircled Allied forces
of the
British
air
super-
battle.
What
Weygand, who
one by proposing
north of the
German
break-in should co-ordinate convergent attacks against the Panzer corridor with the
French armies deal with
still
Blitzkrieg
operating to
and had
authority to execute
whom
in fact
was
south. This reflected a correct appreciation of
too.
Armoured
De
Georges was killed in a
now
a
broken man, while
motor accident on
to
21
Billotte, to
May. The troops
Gaulle had attempted another vain counter-attack with his depleted
Division
on
19
May; and on
21
May two
British divisions,
tank battalions, succeeded in denting the flank of the Panzer corridor
Rommel, commanding on divisions.
how
been proposed by Gamelin two days before, but the
lacking.
he had delegated authority, was
were lacking 4th
it
its
at
supported by two Arras, so alarming
the spot, that he estimated he had been attacked by five
However, these formations represented almost the whole
enemy
Allied force available
Weygand for manoeuvre. The Ninth Army had disintegrated. The First Arm) and tin BEF were constricted between the North Sea and the advancing Germans. The as yet unen1
to
gaged French armies south of the Panzer corridor lacked transport, tanks and
Meanwhile,
after the
German high command's
77
hesitation
of
17
artillery.
May, the Panzers had
THE WAR
May
driven on. By 18 ing the river
May
THE WEST
IN
1940-1943
they were driving across the battlefields of the
Sambre on
their
northern flank and the river
Guderian's divisions reached Abbeville
the
at
World War,
First
Somme on
the south.
mouth of the Somme,
skirt-
On
20
thus effectively
dividing the Allied armies into two.
These were heady days
called
for
arm and even before
the Panzer
Blitzkrieg.
Heinz Guderian. He was dedicated to the development of Hitler's rise to
Frustrated by the timidity of his
power was an advocate of what would be
own
high
by Haider, represented the fainthearts - he had had
command
- Brauchitsch, abetted
to restort to subterfuge in evading
its
orders to proceed with caution after crossing the Meuse. His creative disobedience had
not yet
won
a great victory;
culty in achieving
it.
On
20
he and the whole of the German Panzer force would have
May
reviewed plans
Hitler
for 'Case Red', the
diffi-
advance into the
French heartland which would complete 'Sickle Stroke' and also complete the destruction of the French army - as long as the Panzer arm was kept intact. So it was that the British counter-attack
which had so alarmed Rommel,
commanding Army Group
Rundstedt,
too
at Arras,
far for safety
of the Panzer corridor against
'walls'
ported by Haider,
home mand
A, agreed with
and should not proceed
now abandoned
until the
a repetition
now
him
alarmed Hitler once
that the Panzers
had advanced
slower-moving infantry had lined the
of the Arras surprise. Brauchitsch, sup-
his earlier caution,
urged
their attacks against the encircled Allies in the north,
that the Panzers
and even
should press
B,
advancing on a front through Belgium, had
now
aroused
com-
tried to transfer
of part of the striking force from Rundstedt to Bock, the situation of whose
Group
again.
Hitler's anxiety.
Army
When
on 24 May, however, he cancelled it and reiterated his refusal lowlands which he claimed, from his own trench experience of the First World War, were quite unsuitable for armoured operations. Hitler's 'stop order' would keep the Panzers halted for two whole days, until the Hitler learned of the attempt
to allow the Panzers to press into the coastal
May - two
days which in retrospect have been deemed strategically decioutcome of the Second World War. Unbeknown to the Germans, the British government had on 20 May decided that part of the BEF might have to be evacuated from the Channel ports and had instructed the Admiralty to begin assembling small ships on the
afternoon of 26 sive for the
British
south coast to take them
not yet to
comprehend
with the French
First
off.
a full-scale
The operation would be codenamed 'Dynamo'. It was evacuation; the government still hoped that the BEF,
Army, would be able
to break
through the Panzer corridor to join
on and south of the Somme - which was the point BEF was itself becoming wearied by its battle in Bel-
the surviving bulk of the French armies
of the Weygand Plan. However, the
gium which had increasingly
entailed a fighting withdrawal
concerned by
in France.
to the Schelde,
his responsibility for safeguarding Britain's
General Heinz Guderian, commanding
campaign
from the Dyle
The picture
XIX Panzer
clear!)
Corps, in his
shows two machine.
78
command
and Gort was
only army.
On
vehicle during the
signallers (front) sitting at
an Enigma
23
THE WAR
May he had
IN
THE WEST mO-1943
who was
received an assurance from Anthony Eden,
government would make naval and
that the
On
have to withdraw on the northern coast.
serving as
War
Minister,
them should they same day he concluded that the Weygand arrangements to
air
the
assist
Plan could not be realised for lack of troops, tanks and aircraft, and withdrew from Arras the
two
which had attacked Rommel with such
divisions
miracle can save the
May; but on
and
in the canals
He was wrong
He was
and
rivers
When
French
the stop order
most wanted and needed and the Colme Canal, the
fugitive
First
did,
that the Luftwaffe aircraft
was - temporarily -
enemy could
Dynamo
start
total
could
it
it
night
sunk was
six British
it
British -
the watery sanctuary of the
that part
of the Allied army he
Protected by the Aa Canal
safe.
embarking
in the flotillas
of destroyers
to
send cross-Channel from the
day. Hitler
had been assured by Goering
could not stop the evacuation ships closing the shore
and two French destroyers
in
nine days of air attack - nor
reduce the resistance of the Dunkirk defenders, man)' of them French, many of
who
gave ground with extreme reluctance against concentric Ger-
attack.
The Belgian army was forced
into a capitulation north of the
on 27 May.
almost exactly the same area where, in 1914,
It
surrendered
in
able to consolidate a defensive position
had been supported by French and
Now,
same
get
would prevent any evacuation from the Dunkirk pocket. During 24-26 it and would continue to do so as long as the
those French colonials,
man
that
would
did indeed raise havoc inside
evacuation lasted, until 4 June. But - the
a
Corps, wrote on 23
two days before the
Arm) - reached
was revoked on 26 May
to destroy
headquarters of Operation
its
May. 'Nothing but
which port Gort now directed
to
when he
and small boats which Admiral Bertram Ramsay began
May
II
right to fear that the Panzers
around Dunkirk,
to give the 'stop order'
substantial portion of the
a
'Canal Line'.
21
salvation.
its
For Hitler had anticipated events.
the BEF.
on
Gort's
day Gort's decision to disengage and draw the BEF back towards the
that
coast in effect laid the basis for
bogged down
effect
BEF now,' Alan Brooke, commanding
unfairly
of collapse,
it
condemned
the French First
mans rendered them that a large
It
was
them by
allies
who were
the)
it
mid-
had been
Then, however,
it
themselves on the point
to ask for terms. So, too, shortly
when
at Lille
would
the divisions of
and running out of ammunition. So
marched out
the honours of war, playing significant
fight until 1918.
at
armies which remained intact and combatant.
Arm) which were encircled
bravely had the) fought that,
military band.
British
for deserting
had no option but
and continue the
Dunkirk pocket
to surrender
them
evidence of the fighting
on 30 May,
the Ger-
into captivity with the music of a spirit
proportion of these stalwarts were not French
of the French army of 1940
at all,
but North African subjects
of the French empire.
The evacuation of the BEF - and the French troops
in the
Dunkirk pocket
who
could
now in full swing. Only 8000 were got off on 26-27 May; but on 28 May, as the fleet of naval ships and civilian small craft standing in to the shore grew, 19,000 were embarked. On 29 May 47,000 were rescued; on 31 May, the day Gort himself
be got to the beaches - was
80
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
THE DUNKIRK EVACUATION
The
'miracle' of Dunkirk.
'Bloody Marvellous', trumpeted the Daily Mirror, but Churchill
grimly observed that 'wars are not
won by
evacuations'.
for England, 68,000. By 4 June, when the last ship drew away, 337,000 Allied soldiers had been saved from capture. The number included almost the whole manpower of the BEF less its temporarily irreplaceable equipment, and 110,000 French soldiers, the majority left
of
whom
ports in
on
arriving in
Normandy and
This
now
Brittany to rejoin the rest of the French
consisted of sixty divisions,
some withdrawn from particularly
England were immediately transhipped and returned to French
de Gaulle's
some
army
still
the Maginot Line; only three were armoured,
all
the Meuse,
much
4th Armoured, which on 28-30 May had once again
81
in the field.
on
survivors of the battle
depleted,
tried but failed
v^-k3dk^
82
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
Two
to dent the flank of the Panzer corridor, this time near Abbeville.
mained
Armoured
in France: the 1st (and only)
defending the coast west of Dunkirk (the British
British divisions re-
Division and the 51st Highland Division, rifle
regiments committed to the defence
of Calais had already been overwhelmed). Against them the Germans deployed eightynine infantry divisions and fifteen Panzer and motorised divisions, the five
latter
organised into
groups, each of two Panzer and one motorised divisions. These Panzer-motorised
combinations formed powerful offensive instruments, which provided the model for the
which offensive operations would be conducted throughWorld War and, indeed, ever since. The Luftwaffe continued to deploy
tank-infantry formations with
out the Second
about 2500 strike
aircraft, fighters
tured airfields close to the battle
and bombers, which they could
line.
purchased from the United
hastily
only operate
some
The French
States,
air force,
now
operate from cap-
though reinforced by machines
and supported by 350
of the RAF, could
aircraft
980.
The Weygand Line Weygand,
now pinned
his 'plan' having collapsed,
of a position which would be called the 'Weygand yet
abandoned hope; he had even outlined
German
offensive plan in
be held
to
for the
as a
- were to be
resistance even
if
soon
coast
as
on
it
filled
scheme which mirrored
and Aisne
in
Germany
to join the
Maginot Line
(NATO would adopt
had not
that
of the
in the 1970s).
at
Montmedy, scheme
a similar
The 'hedgehogs' -
villages
with troops and anti-tank weapons and to continue
The
The Weygand Line broke almost
excellent, the practice lamentable.
was attacked by the
5 June.
on the defence
resilient old general
bypassed by enemy spearheads.
The theory was as
Somme
'chequerboard' of 'hedgehogs'
defence of the Central Front
and woods
a defensive
for resistance
The
Line'.
modernity. The 'Weygand Line', running from the Channel
its
coast along the line of the rivers
was
hopes
his
fault lay
right
wing of the Panzer array between Amiens and the
not with the fighting
of the French troops, which had
spirit
greatly revived, but with their material weakness. They were outnumbered and lacked
tanks, effective anti-tank
weapons and
valour. 'In those ruined villages',
air
cover. Colonials
last
man. Some hedgehogs carried on when our
On
5
infantry
and 6 June the Germans were stopped dead
have been held by
behind
it
its
outposts,
to seal off the breach or
Above: Men
of the Royal
return from Dunkirk. all,
British
'the
French resisted to the
was twenty miles behind them.'
several points
and even suffered
Line had had 'depth', the
Tank Regiment, who had taken
Belows: Troops
338,000
at
reservists fought with equal
German advance might was broken, there were no troops but, once its crust counter-attack. Rommel, leading the 7th Panzer Division
Weygand
crippling tank losses. If the
and
wrote Karl von Stackelberg,
of the
BEF waiting
part in the Arras counterattack, to be
evacuated from Dunkirk. In
and French troops were taken from the beaches.
83
THE WAR
across country a
way
when
into the rear
now
which he was the
Weygand
the
last British
On
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
was checked by hedgehogs commanding the roads, quickly found
it
and was directed by the headquarters of Bock's Army Group
B, to
subordinate, to turn towards the coast and encircle the defenders of
Line's
wing from the
left
infantry division
left
rear; in the
process he would force the surrender of
in France, the 51st Highland.
Army Group A moved
9 June Rundstedt's
on the
to the attack
Led by
Aisne.
Guderian's Panzer group of four armoured and two motorised divisions,
it
was
briefly
checked, notably by the resistance of the French 14th Division under General Jean de
de Tassigny,
Lattre
now
Marshal of France, whose reputation for defiance in the teeth
a future
of defeat was established
that day. Yet
on the
on the Somme, the Germans were hold them in check. The previous
Aisne, as
too strong for any display of French courage to
evening Petain, the Deputy Prime Minister, told his former chief of staff, Bernard Serrigny,
Weygand foresaw
that
the possibility of holding the line for three days
at
most and
himself intended to 'push the government to request an armistice. There
Committee tomorrow.
the Central
day would be too
and
Italy
late.
has not yet
the obvious choice.
I
shall draft a proposal.' Serrigny
'Action should be taken while France
still
warned
that
he
meeting of
a
is
that the next
has the facade of an army
come in. Get a neutral to intervene in the approach. He can bring his power to bear on Hitler.'
Roosevelt seems
This was a counsel of desperation. Roosevelt had already declared to Reynaud his inability to influence the
or of the
material
United
ambassador on 28 May
was
neutral,
now
the glory and
government
the
on the the
Loire,
States
10 June, the
to treat for terms,
left, it
Churchill,
on
it
its
fly for his
termination deprived
it
from
city',
to spare
it
for business as usual
Reynaud
a great city'.
when
the
at
for
on
The day
However,
11
Tours June,
after the
Hitler did
Commune.
first
German
who remained
soldiers arrived la Paix,
happy
on to
behind
14 June; three days
be sightseers
in the
in
uniform were
still
fighting, often to the death. Like the Belgians, they
the approach of defeat an outraged capacity for self-sacrifice. At Toul, behind the
Saumur
June
headed
reminded him of 'the absorbing power However, those Parisians with cars were
Maginot Line, the 227th Regiment of Infantry fought on long At
share of
of the world.
Frenchmen found
British
in Tours,
they were thronging the terrace of the Cafe de
tourist capital
it
east.
destruction.
already streaming southwards in tens of thousands, while those
later
As
Paris.
- perhaps, quite unnecessarily, fearing another
his flying visit to
of the hour-to-hour defence of
opened
him of a
fourth meeting with his ally
outflanking the city to the west and
was declared an 'open
not choose to attack
the
day Petain had indicated he intended to press
Reynaud evacuated
whither Churchill would
German Panzer groups were
government
told
even the bribe of French North Africa would keep him
that not
On
who had
while Mussolini,
fleet,
bent on declaring war before rewards.
its
more new
course of events in Europe, by the dispatch either of
after
it
had been surrounded.
the students of the Cavalry School held the bridges over the Loire from 19 to 20
until their
ammunition ran
out.
The garrison of the Maginot Line
84
itself,
400,000
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
strong, refused
captured by 'small
by
a
men
surrender; only one section of blockhouses was ever to be
calls to
all
German
South of the Loire an
attack.
officer
of the
group of Chasseurs Alpins from the 28th Division' cross on
Army watched
Fifth
17 June.
They were
a
'led
sergeant covered with dust, their uniforms in rags, marching in order and in step, the
bent forward, pulling with both hands
at
the straps of their equipment.
wounded, the
dressings stained with dirt and blood.
bowed under
the weight of their packs and
rifles.
Some
They passed
Some were
marched, ghosts
slept as they
with an
in silence,
air
of
fierce determination.'
Comrades-in-arms
on
Mussolini's attack
of
held their ground without
men
losing only eight
killed
behind the French
fraud,'
wrote Haider.
'I
in the
difficulty, yielding
desperation, the Italian high battalion
were
troops
the Riviera across the Alpes Maritimes,
Four French divisions stood
10 June.
of
mountain
these
against
lines, as a
having declared war on
Italy
Italian divisions. They nowhere more than two kilometres of front,
of nearly 5000. Eventually,
casualties
asked for
German
it
clear
I
won't have
in
transport aircraft to land a
token of success. 'The whole thing
have made
confronting
path of twenty-eight
Italian
command
meanwhile
is
the usual kind
my name mixed up
in this
business.'
The humiliation of France Resistance in the Alps and the Maginot Line could avail not in the heartland.
Cherbourg on
The
British
at all
German triumph
against
landed the 52nd Lowland and the Canadian Division
12 June, to assist returning
French troops
to
open
a
new
at
front in the west;
both had to be evacuated almost immediately to avoid capture. The day before, Churchill
had seen
Weygand,
for himself the hopeless pass to all
fight
which France had been brought. At Tours,
gone, told him and the French ministers:
am
'I
helpless,
I
cannot
determined on some London on 14 June that 'a proclamation of the indissoluble union of the French and British peoples would serve the purpose', and Churchill offered such a Declaration of Union to Reynaud on 16 June. His ministers rejected it categorically. Jean Ybarnegaray no doubt spoke for many in saying that he 'did not want France to become a dominion' (of the British Empire). Petain was now chiefly concerned that France should not fall into disorder; even more than defeat and intervene, for
I
have no reserves.
.
.
C'est la dislocation.'
De
Gaulle,
'dramatic move' to keep the war going, proposed to Churchill in
continuing casualties he feared a takeover by the armistice
which would allow the conservatives
Reynaud had none. Lebrun decided
Edward
On
left.
His determination to seek an
to continue in office
that the old
at least a
policy;
marshal should be asked to form a government. General
Spears, Churchill's personal emissary to France,
left
with him Charles de Gaulle, who, promoted general on 25 Secretary for Defence
was
the evening that Churchill's offer of union was rejected, President
on
10 June,
for
England
once, taking
May and appointed Under-
was almost the only member
85
at
of the
government
THE WAR
determined
to carry
on
resistance.
.
He
extinguished.'
the
For
fight.
a traitor
18 June, settled
de Gaulle broadcast from London to
by the
Battle
of France. This war
defiance
this
Frenchmen who could de Gaulle would shortly be
on
called
join
all
him on
will
British soil to
court-martialled and
is
a
not be
continue
condemned
as
by the Petain regime.
had himself broadcast
Petain
'Frenchmen,
misfortune.
...
to the
French people the day before de Gaulle:
the appeal of the President of the Republic,
at
government of France.
direction of the
to
been
1940-1943
whatever happens the flame of resistance must not and
.
.
THE WEST
Next day,
the French people: This war has not
world war
IN
It
is
with
our adversary- to ask
a
heavy heart that
he
if
is
...
have today assumed the
give myself to France to assuage her
I
we must end
say
I
I
the fight. Last night
prepared to seek with me. soldier to soldier,
may
honourably the means whereby
hostilities
would
but without the 'honour' his defeated
treat
Versailles
'soldier to soldier'
had eaten too deep into
German
his
I
applied
after the battle,
cease.' Hitler, the insistent 'front fighter',
psyche for
When
that.
enemy
craved;
the emissaries sent by Petain
on 20 June they found themselves transported first to Paris and then eastward. On 21 June, at Rethondes, near Compiegne, General Charles Huntziger, whose Second Army had been one of the first victims of the Panzer onslaught, alighted from a German military convoy outside the railway coach in which the German delegates had signed the armistice of November 1918. An exultant Hitler observed met
their
his arrival;
counterparts near Tours
General Wilhelm
Keitel,
head of OKW, presented the armistice terms. They did
not allow for negotiation: Petain's government was to remain sovereign, but
northern France and
become to
a
its
zone of German occupation;
Italy,
on terms
to
occupy south-eastern France. The French army was
'occupation
costs', set at
Paris,
borders with Belgium, Switzerland and the Atlantic were to
be discussed with Mussolini, was
to
be reduced to 100,000
French budget. The French empire -
in
men and
be met from the North and West Africa and Indo-China - was to
an exorbitant francmark exchange
rate,
were
to
remain under the control of the French government (wdiich was shortly to establish capital at Vichy), as in
the
was the French navy, which was
to
be demilitarised.
All prisoners
campaign, including the garrison of the Maginot Line, though
it
its
taken
had not
German hands. France, in short, was to be emasculated Germany had been in 1918. The terms, in truth, were far imposed at Rethondes twenty-two years previously. Then
surrendered, were to remain in
and humiliated,
as Hitler believed
more severe than those Germany had been left the bulk of its return to civilian
life.
national territory
Now- the most productive
and two million Frenchmen,
5 per cent
and
its
was
to
of the population but perhaps
manhood, were to go into German captivity with no term of these penalties. The delegation argued, but, as Leon Noel,
France's active alteration
ambassador
to Poland, observed, while
was spreading and
fugitives
for instructions to Petain at
it
did so 'fighting was
still
were being machine-gunned on the
freedom
soldiers their
part of French territory
a
quarter of
fixed for an
the former
going on, the invasion
roads'.
Huntziger applied
Bordeaux, where the French government had withdrawn.
86
to
be occupied
He
THE TRIUMPH OF BLITZKRIEG
was instructed
and did so on the evening of 22 June. Meanwhile
to sign forthwith
delegation led by Noel signed terms
Rome
at
with the
occupation of the Franco-Italian border up to
Italian
a
government, which provided
on the French Germany and Italy was then timed to come into force at 25 minutes past midnight on the morning of 25 June. By then some German spearheads had penetrated deep into the 'free zone' which the armistice left to the new Vichy government. There were German tanks south of Lyon, German tanks outside Bordeaux; for a time there were even German tanks in Vichy. As the for the
The
side.
fifty
kilometres' depth
armistice with both
armistice terms took effect, they withdrew, without heel-dragging; the
campaign of 10 May
to 25
June 1940 had not cost the German army dear. The French counted some 90,000
dead
in
what many of their
eyes, call 'the
village
war memorials, incongruously
war of 1939-40'; the Germans had
weeks, almost
a
de France. Within
a
on
few days
21 June. 'The
everything happening so peacefully.' The
behaved with
prescribed.
all
The French,
responded with an almost
the
as
light
Rommel wrote
to his
practically a lightning
victors
German army, imbued with the magnanimity of to their beaten enemy that army orders
grateful
meekness. Virtually no part of France had been spared
young
conscripts, older recruits, black Senegalese,
infantrymen, Polish and Czech volunteers, infantry, cavalry,
and vanquished
alike,
Tour
shell-shocked by the catastrophe they had undergone,
if
orchards ripening for harvest under
a
on through
tanks -
fields
and for
memories of the 'summer of first communions, jours de fete -
'40'.
inseparable from their
doom, averted
sensation of a predestined national
artillery,
sun and skies whose daily brilliance remain,
the persisting normalities of life - Sunday lunch,
Amid
difficulty,'
war has become
back, dirty, hungry, tired, directionless, sometimes leaderless,
falling
by the tenacity of
in 1918
the
their British
and the miraculous intervention of the Americans, overwhelmed the nation. This
allies
was
its last
'correctness'
the sight of beaten French soldiers -
Arab
and American
be over for good. The local people are relieved to see
will
it
to British
only 27,000. Theirs had been, in
war of flowers. 'Reached here without
wife from Rennes in Brittany
victory,
lost
how
it
had been
in 1815,
when
the enemies of France had beaten the
when
Napoleon
first
in
Germans had beaten the second Belgium; this was how Napoleon in Lorraine. The victor)' of 1918 now seemed merely an intermission. The decline of la grande nation, set about by philistines and barbarians, might seem irreversibly it
had been
charted. Petain, hero of Verdun, all
because they saw
in
The Germans, by over,'
from
a
embodied
now
that
with
realities,
'It
contrast,
were
the spirit of his
a
in
lightened
lasted twenty-six years.'
allies to
in
June 1940 above
The
'The great battle of France
who
British, too,
wrote King George VI to
is
had fought the campaign
were
his
in lightened spirits,
mother,
'I
feel
happier
be polite to and to pamper.' Winston Churchill, face to face
confronted the future
House of Commons on
countrymen
spirits.
young engineer officer
so. 'Personally,'
we have no
the
being inured to loss and suffering.
wrote Karl Heinz Mende, start to finish.
perhaps perversely
the
him
in 1870
in starker
18 June.
'I
terms. 'The Battle of France
expect that the Battle of Britain
87
is
is
over,'
he told
about to begin.'
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
4 AIR BATTLE
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN Thebeen
Battle
of France, though sensational by reason of its brevity and decisiveness, had
an otherwise conventional military operation. In their support of the
armoured spearheads,
aircraft
had played
a
major part
German
in bringing victory; but
neither the)- nor indeed the tanks the)- had overflown had wrought the Allied defeat. That defeat
was the outcome of delects
in strategy, military structure
and readiness
for war,
psychological as well as material, which were buried deep in the Western democracies' reaction to the agony they
The
Battle
time since
had undergone
in the First
of Britain, by contrast, was to be
man had
campaign designed
taken to the skies,
break
to
the
aircraft
enemy's
World War.
a truly revolutionary conflict.
were
will
be used
to
and capacity
as the
to
For the
first
instrument of
resist
without
a
the
intervention or support of armies and navies. This development had long been foreseen.
had been used
Aircraft
soon
as the)
served as auxiliaries to
used intermittently aircraft
as
as
weapon
platforms - by the Italians in Libya in 1911 - almost as
much of the
World War they had the ground and sea forces, but from 1915 onwards airships had been bomb-carriers against Britain by the Germans and, later, bombing
had become
viable as vehicles. For
were used by both Germany and
Britain against
First
each other's
cities.
By the 1930s
bombers, drawing on the technology of the increasingly dependable and long-range airliner,
had become instruments of
1932 drew
strategic outreach;
from Stanley Baldwin, then
a
incautious (and inaccurate) forecast that 'the inflicted
by
German and
seemed
to
endorse
his
member bomber
it
was
that
development
of the coalition government, the will
always get through'. The terror
bombers on the Republican population of Spain warning. As the air historian Dr Richard Overy writes: Italian
88
civil
that in
in
1936-8
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
By 1939
that the air weapon was coming of age. The World War persuaded many, politicians and generals the next war would be an air war. This was founded partly on the
was widely believed
it
experience of the
among them,
that
First
.
was
uncritical expectation that Science
to
life
produce
a
.
.
now
harnessed sufficiently closely to military
stream of new weapons; of secret devices from the
could only be guessed
at. It
was founded too on the more
critical
air
whose nature
scrutiny of
what
done in the First World War. In reconnaissance work, in the support of troops on the ground, in co-operation with the navy on the first clumsy aircraft carriers and primarily in the carrying out of bombing campaigns independent had
aircraft
actually
of surface forces, the services or
The
aircraft
even to supplant
strategic needs: the
United
and vulnerable only
battle fleets
captured
altogether.
belief that air forces might supplant armies
struments of power took root
1918
threatened to dwarf the contribution of the other
it
States, Britain
and
in three countries
Italy.
to transoceanic attack,
which commanded
German
and deepest
earliest
it
and navies
war-winning
ability
experiments
of the
bombing of
prompted the foremost American exponent of independent
battleships
air force,
with such insubordinate vigour that he was obliged in 1925 to defend his stand to the defence of both the
Empire and the home
Italy that a
to
court
and
ex-
'strategic'
concept of broad deterrence of attack by independent
lio
at
base,
bombing against Germany at the end of the First World War, had an autonomous air force in 1918 which thereafter formulated its own empirical
perienced in created
committed
destroy
aircraft to
in the aerial
airpower, General William Mitchell, to agitate for the creation of an independent
martial. Britain,
in-
with widely disparate
In the United States, isolationist after
was the
attention. Successful
as
comprehensive theory of air
Douhet, universally recognised have arrived
at his
strategy
as the
Mahan
air
emerged (if
in
operations. Curiously its
it
was
in
most developed form. Giu-
not the Clausewitz) of airpower, seems
vision of 'victory through airpower' by a recognition of the
futility
of
World War artillery tactics. In his book Command of the Air (1921) he argued that, rather than bombarding the periphery of enemy territory with high explosive, where it could destroy only such war material as an adversary deployed there, the logic of the air age re-
First
quired that factories, Italy's
it
be flown to the centres of enemy war production and targeted against the
and workmen,
experience of the
that
First
made
was supplied from
by
artillery that
no
great distance
from
its
the guns. Douhet's perception was conditioned by
World War, which
own
Douhet's theory extended to
would achieve
its
had fought on narrow
factories located chiefly in
modern
fronts
dominated
Czechoslovakia,
a belief that the
mounted by
bomber would prove immune to and that a bomber outcome of a future war would be
fighters or guns,
effect so quickly that the
decided before the mobilisation of the combatants' armies and navies was complete. that respect,
he was
at
airfields.
defensive counter-measures, whether offensive
it
a true visionary, since
he foresaw the logic of the nuclear
89
In
'first strike'.
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
However, he
insisted that the long-range
bomber, carrying
high explosive, could
free-fall
deliver the disabling blow - and there few would follow him. The United States
Force,
when
it
entered the Second World
Flying Fortress bombers, built to
embody
War the
en masse in 1942,
Douhet
ideal,
through airpower'; the unlearning of that misconception in 1943 was to be painful.
believed that
its
Army
Air
advanced
were instruments of 'victory deep-penetration raids of
its
The Royal Air Force, whose commitment
bombing was Germany (and
to strategic
pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, expected less of its early offensive against
less than it expected). The Luftwaffe of 1939-40 did not espouse any strabombing theory at all; in 1933 it had examined Germany's capacity to build and opera long-range bomber fleet and concluded that the effort required exceeded its in-
achieved even tegic ate
dustrial capacity
even
medium
in the
term.
chiefs,
Its
most of whom were ex-army
officers,
therefore devoted themselves to building the Luftwaffe into a ground-support arm, and this
was
still its
role at the
end of the
Battle
of France, despite the reputation
it
had
won
as
an instrument of mass destruction in the attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam.
When on
16 July 1940, therefore, Hitler issued his next Fiihrer Directive (No. 16)
on
'Preparations for a landing operation against England', the Luftwaffe's professional chiefs
were perturbed by the scope of the
tasks allotted to
them: to 'prevent
gage 'approaching naval vessels' and 'destroy coastal defences sistance of the
demand
enemy
made
light
at
heart
of the
were already
was
still
difficulties.
in progress,
crush Britain with
my
the fighter ace he had
On
August,
1
he predicted to
Luftwaffe.
when
Air Minister
made himself in
front.'
and chief of the the First
down on
I
air fleets (2
and
3)
commanders
committed
his
First
among
base. Air Fleets 2
Normandy airfields;
in the
to support
loomed
3,
weeks
hastily
after the
facility
risk!'
To
Milch,
air
(as
the plan for the in-
offensive Goering
had
he had given any hint of perceiving.
French armistice, were making use of captured enemy
- of supply, repair, signals - had to be adjusted to their needs.
was operating from
Above: Helll medium bombers
crossing the
Below: A Messerschmitt 110 was
me to who
respectively of the Luftwaffe itself and
Operation Sealion
larger than
ordered
redeployed to the coasts of Belgium, northern France and
Air Force, by contrast,
Britain.
Luft-
World War,
the difficulties was the improvised nature of the Luftwaffe's operational
and
every local
The Royal
a
knees in the nearest future, so
vasion of Britain was codenamed), the difficulties and risks of the so lightly agreed to undertake
re-
plan to have this enemy,
an occupation of the island by our troops can proceed without any
two
initial
Here was
the preliminaries of the Battle of Britain
By means of hard blows
Kesselring and Sperrle, professional the
break the
his generals: 'The Fiihrer has
has already suffered a crushing moral defeat, that
.
attacks', en-
achievement of the preconditions of victory before the
army and navy had been committed. Hermann Goering,
who
.
land forces and annihilate reserves behind the
for nothing less than the
waffe,
.
all air
a failure as a
bomber
home
bases
it
had occupied
Channel from France during the Battle of
of the Destroyer
Group
ZG76
in
1940. The Mel 10
escort but later proved a superb night-fighter.
91
for
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
Command
decades. Another advantage RAF's Fighter
own fifty
or a hundred miles to
could engage fuel
While the Luftwaffe
territory.
- crucial
ensured
soon
as
when
a
as
them
by contrast, be
doomed
its
before coming to grips with
lost for
The
11
pilots,
besides operating close to
own
its
No.
at
Group
11
could draw on information from
own it
mere
125 miles - but also soil or,
on occa-
pilots
bases,
had the use of a highly
four groups, 13 (Northern), 12
Its
were under the control of a
central
Uxbridge. west of London, by which the hardest-pressed groups
London and
protecting
nearest northern France) could be re-
inforced from those temporarily unengaged. Fighter
its
a
parachuting into the Channel, would be
(South-Eastern), and 10 (South-Western),
headquarters located
threat; but
generally
Command
Luftwaffe's parachuting pilots or crashlanded aircraft would,
good; many German
Command,
Fighter
and
enemy. Fighter
could bale out over friendly
aircraft
trained and integrated control and warning system.
(usually
its
its
reached operational height. That conserved not only
aircraft
of damaged
to earth.
of defending
that
drown.
to
(Midlands),
enjoyed was
would have twenty and more
the very least
Messerschmitt 109's operational range was
that the pilots
sion, bring
fly
at
1940-1943
wide
a
Command
headquarters, moreover,
of sources - the ground Observer Corps
variety
- to 'scramble' and 'vector' (direct) squadrons against
depended most of all on
the 'Chain
Home'
line
a
developing
of fifty radar warning stations
with which the Air Ministry had lined the coast from the Orkneys to Land's End since 1937.
Radar worked by transmitting
the pulse reflected
a radio
from the approaching
tance, bearing, height
and speed.
It
beam and measuring
target aircraft
was
a British
-
a
the delay and direction of
sequence which established
invention, credit for
dis-
which belongs
to
Robert Watson-Watt of the National Physical Laboratory. By 1940 the Germans had also
produced radar devices of their own, but number,
their
inferior to their British counterparts
Wiirzburg and Freya stations were few in
and no help
to the Luftwaffe in conducting
on Fighter Command a most critical advantage. Fighter Command enjoyed one more advantage over the Luftwaffe: higher output of fighter aircraft from the factories. In the summer of 1940 Vickers and Hawker were producoffensive operations. Radar conferred
ing 500 Spitfires
and Hurricanes each month, while Messerschmitt was producing only 140
Me
Me
109s
and 90
110s.
The Germans had
a larger force
of trained pilots on which to
with an overall military figure of 10,000 in 1939, while Fighter
each week to battle,
its
complement of
with the paradoxical
coming
battle
was
rhetoric, Fighter
it
crisis
1450. This
was
of a lack of
Command
to confront the
pilots to
man
RAF,
aircraft;
at
but
call,
could add only 50 the height of the
no
at
stage
of the
to lack aircraft themselves. Indeed, despite Churchill's magnificent
Command
would manage throughout
fought the Battle of Britain on something like equal terms.
to
The location of the Air
keep 600
Commands
Spitfires
and Hurricanes serviceable
of the Royal Air Force (in the south-east)
Luftwaffe in the
summer
92
of
1940.
It
daily; the Luft-
and the
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN Fighter
Air Fleet S
Command
Air Fleet 2
Key RAF FIGHTER
^#Command
COMMAND
headquarters
w Group heaquarters D
Sector station
- Sector station boundary* Fighter station
+ X
Low-level radar station High-level radar station
- Command *
1
1
boundary
Group
only
LUFTWAFFE BASES
|
A —
93
Bomber Fighter
Command
boundary
THE WAR
waffe
would never succeed
them. These
fighters,
weapons of
cardinal
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
more than 800 Messerschmitt 109s against 3-50 mph) and firepower, were the
in concentrating
evenly matched in speed (about
which
the battle by
victory
was
be decided.
to
Nevertheless the Luftwaffe might have established the
powerful force of bombers - 1000 Dornier ers 87s
same
On
- could have devastated
sort
of coldly
the contrary,
Fighter
it
Command
logical plan
of
strategy,
no
first
air
its
operated from the outset to the
it
in 1940.
equivalent of 'Sickle Stroke', and fought
its
all
posited
on Goering's arrogant
knees' by any simulacrum of a 'hard
Aerial stalemate
would agree
—
in retrospect,
was
to
fall
into five phases of
the 'Channel Battle' (Kanalkampf) from 10 July to early August; (Adlertag), 13
August, the
combat between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force, which
next the Luftwaffe's switch of offensive effort against Fighter
'classic'
its
bombers
in daily, daylight
phase of
lasted until 18 August;
Command's
airfields
August to 6 September; then the Battle of London, from 7 to 30 September, Luftwaffe's fighters escorted
which
superiority by
and Junkers 88s and 300 Junk-
it.
Britain, historians
improvisation:
'down on
then 'Operation Eagle', beginning on 'Eagle Day' aerial
Ills
instead by a series of improvisations,
— Battle
had
Britain's defences,
had no considered
blow' that he directed against
German
Heinkel
by which the German army had attacked France
belief that Britain could be brought
The
17s,
and increasingly
from 24
when
the
costly raids
and finally a series of minor raids until the Battle's 'official' end on 30 October. Thereafter the badly mauled German bomber squadrons were switched to destructive but strategically ineffective night operations, a phase that Londoners would come to call 'the Blitz', in a homely adaptation of the term coined by the world's press to denote Hitler's overwhelming ground offensives against Poland and France. The Kanalkampf, which opened on 10 July, began with German bomber raids, in a against the British capital,
strength of twenty to thirty aircraft, against English south coast towns - Plymouth,
Weymouth, Falmouth, Portsmouth and Dover - and on convoys when intercepted. Later it was extended to the mouth of the Thames. Some material damage was inflicted and about 40,000 tons of shipping sunk; but the Royal Navy, which had to be beaten
if
the fleet
of tugs and barges Hitler was having assembled in the Dutch and Belgian estuaries for the
Channel crossing was
to
be passed
safely across the
Narrows, remained untouched. During
German aircraft were shot down, for the loss of 70 British German aircraft destroyed were bombers, so the 'exchange rate'
the period 10-31 July about 180
hundred of the fighters, on which decision
fighters; a
in
Hitler that
of Britain would turn, stood even.
in the Battle
was becoming impatient with the
the British were already beaten,
He had persuaded it,
himself
shrank from
its risks and his own hope that they would concede defeat - but was now determined that, since no other means were
unleashing the invasion - because of both shortly
aerial stalemate.
only they would recognise
if
94
.
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
must force
available, the Luftwaffe
He
France),
alone to destroy her
let
European empire and
he had no desire
Britain.
fight
making one proposal
'After
on the reorganisation of Europe', he
now
'I
On
my
find myself forced against
left
the English air force with
were
objectives
be
to
organisations, but also
On
equipment'.
the
.
the forces at
all
units,
'flying .
its
17,
Great
a
against
and
installations
The
supply
their
the aircraft industry including that manufacturing anti-aircraft
.
same day Goering assembled
War
war
just as little desire to
in the shortest possible time'.
ground
made
ace already
expressed reservations:
combat over England with
'I
explained to
my Wing
I
The Hague to Theo
his subordinates at
harangue them on the outcome he expected from
Osterkamp,
Norwegian
ordering the Luftwaffe to 'overpower
command
their
another to
his
will to fight this
same position as Martin Luther, who had with no alternative.'
August he issued Fiihrer Directive No.
1
new
after
Vidkun Quisling,
told
find myself in the
I
R-ome but was
Battle,
to the illusion that his
old empire of the oceans might not merely coexist but
Britain's
puppet, on 18 August,
he had
to humiliate Britain (as
he had Poland). He clung
(as
even co-operate, to each other's advantage. the British
of treating with Germany.
Britain to accept the necessity
insisted to his generals that
still
Adler
(Operation Eagle).
cautious by his experience in the Channel
him
counted
that during the .
.
.
time
when
I
alone was in
about 500 to 700 British fighters
.
.
concentrated in the area around London. Their numbers had increased considerably
new units were equipped with Spitfires, which I considered of a quality equal to our own fighters.' Goering was angry and dismissive. He claimed that the British were cowardly, that their numbers were much depleted and that the Luftwaffe's superiority in bombers made the British defences of no consequence. beginning of the
[since] the
Adlertag (Eagle
battle. All
Day) was shortly afterwards fixed for 7 August.
In fact Operation Eagle, beset by bad weather, stuttered into eventually 13 August
experienced setbacks, largely through spreading it
attacked
Thames and - inexplicably for Home' radars. It lost 31 aircraft,
RAF
the
RAF 22. On
it
must be
On
our favour.
.
.
.
15
August
effort
too wide.
On
12 August, a typical
Portsmouth harbour, shipping
in the
said that the
were
itself that
RAF
Eagle
Day
itself it also attacked, in
darkness,
RAF's 13 (from which
six pilots,
aircraft to the
saved).
On
August
15
the 'exchange
grossly exaggerated
ratio'
it
lost 75, the
was
estimate of
its
in
its
RAF
34.
favour (in
German
aircraft
14 August the Luftwaffe reported to Haider: 'Ratio of fighter losses 1:5 in
We
be able to replace
German
persuaded
it
its
airfields,
near Birmingham, losing 45
Throughout the week destroyed).
8 August;
the only time throughout the Battle of Britain - the 'Chain
the key element in Britain's air defences,
fairness
on
was declared Eagle Day. By then, however, the Luftwaffe had already
day of the operation,
a Spitfire factory
life
have no
difficulty in
making good our
losses. British will
probably not
theirs.'
losses, particularly in
dive-bombers, were running so high, however, that on
Goering was already beginning to
commanders. Doubters
like
institute
a
change
Osterkamp were promoted out of
95
of plan,
and of
front-line responsibility,
THE WAR
and aggressive young leaders
THE WEST
IN
1940-1943
who would
Adolf Galland,
(like
the Knight's Cross by Hitler - reluctantly, since he their place. Britain: the
RAF
were promoted
Not
strike,
until
for the loss
fighter stations,
the north-east
own
destroyed and seventy ground
Command
290
lost
The autumnal
weeks: Fighter
bombed
to
win the
OKW
while Biggin
Hill,
wounded. Between 24 August and 6 constant defensive engagements; the
—
The crunch battle
- but not
fast
enough
would have
have to be beaten in the
out of the Channel.
an
main
room
aircraft in
in 1940 Britain's resistance
Command would
as
a
times in three days, the operations
gales threatened. If the invasion barges
Schwerpunkt (focus of attack)
been spared;
fighters
but only half of those were fighters.
aircraft,
The Luftwaffe had begun
RAF
come: on 30 August and 4
to
aircraft factories,
six
or
staff killed
— Channel Narrows
on
inflicted
a
suburbs, was badly
day and destroyed 22
sorties that
There was worse
aircraft.
was put out of action by
London
demoralised, taking to the air-raid shelters and
London, was attacked
fighter station covering
Luftwaffe lost 380
staff were
The Luftwaffe flew 1000
September serious damage was
September Fighter
24 August did the
in
its
first
command) had ordered since RAF feel its effect, but then with
its
of 38 of
the
effort,
of
(the Luftwaffe high
and North Weald,
damaged. At Manston the ground refusing to emerge.
OKL
most forward of
alarm. Manston, the
determined
that
into
in the Battle
Bad weather averted the inception of this
fighter airfields.
the battle was undertaken.
be
shortly be decorated with
Jewish')
Goering outlined to them the objectives of the third stage
genuine concentration of force
patience.
looked
On
would be
31
August
shifted
OKL
for Hitler's
were
to be
air
and Goering's
be got across the
to
broken
in the
so that the Royal
decided
that
on
7
next few
Navy could
September the it
had
area
and
from the airfields to London. Thitherto
London
order of 24 August stated: 'Attacks against the
terror attacks are reserved for the Fiihrer's decision.'
He had
withheld
because he had
it
hoped to bring Churchill to the conference table - and also to avert retaliation against German cities. Now he was driven to the calculation that only by an attack on London would 'the English fighters leave their dens and be forced to give us open battle', as the ace still
Adolf Galland put
Thus the
it.
Battle
of Britain reached
its
climax: the assault by dense formations of
bombers protected by phalanxes of Messerschmitt description) 'the seven-million-people city on the Thames
Heinkel, Dornier and Junkers 110s, against (Galland's
and nerve centre of the
British
High Command'.
It
was an
assault that
had
109s .
.
.
and
brain
to brave a ring of
1500 barrage balloons, 2000 heavy and light anti-aircraft guns and the constantly maintained
An Hell
1
over the
London docks, September 1940. The Helll's
opposition during the Spanish Civil
War
encouraged the Luftwaffe
posed by the RAF's eight-gun
96
fighters.
success against second-rate to
underestimate the threat
4~ I
AU
Ml*
r
ii
*y*u>
h
?**r Li*
"VV\\
RAF FIGHTER
COMMAND Right: Supermarine
Spitfires of
No. 610 Squadron, which ended the Battle of Britain uith 71 confirmed kills.
Far right, top: A Hawker
Hurricane of No. 71 'Eagle' Squadron,
photographed
Far right,
1941.
in
centre: An RAF armourer
fighter
prepares a
another mission; each
Spitfire for
had
a
ground crew of three - a
Far bottom: The Filter Room Command HQ at Bentley
rigger, fitter
right, Fighter
Prior). Plots
and armourer.
at
from The Royal Observer
Corps and the 'Chain Home' stations were passed
to
Bentley Prior) and
transferred to the Filter Table. Filter Officer
and
his staff
expert at estimating the
The
became
mean
of
different radar plots. Filtered plots
were
then relayed to the gridded plotting tables at
Sector.
Command, Group and
Below:
.Architect of victory.
Hugh Dowding. Command,
Air Chief Marshal Sir
AOC-in-C
Fighter
1936-40. His support development of radar
for the in
the late
1930s, and his careful husbanding of scant resources during the Battle of
France,
when he was under
pressure to
commit
vital
great
squadrons
to
a lost cause, ensured that Fighter
Command
enjoyed the narrowest of
margins over the enemy
summer
of 1940.
in
the
pp*"*
THE WAR IN THE WEST
The human
face of the Blitz. in
A
1940-1943
Heavy Rescue Squad gently
November 1940. Some 40,000
civilians
were
pulls a survivor
from the rubble
killed in the Blitz.
ranks of 'the Few', 750 Spitfires and Hurricanes. For ten days in mid-September, days of
remembered by all each morning by German raiders
blue sky and brilliant sun
were
filled
be intercepted by
British fighters rising to
witnesses, the skies of south-eastern England in
hundreds proceeding towards London
meet them and
form, sometimes not, as the battle engulfed them.
to disperse,
Desmond
sometimes
to
to re-
Flower, a young conscript of
the Middlesex Regiment, recalls the spectacle:
Sunday
in
Sevenoaks was the same
as
Sunday throughout Kent, Surrey, Sussex and
100
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
Essex.
The hot summer
air
throbbed with the steady beat of the engines of bombers
in the dazzling blue. Then the RAF would arrive; the monotonous drone would be broken by the snarl of a fighter turning at speed, and the vapour trails would start to form in huge circles. I lay on my back in the rose
which one could not see
garden and watched the
trails forming; as they broadened and dispersed a fresh set would be superimposed upon them. Then, no bigger than a pin's head, a white parachute would open and come down, growing slowly larger; counted eight in the air at one time. I
Some of the
may have been British, for on 9, 11 and 14 September Fighter German formations. However, its success in sparing London damage - it was not true, as the German military attache was reporting from Washington, that 'the effect in the heart of London resembles an earthquake' - now prompted the Luftwaffe to maximise its effort. On 15 September the largest bomber force yet dispatched, 200 aircraft with a heavy fighter escort, approached London. Fighter Command had early warning: its forward airfields had been repaired since the opening of the assault on the capital, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, gave permission for the Midlands Group, No. 12, to lend its squadrons
Command
parachutes
lost heavily in repelling the
to the defence. Visiting
No.
11
Group's headquarters
at
Uxbridge
that
morning, Churchill
asked Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the group commander, 'What other reserves have we?',
and got the answer he had heard from Gamelin
in Paris three
months
before: 'There are
none.' But Dowding's plunge was a considered decision, not a miscalculation.
means
against
ends with discrimination, and the decision was
and Hurricanes intercepted the German bombers well
250
Spitfires
the
end of the day when
nearly sixty.
It
while the
a
its
deterrent
in the battle
Some
of London and by
down
(though not the cos-
Sealion until further notice.
had always regarded the two
a termination
of Eagle. For one thing, Goer-
operations as quite separate and clung to the
personal offensive against Britain could achieve
efforts
measured
effect.
Postponement of Sealion did not evoke
this
It
results.
Hopes that Britain's resistance could be broken invading season held collapsed: on 17 September Hitler announced the postin
ponement of Operation ing
east
by
second wave had been met and turned back, had shot
was the Luftwaffe's most spectacular defeat
and decisive
tliest)
justified
a strategic result
hope
that
independent of the
of the army and navy. For another, Hitler wished to sustain the pressure on
Churchill's government,
which he had persuaded himself must perceive the
inevitability
of
London and other targets were therefore maintained throughout September and on some days inflicted heavy damage; on 26 September, for example, a surprise raid on the Spitfire factory in Southampton stopped production for some time. The equation of aerial effort, however, was speakan accommodation as clearly he did himself. Daylight attacks on
ing for
itself.
As Galland explained to
a resistant
101
Goering
at
the Reichmarschall's hunting
THE WAR
lodge, whither Galland
on 27 September,
German it
had
IN
had been bidden
THE WEST
to shoot a stag in
plane wastage was
'British
intelligence staff estimated
now
and
and the accusation of
norm. During October
day;
for his fortieth victory,
lower and production
far
far
higher than the
events were exposing the error so plainly that
slowly: daylight raids continued, at
into October; but night raids - inaccurate
the
reward
be acknowledged.'
to
Acknowledgement was conceded taliation
1^40-1^43
and
after
November,
tions altogether.
six
though they were, besides
'terror tactics'
By then the
times the tonnage of
Battle
Malan,
icy 'Sailor'
warning
who
to the rest).
tried to
some 2500 young
formed 5 per cent of
a vital
'the Few',
New
pilots
The majont) were
It
had been
a
heroic
had alone been
re-
citizens; but significant
Zealanders and South Africans (including the
send German bomber
A few were
and
countries' neutrality,
Australians,
re-
bombs was dropped by night as by bombing supplanted daylight opera-
of Britain could be said to be over.
sponsible for preserving Britain from invasion.
numbers were Canadians,
cost,
both
which Hitler eschewed - began to become
in 'the Blitz' proper, night
episode. 'The Few' deserved their epitaph:
mounting
inviting
pilots
home
with
a
dead crew,
Irishmen and Americans, impatient
aliens,
minority were refugees, Czechs and Poles; the
were responsible
for 15 per cent
at
latter,
as a
their
who
of the losses claimed to
have been inflicted on the Luftwaffe.
The tember,
victor)'
when
of
'the
Few' was narrow. During the
the Battle of Britain was
Luftwaffe only 668.
It
was the
loss
at its
became
casualties
ceeded production, so, the Luftwaffe
in
Had
of their success during the height of the
pilots
combat
as
the)'
and
battle,
itself
the
his Fighter
be long delayed
in
that
its
dawn of
Command
effects;
most
when
first air
an independent strategic arm, thus
a quarter
staff,
fighters, the
the balance
of Fighter Command's
their effort.
Had
they done
force to achieve a decisive victory
fulfilling
the vision that it
Douhet and
was, the pragmatism of
the self-sacrifice of their pilots and the inits first
defeat.
The
legacy of that defeat
but the survival of an independent Britain which
certainly
to the ex-
August to 7 September) ex-
military aviation. As
Germany
832
made
lost
and Goering been privy
would undoubtedly have surpassed
might then have made
novation of radar inflicted on Nazi
was the event
Hitler
fighter losses for a period (11
Mitchell had glimpsed in the
Dowding and
Command
of nearly 600 German bombers which
sheet read so disfavourably to the attacker. tent
months of August and Sep-
critical
height, Fighter
determined the downfall of
102
Hitler's
it
Germany.
would
assured
WAR SUPPLY AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC of food, of raw materials, of finished products, of weapons themselves,
Supply the root
of war.
From
resources he lacks and, self-protection
from
his
the earliest times
when
at
war, has fought to secure his
means of livelihood and
economic
to this rule. In
historian of the conflict,
the deliberate choice of warfare as an instrument of policy by
most economically developed
lies at
has gone to war to take possession of
enemy. The Second World War was no exception
the view of Professor Alan Milward, principal 'lay in
man
its
origins
two of the world's
economic reservations about warfare as a policy, both the German and Japanese governments were influenced in their decisions for war by the conviction that war might be an instrument of economic gain.' Milward's judgement that economic impulsion drove Japan to war is incontestable. It states.
Far from having
was Japan's belief that her swelling population, overflowing an island homeland deficient in almost ever)' resource,
could be supported only by taking possession of the productive
regions of neighbouring China which had brought her into direct diplomatic conflict with the United States in 1937-41;
it
was America's
hamstring Japan's strategic adventurism,
choose war rather than circumscribed peace Pearl
reactive trade embargoes, designed to
that in 1941 as
its
drove the Tokyo government to
national
Harbor 40 per cent of Japan's requirements of steel had
islands, together
way forward. to
be imported to the
with 60 per cent of her aluminium, 80 per cent of her
oil,
her iron ore and 100 per cent of her nickel. America's threat to deny her
of
home
85 per cent of oil
and metals,
good behaviour as Washington should judge it, was therefore strangulation. The 'southern offensive' was an almost predictable outcome.
against a guarantee of
tantamount to
In the year
103
THE WAR
economic
Hitler could not argue
when
1939,
consumption of
consumed and
THE WEST
self-sufficient in food,
eggs,
employed on the
still
needing
vegetables and
fruit,
1940-194?
insufficiency to justify his strategic adventurism. In
of the population was
a quarter
almost completely
IN
to
import only
proportion of her
She also produced
fats.
Germany was
land, a
the coal she
all
high proportion of her iron ore, except for armaments-grade ore which
a
oil - commodities for which coal-based would be found during the war - she was wholly dependent on imports, as she for most non-ferrous metals. However, through peaceful trade, her high level of
was supplied from Sweden. For rubber and substitutes
was
also
exports (particularly of manufactures such as chemicals and machine tools) easily earned the surplus to fund and
make good
Had it not been for Hitler's socialeconomic autonomy - Germany would
those deficiencies.
Darwinian obsession with autarky -
total national
have had no reason to prefer military to commercial intercourse with her neighbours. Paradoxically ally,
was Germany's
it
adversaries, Britain
which had the better economic reasons
Italy,
for
and France, and her half-hearted going to war.
Italy
was
major
a
energy importer, while her industry, particularly her war industry, was rooted
in
a
of craftsmanship quite inconsistent with the ruthless mass consumption of the modern battlefield. Italian aero-engines were works of art - no consolation to the Regia tradition
Aeronautka pilots to
match
when replacement
attrition in the skies
arsenals run
on
aircraft failed to
in plenty,
it
though the country fed
depended on
its
raw materials and some manufactured goods United
Britain's case all
advanced
for
was the most paradoxical of all.
the weapons, ships,
man on
empire and
of 1940, and for rubber from
States in the crisis
aircraft,
the battlefield. As
it
guns and tanks
it
its
its
itself
with ease and
trading partners for man)'
example, from the
aircraft, for
its
industry could produce
mobilised military population could
in the First
could continue to find
and events would prove
a surplus
in the
of armaments to export
or to re-equip exile forces (Poles, Czechs, Free French), even
(to Russia)
at a rate
colonies in Indo-China.
its
In high gear,
that
had demonstrated
Second World War, moreover,
off the production-line
over Malta and Benghazi. France, too, maintained military
artisan principles; and,
exported luxuries
come
at
the nadir of its
However, it could do so only by importing much of its non-ferrous some of its machine-tool requirements to supply its factories, all its oil, and -
military fortunes.
metal and
most living
critically
of all for an overpopulated island
on unhusked
rice,
could survive
North American wheat, would strategic reserve
and halved
in
-
half
its
food. At a pinch the Japanese, by
near-starvation level.
few months
it
would
The
British,
if
deprived of
take to exhaust the national
of flour and powdered milk have undergone
a truly
Malthusian decline
numbers.
Hence Winston
Churchill's heartfelt admission,
thing that really frightened
form of
in the
at
flaring battles
diagrams and curves
and
me
glittering
unknown
once
victor)
during the war was the U-boat achievements,
to the nation,
it
came,
peril. ...
manifested
itself
It
that 'the only
did not take the
through
statistics,
incomprehensible to the public' The most
104
WAR SUPPLY AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC
important
statistics
goods by sea
were
to support
needed
easily set out. In 1939 Britain
way of life. To do so
its
it
import 55 million tons of
to
maintained the largest merchant
fleet in
the world, comprising 3000 ocean-going vessels and 1000 large coastal ships of 21 million gross-register (total capacity) tons.
manpower of
merchant
the
To
themselves, totalled 160,000.
Some 2500
service,
ships
were
sea
at
almost
resource
a
at
any one time: the
important
as
as
the
Navy deployed 220
protect this fleet the Royal
ships vessels
equipped with Asdic - the echo-sounding equipment developed by the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee in 1917 - consisting of 165 destroyers, 35 sloops and corvettes
and 20
trawlers.
The
ratio
between merchant ships and
Convoy, the practice of assembling merchant ships
14:1.
naval escort, was
no longer
controversial procedure as
a
War; the Admiralty was committed to
it
it
had been
before war broke out and
oceanic routes immediately and in coastal waters as soon
was thus about
escorts
organised formations under
in
it
in the First
World
was introduced on the
as practicable.
U-boats and surface raiders enemy of convoy was the submarine, or U-boat (Unterseeboot). As in 1914 the deployed a number of surface commerce raiders, including both orthodox warships and converted merchantmen, but their number was small; between September The
principal
Germans
also
1939 and October 1942 less than
most
successful. Atlantis, sank
HMS
Devonshire in
and
November
a
dozen
auxiliary raiders gained great waters,
1941.
Germany's
battleships, battlecruisers,
cruisers occasionally raided the sea lanes, but they too
judged too valuable, to be risked often, particularly pocket battleship Graf
German the)-
aircraft
Montevideo by three
Spee off
some
achieved
sank 150,000 tons (the average displacement of
minelayers
German
Slapton Sands in
itself.
coastal craft,
a
known
May
of the
December
1941, a
1939.
peak month,
Second World War merchant ship surface ship or submarine,
to the British as E-boats,
were
were
a
prolific
a relentless threat to coastal
on an American troop convoy practising disembarkation for Devon drowned more GIs than were lost off Normandy on 6 attacks of aircraft and surface ships, large and small, on merchant
in April
D-Day June
British cruisers in
aircraft,
number, and
in
after the humiliating defeat
waters in 1941-4, and constituted
in British coastal
convoys; at
fast
by
laid
pocket battleships
were few
success as ship destroyers - in
was 5000 tons) - and mines, whether constant menace.
of which the
twenty-two vessels before interception and destruction by
1944 a raid
However, the
shipping were extraneous to the
War. That was one,
as
real battle at sea in
Winston Churchill
rightly
European waters
in
the
Second World
denoted, between the convoy escort and
the U-boats. In
September 1939
Karl Donitz, the
under command, of which going.
The German
thirty
German U-boat
were short-range
navy's pre-war expansion
105
admiral, had fifty-seven U-boats
coastal types
and twenty-seven ocean-
programme, the
'Z-plan',
called for the
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
construction of a fleet of 300, with which Donitz claimed he could certainly strangle Britain to death.
He was
to achieve that total in July 1942, allowing
operations and sink shipping British building
at
an annual
rate
him
to maintain 140 boats
of 7 million tons,
of replacement shipping more than
five times.
a figure
on
which exceeded
By then, however, thanks to
the inescapable dynamic of warfare, almost ever)' term in the equation by
which he had
had changed
calculated the inevitability of Britain's strangulation by U-boat tactics
to his
disadvantage. Requisition and chartering of
had added 7 million tons
foreign ships British
merchant
American
torpedoing.
year's
shipyard
expanded
enormously
capacity,
to the
the equivalent of a
fleet,
by
an
emergency mobilisation, had been added ships
in
1943
15,000 tons), as
10,000-
three times as
were
U-boats
the
many of
(including
more than
to
new
the British, promising an output of 1500
many Naval
sinking.
would add 200 escorts a year to the fleet between 1941 and 1945. Over 500 of these would go to join construction in the United States
the Royal Navy's escort fleet in the North Atlantic which, having reached a strength of
374 in March
1941,
had almost doubled since
the outbreak. Long-range aircraft based in
North America, Iceland and progressively reducing the
'air
Britain
gap' in
were which
U-boats could safely operate on the surface, their preferred
submerged
mode
speed;
because of their low
and
integral
aircraft
protection for convoys, provided by 'escort Jochem Mohr. captain sank
130,000
tons
being
destroyed
Black
Swan
est
by
in April
of
U-124, whose boat
of Allied
HMS
shipping
Stonecroft
before
and
1943. Arguably the great-
U-boat ace of the war was Otto Ktretschmer,
who sank
over
350,000
tons of shipping.
carriers',
was soon to
level a direct threat
against attacking U-boats.
basing
his
improved;
boats in
electronic
warfare the conflict
promise
had
of secret
hung
Only
some
years. Nevertheless the
in the balance; the
underwater could
weapons, not
be
U-boats had already inflicted severe material and
damage on the Allied, particularly the British, war effort; and in mid-1942 the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic was evident to no one. The 'statistics,
psychological eventual
position
and cryptographic
which favoured Germany, realised for
in facilities for
Donitz's
diagrams and curves' were pregnant with menace.
106
WAR SUPPLY AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC Thus
far
through four U-boat
the Battle of the Atlantic (Churchill had coined the term) had passed
distinct phases.
From
the outbreak of the war until the
had been confined by geographical constraints and
fleet
sensitivities
of neutrals to operating within the immediate
June 1940,
when Germany
fall
Hitler's
vicinity
of the
of France, the
concern for the
British Isles. After
gained possession of the French Atlantic ports (where in
January 1941, with remarkable prescience, Hitler ordered the construction of bomb-proof
U-boat 'pens' to begin), the particular
on
fleet
began to operate in the eastern
the 'Cape route' to West and South Africa and occasionally penetrating into
the Mediterranean, since the Italians April to
Atlantic, concentrating in
December
1941,
were proving themselves inept submariners. From
thanks to their increasing expertise in anti-convoy
tactics,
despite the delineation of an American 'Neutrality Zone' in which the United States
and
Navy
gave notice of its intention to attack marauding submarines, the U-boat captains began to
extend their operations into the central and western
Atlantic; after
June
1941,
when
Britain
began to run convoys to North Russian ports with war supplies, the U-boats, frequently supported by German war ships and shore-based latitudes. Finally, after
Atlantic coast
December
1941, Donitz's
aircraft, also
men
began to operate
carried the submarine
of the United States and into the Gulf of Mexico, where, during
named 'Happy Time' of organise convoy
on
several
months caused by
the
in Arctic
war
to the
a
gruesomely
US Navy's temporary
inability to
coastal routes, they sank coastwise shipping
by hundreds of thousands
of tons.
The crew
of
U-616
savour grapes to celebrate their safe return from patrol. Three-quarters of the
German U-boat
crews
fell
107
victim during the war.
108 -
COMBATING THE U-BOAT MENACE Far
left,
Skate
above:
HM
destroyer
depth
testing stern-dropped
charges on exercise during the Battle of the Atlantic. Stern-dropping gave
way
to firing
progressed. destroyers
ahead as the left,
U-6761
depth-charging
1941. The U-boat,
American all
battle
below: HM Wishart and Anthony Far
aircraft,
first
in
February
detected by an
was destroyed and
but seven of her crew picked up by
the destroyers. Left:
A
British
convoy
at sea during the Battle of the Atlantic. Location
and date are
unidentified, but the small size of the
ships
and the
escort trawler suggest a
coastal convoy early in the war. ships' boats are ....
,
....
swung out on
...
davits in case of torpedoing.
The
their
THE WAR
Until June 1940 the U-boats
kept the
German High
Using the
THE WEST
IK
had been confined by the same
home
Seas Fleet close to their
Baltic as their training
1940-1943
ground
(as
facts
of geography
bases during the First
they were to
do throughout
as
had
World War.
the war), they
attacked British shipping in the North Sea but were denied egress via the Channel by the
mine
Dover
barrier in the
Straits
and could reach the
passage round the north of Scotland -
Only
range.
eight of the
could cruise
Type IX were
as far as Gibraltar; the
if,
remaining
some
these limitations the U-boats had
Courageous
carrier
home
precautions in
is,
From
on
Donitz's boats
do
so.
Few had
that
notable successes, including the sinking of the
main base
at
Scapa Flow in October 1939 and the flagranti)"
sinkings in the North Atlantic did not exceed 750,000 tons
The capture of the French
by making the long
with a range of 12,000 miles; eighteen
the outbreak of war to the
Atlantic ports in
of U-boat operations. Possession of
to
could not leave the North Sea. Despite
thirty
which was sunk while
waters.
Atlantic only
had the range
the}'
truly oceanic,
battleship Royal Oak in the Royal Navy's aircraft
that
neglecting anti-submarine
fall
of France,
and
141 ships.
total
merchant
June 1940, however, transformed the
Brest, Saint-Nazaire,
basis
La Rochelle and Lorient put
the doorstep of Britain's trade routes, thus ensuring that the pattern of
and sporadic, should become regular and consistent. As soon
sinkings, thitherto arbitrary
crews cleared the Bay of Biscay they found themselves astride the route from Britain
as his
Cape along which
to the
reaching out only
travelled Nigerian oil
a little further into
and South African non-ferrous
ores;
and by
the Atlantic they could attack convoys carrying meat
from the Argentine and grain from the United
States.
Ships sailing individually were desperately vulnerable to interception. As the Royal
Navy's experience in the
U-boats with
a
succession of targets:
route could
trade
World War had proved, independent
First
still
a
who
captain
sailing
missed one lone ship on
probability. Because the
attack
that
when
a
submerged speed of a submarine was at best equal to and often a U-boat captain who was wrongly positioned for an
convoy hove
into view
days before another appeared, with
would miss
no
which
all
the ships in
and might have
it
to wait
greater certainty than before of rinding himself
it.
World War submarine
Donitz, a First at
a
Convoy upset
of a merchant ship,
correctly positioned to attack
disadvantage
well-used
count upon the appearance of another and thus achieve
respectable success rate by the operation of the probability factor alone.
lower than
a
presented
his naval
captain,
had recognised the mathematical
arm operated and conceived
a
method to overcome it. By when Germany was
experimentation with surface torpedo-boats, during the period
denied U-boats by the Versailles Treaty, he demonstrated disposed in
a chain
on the
surface
where
their
could identify the approach of convoys across
that 'packs'
speed exceeded a
that
of submarines,
if
of merchant ships,
wide band of ocean, be concentrated
one by radio command from shore and inflict mass sinkings by a concerted raid in numbers that would overwhelm the escorts. Once Germany acquired the French Atlantic against
ports,
it
was these 'wolf pack'
tactics that
were
to
110
make
the Battle of the Atlantic the knife-
WAR SUPPLY AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC edge struggle for advantage which overshadowed Churchill's conduct of the
from mid-1940
effort
war
British
to mid-1943.
Convoy, which was the Royal Navy's defence against the wolf packs, offered only protection to the Atlantic
partial
naval escorts themselves - in the early days
The
lifeline.
perhaps only two or three destroyers and
were
a corvette
and tankers across 3000 miles of ocean - were
freighters
available to
shepherd
direct threat to a
little
forty
determined
U-boat formation. Asdic, the echo-sounder used to detect submerged U-boats, was ineffective
beyond 1000 yards and
The depth charges used
by guess and fractured the U-boat hull only
The radio was the measures taken
which best assured
to route
and
aircraft
convoys away from
of range
(available as a base to Britain after the
when
intelligence
or suspected U-boat patrol
measures by. Until
particularly aerial
May
1943 a shortage
between North America, Iceland
invasion of fear
on the other hand, was
On
the
German
side,
a
a
Denmark
in April 1940)
on
the
and
of surveillance; the gap was closed
stratagem
employed from
came
into
the very beginning
strong sense of direct conflict between the two
the officers of the B-Dienst (Observer Service) used wireless
and decrypts of cipher transmissions
orders;
attacks,
useful than
warning or accurate ranging.
known
gap'
more
radar was
the very-long-range Liberator (B-24) with an endurance of eighteen hours
intercepts their
'air
German
of the Atlantic war, and there was always sides.
an
left
which U-boats operated without
service. Rerouteing,
depth.
war
submerge while convoys passed
their shortness
Britain itself in
to give early
their safety, together with ancillary
patrol - to force U-boats to
of
when
night,
at
were too primitive
Asdic, but until 1943 radars
It
(until 1944)
detonated close by. Most U-boat
if
moreover, were delivered from the surface
lines
and bearing, not
reflected only range
to attack U-boats, triggered by water-pressure fuzes, had to be set
British
(later
to establish
Anglo-American)
Government Code and Cipher School
at
Bletchley
side,
convoy positions and read the
and the
cryptographers of the staff
of the Admiralty
Operational Intelligence Centre monitored the signals sent between U-boats and from Donitz's
headquarters
at
Kernevel,
Lorient
(after
March 1942
Berlin),
formation of patrol lines and the vectoring of wolf packs against their
to
targets.
detect
the
Rerouteing
1943, for
most successful of convoy protection measures. Between July 1942 and May example, the British Admiralty and US Navy Department intelligence centres
managed
to reroute 105 out of 174 threatened
was by
far
the
and minimised traps
attacks
on another
and suffered heavy
North
Atlantic
convoys
clear out
of danger,
53 by rerouteing; only 16 ran directly into wolf-pack
loss.
The success achieved by Captain Rodger Winn, RN, and later by his American Commander Kenneth Knowles, depended ultimately upon the skill of the Bletchley Park cryptographers in decrypting the Kernevel U-boat traffic fast enough for its
counterpart.
significance to be applied to
convoy operations. That
111
traffic
was, of course, enciphered
on
.
THE WAR
Enigma machine, and the
the
regularly
Much
1943.
until
up
Intelligence Centre
THE WEST
1940-1^43
key used by the U-boat service proved particularly
'Shark'
resistant to Bletchley's efforts;
IN
was not broken
it
of the
radio
vital
December 1942 and then not
until
used by the Operational
intelligence
was of lower-grade, position-fixing
to that time
Frequency Direction Finding (HF/DF or 'Huff Duff) enabled ships
shadowing U-boats from the transmissions they sent back for
convoys to be rerouted or protecting
to
quality.
to detect
High
and locate
U-boat headquarters, and so
summoned. Meanwhile, because of the book code instead of a machine cipher, and direct wolf packs on to chosen routes with
aircraft
Admiralty's ill-advised persistence in the use of a the B-Dienst was able to read convoy
sometimes disastrous
traffic
effect.
The crux of this radio
intelligence
war began with the move of the U-boats from the
eastern to the central Atlantic after April 1941. Substitution and rationing in Britain had
allowed the import requirement to be reduced from 55 to 43 million tons, but the
minimum
level
of subsistence was approaching and had to be measured against
sinking which threatened
had enacted
States
of
to outstrip replacement building. In February 1941 the United
Lend-Lease law which,
a
a rate
in effect,
allowed Britain to borrow war
supplies against the promise to repay after victory; and from April 1941 the United States
was operating
which
a Neutrality Patrol
effectively
excluded U-boats from the Atlantic west
of Bermuda, under the terms of the Pan-American Neutrality Act of 1939. However, the
U-boat
fleet
adding to
now had
numbers
its
during
operations;
eight
at
a
1941
the
less
than
September 1939 was
The
over 2000 miles of ocean in which to intercept convoys and was considerably higher rate than building rate
months of extended U-boat warfare German navy. In May it
unwisely unleashed
the British
Home
1,500,000 tons
new
Fleet;
time
at a
as a
when
which the home
rubber, explosives and
total
lost
since
commerce
in the Atlantic in 1941 therefore
proved
suffered the loss of the great battleship
raider, at the
end of a
great chase
by most of
but that defeat was offset by the sinking of 328 merchant ships of
were launching
the British yards
down
construction annually. The casualties took
material of
was losing U-boats on
fift)
extremely successful to the Bismarck,
it
exceeded 200, while the
oil, as
islands stood in dire
less
than
a
million tons of
with them almost every category of
need - wheat,
beef, butter, copper,
well as military equipment.
Apologists for the British effort could show, however, that two-thirds of the ships lost
had been sunk out of convoy and the escorts' success
soon
as (as
it
as the
was
United
States
American
From
was
certainly
1941),
28, suggesting that
prepared to draw that conclusion: rather than a hostile neutral
he transferred the weight of his
effort to the
United
January 1942 onwards, up to twelve U-boats were cruising off the
east coast
March they sank
U-boat losses for the year totalled
Navy became an overt combatant
had been since September
States coast.
that
increasing. Donitz
and
in the
Gulf of Mexico
1.25 millon tons
at
any one time; between January and
of shipping, equivalent to an annual
higher than that achieved in the North Atlantic during 1941.
112
rate four times
The German battleship Bismarck engages sortie,
24 May
1941; the
HM
battlecruiser
Hood
during
its
North Atlantic
photograph was taken from Prinz Eugen.
By May, however, convoy had been introduced on America's Eastern Sea Frontier
and sinkings
at
once declined
in those waters.
Moreover, the
rate
of new building, both of
merchantmen and escorts, began to accelerate spectacularly, as the American shipyards revived and were mobilised for new construction. Of particular importance was the appearance of
which were
standardised tanker, the T10, and a freighter, the Liberty ship, both of
a
larger (14,000
and 10,000 tons) and
besides - most important of
all
faster
than their pre-war equivalents,
- being quick to build. Three months was the average
construction time; by October 1942 American yards were launching three Liberty ships a
day and in
hours -
November
a
the Robert
E.
Peary
was
built
from the keel up
prefabrication techniques
posed
critical
approaching
its
crux.
Germany's in
at
Saint-Nazaire
largest battleship.
February by the
Channel - an incident
it,
the
Battle
There were diversions from the central
destroyed the dock
been joined
fifteen
point
By July 1942, though neither side yet perceived
Tirpitz,
and
to the efforts of his U-boat captains.
The
British
in four days
public-relations stunt, but grim evidence to Donitz of the challenge that
that
It
which offered an
was then harboured
Scharnhorst
and
in
of the Atlantic was
issue. In
March 1942 the
Atlantic coast
home
north Norway, where
Gneisenau after their daring
to the it
had
dash through the
provoked much recrimination between the Admiralty and the
113
THE WAR
RAF
over
levelled a
who
IN
bore responsibility for the
menace
against the Arctic
disruption to convoy
PQ17
in July. In
an Arctic convoy, provoking
much
THE WEST
1940-1943
them. The three heavy ships
failure to intercept
convoys for months to come and caused
December
anxiety
at
1943 Scharnhorst
made
lethal
a brief sortie against
the Admiralty, but suffered an identical fate
menace did not end until November 1944 when she was sunk by bombing at her moorings in Tromso Fiord. But these episodes largely summarise the contribution of the German surface fleet to the Kriegsmarine's war. The need to mount to that
of Bismarck; and the
Tirpitz
the North African 'Torch' landings in
merchantmen and warships from
November
the Atlantic
1942 temporarily drained away Allied
lifeline.
Ultra decrypts of U-boat radio traffic in February 1942 a
time
when
book code.
There was
which
a serious interruption
lasted for
most of the
of
year, at
the B-Dienst was enjoying increased success against the Royal Navy's no. 3
The
American
British,
and
Canadian
convoy
control
systems
were
simultaneously experiencing problems of 'shaking down' into a routine of co-operation; the Royal Canadian Navy,
which was undergoing an expansion from
six to nearly
400
warships in service, the largest of any armed force in any country during the Second World
War, found particular
difficulty in
matching the expertise of
its
larger partners. Since the
outbreak of the war the Admiralty and the Royal Air Force had been locked in over the deployment of long-range
convoy protection produced offensive
a quarrel
aircraft,
the Admiralty rightly but vainly arguing that
a better return
of effort than spectacular but often ineffective
bombing of German
cities.
Against this background Donitz was working to
extend the range of his U-boats by experimentation with refuelling
at
sea
from submarine
'milch cows', and to equip his boats for the increasingly dangerous surface transit of the
A
line of Liberty Ships in
an American shipyard. Average construction time
was
three months.
114
for
each freighter
WAR SUPPLY AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC Bay of Biscay against attack by such long-range Admiralty
Coastal
via
Command.
In
mounting the new and powerful Leigh night and attack
them with depth
had already ordered
first
gave
it
In a see-saw of technical duelling,
its
Command
aircraft
to surprise U-boats in the
destroyed in
The
July,
Bay
at
although Donitz
significance of the Leigh Light
when
the final 2000 yards of their approach
aircraft 'eyes' in
did allocate to the
the passage submerged, despite the delay
entailed in reaching the Atlantic cruising grounds. that
began
Two were
make
RAF
the
aircraft as
half of 1942 Coastal
searchlight
charges.
they must
that
the
usefulness was to be reduced
was
radar did not work.
when
the
Germans
learned to develop passive radar detectors which indicated danger before the Leigh Light
could be activated. Over the course of the Bay of Bisca/ 1944, the advantage consistently returned to the Allies.
the
battle,
however, which lasted into
was not
It
until the
deployment of
schnorkel-equipped U-boats (which could recharge batteries while cruising
first
submerged)
danger levelled by anti-submarine
in early 1944 that the
aircraft
began to be
offset.
By then, however, the climactic phase of the Atlantic
From
July 1942
redeployed
onward, when Donitz
at last
his effort to the central Atlantic,
weakened by
battle
had come and gone.
achieved his target figure of 300 U-boats, he
where the
Allied escort fleet
had been
the transfer of British ships to help the Americans introduce convoy
He was
Eastern Sea Frontier.
also
now becoming more
adept
at
on the
organising patrol lines and
concentrating wolf packs against convoys, and he was having greater success in locating
convoys because of the advantage Bletchley.
The
British
in
cryptography that the B-Dienst currently enjoyed over
responded with two experimental measures which would bear
fruit
the creation of a 'support group' of escorts to go to the rescue of a convoy under
later:
attack
and the adaptation of merchant ships
The MACs however, proved clumsy forerunners of which, USS Bogue, would not appear
would compel
shortage of escorts
merchant
to fly off aircraft, the
until
aircraft carriers.
the true escort carriers, the first
of
the following March; while the persisting
Group
the 20th Support
to
be disbanded
after
two
months. As
a result,
of 509,000 tons,
U-boat sinkings in the North Atlantic a figure
in
exceeded only once before
'Happy Time' off the American
December and January; but
in
coast.
Vicious
November
Atlantic
in a
running
May, during the
weather halved sinkings
in
February 1943, despite continuing bad weather, 120 U-boats
sank nearly 300,000 tons in the North Atlantic and the
March,
1942 reached the total
in the previous
battle against
toll
seemed
set to rise.
two convoys eastbound from North America
During
to Britain,
codenamed HX229 and SC122, forty U-boats sank twenty-two out of ninety merchantmen and one escort of the twenty which were defending them. The tonnage sunk, 146,000 was the highest in any victor) totalling
in
convoy
battle
and led Donitz and
his
crews to believe
their grasp. Altogether they sank 108 ships in the
476,000 tons, the majority
lost in
convoy. Wolf 1 pack
North tactics,
that they
Atlantic in
had
March,
supported by the
position-finding and decrypting successes of the B-Dienst, appeared to have achieved
115
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
«»..?»
U-71
108 by a Sunderland flying-boat of No. caught on the surface, under gun attack
Squadron,
RAF
Coastal
Command. The U-boat
survived the attack. Right:
The
interior of a
weapon. Sunderland, a formidable anti-submarine
mastery over convoy protection.
rate rising to Not only was the shipping replacement amount of the had actually made good meet losses (by October 1943 new construction merchant fleet into the bargm), U-boat losses shipping lost since 1939, and built a superior monthly rate of about fifteen. Those statistics were also beginning to equal launchings, at a directions: explanation of the shift lay in several spelt doom to Donitzs effort. The more even rerouteing B-Dienst in May 1943, making Bletchley recovered its edge over the permanen of plentiful, allowing the creation successful; escorts were becoming more added two escort April; to the existing escorts were
Tne appearance was
"'support groups', five in
illusory.
number
in
U-boats in the aircraft which could force all earners embarking twenty anti-submarine offensive potential thus effectively negating their vicinity of a convoy to submerge, levelled a direct Squid) and (Hedgehog improved radar. Asdic and depth-charge launchers availability of increased close combat; but, above all, the tactical threat against the U-boat in to the advantage wrought a strategic shift of long-range patrol aircraft for the Atlantic battle bomber, particularly the Liberator Bntish-US-Canadian side. The long-range aircraft,
116
#^f^ A' 1
'
•
1
I
i
1
y .**
^W
i *
w'^m
1
^^1
1M
(ft
/ lU
^jV-«
«•
r
3;
1
1
p *T
*
***
ft"
1
Liifll
*l
= SEP
BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC The panels in
at the top of the spread
show
1939
-MAY
1940
JUNE
1940
-MAR
1941
the shifting areas
which the main action of the Battle of the Atlantic was
concentrated. In July the French
940
1
and Norwegian
Kriegsmarine the Atlantic.
to
extend
the U-boats gained access to
operations
its
At the same time man)'
concentrated
in
home
waters
'wolfpack' tactics,
moved
much
counter the
to
farther into
British escorts
were
German
1941 Ddnitz, using
invasion threat. Throughout
British air cover. In
f
ports, enabling the
his operations west,
awav from
January 1942, with the United
entry into the war, Ddnitz transferred the
States'
main weight
of
his offensive to the unprotected shipping of the western
hemisphere. During this period (January-July 1942)
U-boats average
in the Atlantic life
were
at their safest,
of thirteen months,
deadly, sinking on average tons before being sunk.
19
With
and also
with an
at their
ships of about
most
\00,000
the strengthening of
US
coastal escorts, the U-boats were driven back into the
North Atlantic. By the end of co-operation had led to
more
1
943
closer
efficient
Anglo-US
anti-submarine
techniques; production of faster transports and escorts steadily rose. 'Wolfpack' tactics
abandoned
months
in
of the
were eventualK
favour of individual attacks. In the closing
war U-boats operated
primarily around the
British Isles, using their schnorkels to
remain permamntK
submerged. By the end of the war the average
U-boat had sunk
• ^^^
to three
life
of a
months.
Key Main areas where Allied and neutral merchant ships were sunk Main areas where U-boats were sunk
-^^— Convoy
routes escorted
Convoy routes unescorted *"
v
Allied air cover
zones
Limit of pan-American neutrality zone
American western hemisphere defence zone. |j
British, Allied
New
18 April 1941
and neutral merchant shipping losses (Atlantic theatre)
construction of British and American merchant shipping
(1600 gross tons and over)
1939
118
1941
119
A
B-17 takes
off
on an anti-submarine patrol from an
airstrip
on the Azores. Portugal
granted the Allies basing rights in the Azores in October 1943.
equipped with
radar, Leigh Light,
machine-guns and depth charges, was
flying death to a
surfaced U-boat. In the Bay of Biscay - after a short and disastrous episode of 'fighting out',
ordered by Donitz - the
Atlantic hunting-grounds
aircraft
forced
submerged,
his concentrations
of about
3:2
make
U-boats to
their passage to the
and
aircraft
On
from the ocean, conceding
24
by dispersing
escorts,
May
it
North
fourfold time penalty; in great waters they
tactics
his patrol lines
wherever they appeared. In May 1943 U-boat
between
replacement more than twice. fleet
a
at
completely disrupted Donitz's wolf-pack
all
reached
and savaging
losses, inflicted at a ratio
forty-three,
which
exceeded
Donitz, accepting the inevitable, withdrew his
later in his
memoirs: 'We had
lost the Battle
of the
Atlantic'
That did not mark the end of the U-boat war. In
equipped U-boat made
its
trial
cruise.
The schnorkel,
allowed a submarine to cruise submerged while using
May
1944 the
first
schnorkel-
a retractable air-breathing tube, its
diesel engines.
The
device,
invented by a Dutch naval officer in 1927, anticipated the development both of the closed
hydrogen-peroxide system, which the Germans would bring into service nuclear propulsion, in that
it
transformed the submersible U-boat into
in 1945,
a true
and of
submarine,
capable of operating below the surface throughout an operational mission. Misused,
could
kill
a
crew by suffocation, and two U-boat crews are believed
120
to
have died
it
in that
WAR SUPPLY AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC way; properly employed, lost their
main
it
would have revived
the U-boat threat.
American army
Atlantic ports to the
Had
the
Germans not
August 1944, schnorkel U-boats
in
would have reopened the Atlantic battle, to the Allies' very great cost. Measured across the space of the Atlantic struggle, from September 1939 to May 1943, the cost can be seen to have fallen most heavily on Donitz's submarine arm. Although the Allies lost
2452 merchant ships
175 warships, mostly British
and Free French escorts operations, almost
(a
in the Atlantic,
also), the Kriegsmarine lost
in the Atlantic,
all
of nearly
13 million gross-register tons,
term which included Canadian,
and 25,870
and
Norwegian
Polish, Belgian,
696 out of 830 U-boats dispatched on
killed out
of 40,900 crewmen
who
sailed;
another 5000, plucked from the wrecks of their depth-charged boats, became prisoners. This casualty rate - 63 per cent
fatal,
75 per cent overall -
far
exceeded
that suffered
by any
arm of service in the navy, army or air force of any combatant country. The cost was certainly not in vain. Given that the economic odds disfavoured Germany from the outset, that its industry was organised 'in breadth' for a short war rather other
than
'in
depth' for a long war, and that Hitler's campaign of conquest was notably
unsuccessful in adding either productive capacity or raw material resources to the Reich's war-making capacity - it failed, for example, to acquire any large source of oil or nonferrous metal ores for the
the
German war machine -
liberation of
Europe may be seen
between 1940 and 1944 from
its
as crucial.
own
on
the delaying effect of the U-boat war
transformation of Britain into an Anglo-American
place
d'armes
for
the
Moreover, while Germany fed
agricultural output
eventual
itself easily
and the requisitions made on
farming in the occupied lands to the east and west, Britain was constantly held close to the level
of
though
minimum fairly
subsistence by U-boat depredations
on
its
food imports. Rationing,
applied and beneficial to the classes nutritionally deprived before the war,
created a climate of latent capacity to strike back
World War was
crisis
among
the enemy.
at
the British
as intense as that levelled
was not much weaker the Luftwaffe, which
made
The U-boats were
during the
1940-4 than in 1914-18.
in
which distorted and diminished
Britain's military threat to
It
First
Germany during
though
in relative
the
their
Second
terms Britain
was the U-boats, marginally
assisted
by
the difference.
also to
prove of crucial significance
in diffusing
and diminishing
the support brought by British and especially American industry to their allies and their
own
ancillary theatres
of war. Russian industry was devastated by the German invasion of
White Russia and the Ukraine
and the Soviet Union's capacity
in 1941,
was only salved by the almost incredibly provinces to the trans-Ural regions
in
to sustain resistance
swift transfer of factories
the terrible winter of 1941-2.
October, for example, 496 factories were transported by train from
from the western
Between
Moscow
July
and
to the east,
leaving only 21,000 out of 75,000 metal-cutting lathes in the capital; overall the Russian railways
moved
1523 factories from west to east between June and August, and between
August and October wheels',
that
80 per cent of Russian war industry was 'on
moving from the threatened zones
to areas of safety in western or eastern Siberia.
it
was calculated
121
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
The disruption of production entailed by this unprecedented industrial migration could only be made good by substitutions from Western sources, of weapons and munitions but above
of the elements of war's infrastructure - vehicles, locomotives and rolling stock,
all
fuel, rations
and even such simple but
supplies as boots, the
vital
of which tens of thousands of German soldiers
March
and October 1945 the United
1941
locomotives, 11,000
wagons, nearly
rail
51,000 jeeps, 375,000 trucks
trucks that the
foundered
winter boots for lack
felt
winter of 1941-2. Between
States supplied the Soviet
of boots.
pairs
It
was
Without them
to Berlin.
its
campaign would have
far
more important
items of war supply than the 15,000
7000 tanks and 350,000 tons of explosives which Lend-Lease also consigned to the
Soviet Union; far
war - 5000
more important than
tanks,
7000
aircraft,
were, however,
supplies
the)
all
the aid sent by Britain during the course of the
even the 114,000 tons of rubber.
Vital
reached Russia between 1941 and
from
Murmansk and Archangel had
Britain to
Greenland and
as far
north as Spitsbergen (on which
of weather stations was fought
and sea
attack
by German
in 1941-2)
to
though these war
1944 by the most
circuitously inconvenient routes, thanks to Donitz's U-boat campaigns.
air
rails,
American boots and
in
western Russia in 1944.
to a halt in
Boots and trucks proved aircraft,
run'
Union with 2000
of gasoline, 540,000 tons of
3 million tons
and 15,000,000
Red Army advanced
lost toes in the
The 'North Russia
be routed almost
a strange little
summer months of 1941-4,
during the
Norway; when the winter
units based in
to interrupt sailings
occasions - to
alternative route
Stalin's
woundingly expressed scorn. The
railway system.
The
enemy
and
attack,
to avoid
on
several
through the
the railhead of a long and inadequate
at
Pacific route, to Vladivostok, it
as
drove the
ice
convoys eastward, losses rose grievously, forcing Churchill Persian Gulf was roundabout and terminated
west
as far
sub-war for possession
was
also affected
by
ice
and the danger of
connected with the wrong end of the longest railway
line in the
world, the Trans-Siberian. Hitler's
investment
partial strangulation all
in his
on the
U-boat
fleet
thus
more than
justified the cost.
It
exerted a
offensive effort of the immediate enemies, the Russians
most of
but also the British, delayed the build-up of a large American expeditionary force on his
doorstep and hampered the development of
a
hostile
'peripheral'
strategy
in
the
Mediterranean; the closing of that sea to regular British convoying in 1940-2, largely
through
aerial
but partly through submarine threat, forced the desert army to depend on
supply via the Cape route, 12,000 miles long,
Had its
size thereafter, or
managed
less,
its
strategic area
the
its
most
useful of
all
efficiency.
added
significantly to
advanced schnorkel and revolutionary
might have become
total strangulation.
None
the advantage of being able to operate from the
- the advantage of 'interior
traditionally exercised against oceanic far
partial
Germany considerably maximised
centre of
very great cost to
to introduce his
hydrogen-peroxide types before 1944, the
at
Hitler achieved the creation of a 300-boat fleet before 1942,
enemies
in the
the military subordinates
122
lines' that
continental powers had
European world. Donitz proved by
who
lent their services to Hitler's
WAR SUPPLY AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC campaign of conquest -
more
far
useful than Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, or even
Braun, the father of his pilotless missiles - and
have been nominated to succeed him
it
was
Fuhrer in the
as
entirely appropriate that last
Wehrmacht
to the U-boat arm.
and the
- Giinther Prien, Otto Kretschmer, Manfred
'aces'
Its
pitiless
no equal within
days of the Reich. In
self-immolatory dedication to the creed of total war, Nazism found
von
he should
Joachim Schepke - whether believing Nazis or not, personified its ethos of the superman and even succeeded, for all the cruelty they inflicted, in winning the respect of Kinzel,
enemies
their
of aces' with
for their warrior prowess. a slate
The
interrogated Kinzel, 'ace
of war supply. The Burma Road and 'the
via dolorosa
Hump', over which supplies were driven or flown army
who
like him'.
was not the only
Atlantic
British officer
of 270,000 tons of shipping sunk, ruefully expressed the hope that
were not too many
'there
The
in south China,
were
The Takeradi
others.
(at
route,
14,000 feet) to Chiang Kai-shek's
from West
to East Africa, provided
the desert air force with aircraft disembarked from Atlantic convoys and assembled ashore.
The Lake Ladoga
And
'ice
road' saved Leningrad
ultimately the Japanese,
who had
Pacific 'island perimeter' into the
achieved extraordinary
feats
combatant during 1943-4,
brink of starvation by
total starvation in the
of maritime supply
when
winters of 1941-3.
in turning the archipelagos
within their
foundation of a watery 'continental' strategy during 1942, in
keeping their far-flung garrisons
MacArthur's 'island-hopping' plan cracked the carapace of
end of their own
their oceanic fortress. In 194S, at the
almost their whole merchant
from
succeeded
fleet to
midsummer
'Battle
of the
America's submarines, the
Pacific',
home
when
islands
they lost
were on the
- a whimpering end to Japan's campaign of conquest
which was stopped short by the cosmic bang of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, none of these importance with the enterprise.
Had
it
Battle
been
of the
lost,
Atlantic.
had those
Winston Churchill's days and nights line
succeeded
losses already
in sinking
British
between 1939 and to
whom
It
(one-fifth
of
1945, the majority
were quite
compared
was
'statistics,
truly
duration, magnitude and
in
both
a battle
and
a
war-winning
diagrams and curves' which blighted
1940-2 turned wrong, had each U-boat on
more merchant
ship in the
summer
10 per cent, the course, perhaps
War would have been
Merchant Navy
Atlantic sea,
in
only one
exceeded launchings by
of the Second World
efforts
logistic
its
entirely otherwise.
pre-war strength)
drowned
who
patrol
when
even the outcome,
The 30,000 men of the
fell
victim to the U-boats
or killed by exposure
as certainly front-line warriors as the
its
of 1942,
on the
guardsmen and
cruel
North
fighter pilots
they ferried the necessities of combat. Neither they nor their American, Dutch,
Norwegian or Greek fellow mariners wore uniform and few have any memorial. They stood nevertheless between the Wehrmacht and the domination of the world.
123
— PART — II
THE WAR IN THE EAST 1941-1943
i
6 HITLER'S
STRATEGIC
DILEMMA On
19 July 1940 Hitler
convened the Reichstag
witness his mass creation of the
Napoleonic gesture and,
in the Kroll
new German
Opera House in Berlin to It was a consciously
marshalate.
Napoleon's elevation of eighteen of
like
be Marshals of the Empire on 9 May 1804, was designed to
glorify the
his generals to
head of state rather
than honour his military servants. His three army group commanders, Bock, Leeb and Rundstedt, his personal chief of four of the
most successful
field
Keitel, the
staff,
army commander-in-chief, Brauchitsch,
commanders, Kluge, Witzleben, Reichenau and
on
three Luftwaffe chiefs, Milch, Sperrle and Kesselring, were
appointed to the novel rank of Reichsmarschall,
a distinction
the
List,
and
Goering was
roll;
he decided entitled him to
yet
another splendid uniform, and was decorated with the Great Cross of the Iron Cross,
the
fifth
Bliicher,
- and
last
- award of an honour previously conferred by the Prussian kings on
Moltke and Hindenburg.
Although the creation of the marshalate was the sensational event of actual point
that day, the
of the occasion was to review for the puppet deputies the course of the
Second World War thus speech was intended
as
far
and
to state the terms
an appeal,
via
on which
world opinion,
it
might be concluded.
to Britain,
Hitler's
exposing the hopelessness
of her position and inviting her government to make peace. William Shirer, the American journalist,
who
witnessed
it
and was
Previous page: The German one-da)- 'victory'
visit
retreat
to Paris,
a
connoisseur of
Hitler's speeches,
thought
from Moscow, December 1941. Left: Hitler during
23 June 1940.
Bormann
is
Albert Speer
in profile
127
on his
left.
is
on
his right
and Martin
his
it
his
THE WAR
performance: 'The Hitler
finest
conscious of
mind,
that
and
it,
yet so
IN
we saw
THE EAST
in the Reichstag tonight
wonderful an
he mixed superbly the
1941-1943
was the Conqueror, and
which always goes down so well with the masses when they know appeal
came
at
end of his long
the very
oration: 'In this hour,
my own
conscience to appeal once more to reason and
much
elsewhere.
as
consider myself in
I
be
feel
I
common
a
it
man
is
be
my
to
on
top.'
sense in Great Britain as
make this appeal since I am not the speaking in the name of reason. I see no reason
this
war must go
He
did not, however, disclose, or even apparently harbour, any view of how
ended.
Since
His
duty before
position to
a
vanquished begging favours, but the victor
why
German
handler of the
actor, so magnificent a
confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness
full
on.'
arrangement of the armistice with France,
the
it
might
intellectually
and
emotionally Hitler had given himself a vacation from responsibility from which he was loath to return. In the
World War
First
as a
common
company of two old comrades of the
battlefields
He had
soldier.
visited the sights
of
view the Opera, the supreme expression of his through
his favourite
at
leadership,
He
had waited for
made
It
was with reluctance
the heavier by the
all
was the choice of enemy he confronted
months
earlier
a
Freudenstadt in the Black Forest,
the reality of defeat.
had
Paris, to
muse
at
Napoleon's tomb and
taste in architecture.
He had wandered
South German landscapes, breathing the mountain
adulation of simple people.
headquarters,
trenches he had toured the
of the Western Front where he had fought with great bravery
now
need at
air
and the
week in one of his many purpose-built for word that Churchill was recognising
that
he had returned to the burdens of
to decide the future. Britain or Russia? That
the crossroads to which his decision for war ten
brought him.
Either choice was disagreeable and dangerous.
He could
not be defeated by Britain
but he could be humiliated in the attempt to invade her; moreover, he clung to his dream
of winning
co-operation rather than beating her into subjection.
Britain's
On
the other
hand, he had long and ardently desired the defeat and subjection of Russia; but he recognised the dangers of the attempt. Russia was strong, her centres of power remote; only the fear that time
would make her stronger and Germany had
productive western territories - those to seek for
ways through the
During the days
dilemmas with
his
risk
the urge to incorporate her briefly
fertile
and
possessed in 1918 - drove him
of an eastern offensive.
after his Reichstag
speech, Hitler addressed himself to debating these
commanders. Erich Raeder,
his
Grand Admiral, warned
that, 'if
the
preparations for Sealion' (by which he meant the defeat of the RAF) 'cannot definitely be
completed by the beginning of September, fact Hitler,
chief
Wehrmacht
adjutant, that
what Raeder meant by 'other
it
will
be necessary to consider other
plans.' In
French armistice, had told Schmundt, his he was considering an attack on Russia - which was not
even during his 'vacation'
plans' -
after the
and had
set
Colonel Bernhard von Lossberg, one of
OKW's operations officers, to draft a study (which Lossberg codenamed son). He now set OKH to the same task.
128
'Fritz', after
his
HITLER'S STRATEGIC
At the
DILEMMA
end of July he reconvened discussions with
his Bavarian retreat.
On
31 July
his
commanders
he told Brauchitsch and Haider
that
his
manpower
for
decision, taken in mid-June, to demobilise thirty-five divisions to provide
the
economic war
divisions (he to twenty)
against Britain,
had already ordered
would a
and would accelerate the
the spring of 1941 he
the Berghof,
at
he was reversing
in fact increase the strength
of the army to 180
doubling of the number of Panzer divisions from ten transfer, already
would have 120
begun, of forces to the
east,
so that by
divisions close to Russia's border.
He had been alarmed by
This decision could be interpreted as a precautionary move.
and Estonia
mid-June and by its annexation of Bessarabia and North Bukovina from Romania on 28 June - an annexation in which he was Russia's occupation of Latvia, Lithuania
bound
to acquiesce, since Russia's claim to those provinces
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 22 August
They consolidated
as threatening.
since
in
a
had been agreed
in
the
These acquisitions of territory could be seen
1939.
move westward
of Russia's strategic boundary, which
September of the previous year had engulfed 286,000 square miles inhabited by 20
million people. Hitler did not, however, believe that Russia intended to attack. rather that the
boundary changes enlarged
It
was
Russia's opportunities for further strategic
expansion while narrowing Germany's. The occupation of the
Baltic states
threatened
German protectorate, and extended Russia's area of control in Baltic among other things, trained its U-boat crews). The annexation of Romania's Danubian provinces threatened Bulgaria, a German client state, and improved Finland, effectively a
waters (where Germany,
Russia's opportunity of seizing the Mediterranean entrance to the Black Sea. It
its
own
was the evidence these 'forward' moves gave of Russia's determination
advantage in the teeth of Germany's proven military power that persuaded Hitler
he could not defer than
to pursue
later.
a test
of strength with her for ever - and,
Foreign Armies East, the
OKH
if so,
intelligence branch
it
must be sooner rather
which monitored Soviet
and intentions, had reported in May, from the military attache in Moscow, that Red Army, though capable of raising 200 infantry divisions for war, remained so disorganised by the great military purge of 1938 that it would take twenty years 'until it reached its former heights'. Its information on Russian arms production, particularly of tanks, which would have warned otherwise, was defective: the size of the Russian tank fleet was reckoned at 10,000 (against Germany's 3500), when in fact it was 24,000. Hitler was prepared to pit his tank fleet against the Russian, even at odds of three to one; and he capabilities
the
had no doubt
that 120
mobilising such
When
a
German
divisions could defeat 200 Russian,
if
Stalin
succeeded
in
on
14
number.
the twelve
new
marshals came to collect their batons
at
the Chancellery
August, therefore, Hitler's talk was of the emerging need to fight the Soviet Union. Field
Marshal von Leeb's record of Hitler's remarks reveals the trend of his calculations:
Probably two reasons but the
US
can't start
why
Britain
won't make peace.
major arms deliveries
129
until 1941.
Firstly,
she hopes for
US
aid;
Secondly she hopes to play off
THE WAR
THE EAST
IN"
Russia against Germany. But German)'
two danger
are
which could
areas
pockets Finland;
this
would
German
on
Russia.
attack
We
Romania.
militarily far superior to Russia.
is
set off a clash with Russia:
cost German)' her
Number
cannot permit
two,
will
.
German)"
.
.
world
in
A On
eastern campaign might be conducted.
deployed.
And on
armed. By the spring there
why peace
is
is
Fritz Todt, his chief
On
where
east,
September,
14
6
new
However, he could not was
'Fritz'
as a
to
On
when
his
a
frontiers
was postponed
air
at
which the Wehrmacht would march eastward, Hitler's
from
as a
move
to validate
it
to
defence force of
Italy
Hungary.
a
Hitler also
new
amount
its
burgeoning
to
come
what the
conflict with the
As the need to accept or
itself,
in
the
together with
a
state
of Slovakia which
on 2 September between the assistance of the third if it were
to
reject
to the
mounting of an eastern
of the Soviet Union - though
Tripartite Pact (in fact
United
Hitler to the decision for such an offensive
characteristic
it
Tripartite Pact, signed
to a direct provocation
leaders conceived dire suspicions of in
but,
staff,
which transferred
sent a 'military mission',
were necessary and useful preliminaries
offensive. Yet they did not
Japan
personal
thousand men. His diplomats were simultaneously
and Japan, binding any two
attacked. All these
'the
Germany's guarantee of Romania's
the time of the 'Vienna Award' of 30 August
lead to their joining the
Germany,
on
his 'Fritz' plan to Jodl; ultimately
beginning the discussions with Romania, Hungary and the puppet
would
again.
decision for the attack
unusually great strength of a whole arm) division, into Romania Luftwaffe
the
at
postponing Operation
contingency document. The transfer of German divisions into
announced
half of Transylvania
convened
again
for
communication between subordinate and superior within
Poland continued, camouflaged
new
to
it
transfer of Bock's
including six Panzer, were
commanders
announced that commit himself to a firm
yet
be the plan according
remained meanwhile
Mediterranean
of war construction, to
September he approved the
September Lossberg submitted
15
be
will
headquarters from which an
thirty-five divisions,
Sealion against Britain; three days later he
Bolshevik enemy'.
a
possible with Britain.
war conference, he reviewed further reasons
a
one, Russia
and impede
pattern of evasion and delay
Arm)' Group B from west to
Chancellery for
There
.
Romania's gasoline supplies to
of
full)'
East Prussia to search for a suitable site for another
now
.
encroachments by Russia on
further
in the east, Russia in India, Italy in the
trade. That
Schmundt and Dr
27 August Hitler sent
Baltic
.
not striving to smash Britain because the beneficiaries
is
Germany but Japan
not be
and America
number
dominance of the
because
this,
Germany. Therefore Germany must be kept 180 divisions.
1941-194?
States)
its
designed to support
portended - nor did they commit
itself.
such
a
decision sharpened, Hitler
behaviour pattern of evasion and delay.
130
It
had overcome him
for
fell
into a
weeks
after
HITLER'S STRATEGIC
DILEMMA
the Polish triumph, while he had fenced with his generals over the strategy for an attack
the Western Allies.
had seized him
It
in
on
an acute form twice during the Battle of France,
attack on the Dunkirk perimeter. Now it was manifested means of winning the war by broadening its base. If he could not talk the British round, or defeat them by invasion - Sealion was cancelled for good on 12 October he would achieve the same effect by multiplying the enemies they had to face and the fronts on which the) had to fight. Mussolini had opened an offensive into Britishgarrisoned Egypt from Libya on 13 September. On 4 October, while the offensive still seemed to promise success, Hitler met Mussolini at the Brenner Pass, on their joint frontier, to discuss how the war in the Mediterranean, for two hundred years Britain's
once before and once during the in a search for
principal foothold outside
its
island base, might be turned to her decisive disadvantage.
He
suggested to his fellow dictator that Spain might be coaxed on to the Axis side - thus giving
Germany Africa,
free use
and
that
of the
British
Rock of Gibraltar - by
offering Franco part of French
North
France might be persuaded to accept that concession by compensation
with parts of British West Africa. Mussolini proved enthusiastic - and understandably since the
scheme included
Napoleon
III
in 1860)
his
from France.
Hitler accordingly hurried
Franco and Petain. Back in the
visits to
Stalin inviting
home
to Berlin to arrange
he constructed with Ribbentrop
capital,
Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, to
and the Soviet Union might agree between themselves
so,
Corsica and Nice (annexed by
acquisition of Tunis,
visit at
how
to profit
from
a letter to
when Germany
an early date,
Britain's current
defencelessness.
A week
later,
on 20 October, he
left
in his
command
train, Amerika, to
and Franco. The meeting with Franco took place on 23 October Franco-Spanish frontier.
World War
has
It
become famous
for Hitler's furious parting shot that
'rather
Petain
Hendaye on
at
in the diplomatic history
he would
meet
the
of the Second
have three or four teeth
extracted than go through that again'. Franco, supported by his Foreign Minister, Serrano
Suher
('Jesuit
Swine',
in
Hitler's
characterisation
-
he
preserved
a
Benedictine
catechumen's defensive antipathy for the Society of Jesus), stonewalled throughout the hours of negotiation.
When
his train left at
two
in the
inch towards co-belligerency with Franco. Petain,
morning, Hitler had not advanced an
whom
he met on 24 October, proved
equally unresponsive, but nevertheless succeeded in convincing Hitler that they had had a
meeting of minds. The marshal's reputation, antiquity, soldierly bearing and evident patriotism were
promise
to Hitler's taste.
to consult his
believe that they Hitler
war
all
to present to
Petain had
conceded nothing more than
government, which obeyed him automatically,
were united
now had
Though
in a
productive hostility to
Hitler
Britain.
the outlines - despite Franco's heel-dragging - of a larger coalition
Molotov
at his
forthcoming
visit.
While he waited
for the Soviet Foreign
Minister to arrive, he was distracted by the errant behaviour of Mussolini,
moment
to
mount an
a
decided to
attack
from Albania (occupied by the
Italian
army
Greece. Mussolini claimed to be motivated by the fear that the British
131
who
chose
this
in April 1939) into
would
establish
1
STRATEGIC OVER-VIEW,
JUNE 1940-MARCH
1941
Key 1
The plan
for
2 The
Operation Sealion, which was postponed
on 17 September 1940
indefinitely
Soviet occupation of Latvia, Lithuania
and
Estonia in mid-June 1940, threatening Finland, effectively a
\
German
protectorate,
and extending
Russia's area cf control in Baltic waters
\
3 The Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina
\6 \
s»
from Romania
4 Romania of the
\ \ \ R Don
\
end of June 1940
at the
Hungary under
cedes territory to
the terms
Vienna Award, 3 September 1940. General Ion
Antonescu assumes power as dictator
after the
abdication of King Carol
Romania
into the Axis
camp
5 The
plan
'Fritz'
II,
bringing
for the invasion of the Soviet
presented 15 September 1940, committing the
\ Astrakhan
German
weight of the
6
#
firmly
Hitler's 'AA' line,
attack against
Union,
main
Moscow
running south from Archangel
Astrakhan, the proposed boundary of
to
his eastern
conquests
7 Five
Italian divisions
1940, occupying
8 The
_.^"\
\CKSEA
v ry
.J
9 Germany,
f
and Japan
Italy
sign the Tripartite Pact in
27 September 1940
10 Hitler meets General Franco at Hendaye,
23
October 1940 1
W
Barrani
British counter-attack reaches El Agheila,
Italy launches
an attack on Greece from Albania, 28
I)
SYRIA
- '_
into Egypt, September
February 1941
->
Berlin,
^ A
Sidi
march
October 1940
/
12
in the
Key Greater Germany
Occupied by Germany '.
I |
'Felix',
Allied to
Admiral Raeder's plan
to
hamstring Britain
Mediterranean by capturing Gibraltar
13 Bulgaria and Yugoslavia are compelled to join the Tripartite Pact,
March 1941.
In Yugoslavia the
Germany
Boundary Prior to 1939
government
Ceded
coup
to Russia
is
overthrown on
in part inspired
27 March
Vichy France and territories
divisions to Greece
133
by a military
by the despatch of four British
from North Africa 14
THE WAR
positions in Greece
if
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
he did not, and he certainly had legitimate
wishing to deny them naval and
air
bases any closer to his
own
strategic reasons for
along the Adriatic than
those they already possessed in Egypt and Malta. However, his purpose in striking into
Once fulsome in praise of wake of his own, and who had sought domestic plaudits for the remilitarisation of the German Rhineland while Mussolini was conquering an overseas empire in Ethiopia, had cast him into the shadows Greece on 28 October was an egocentric wish to emulate
his political 'genius'. Hitler,
by the triumphs of Blitzkrieg
whose
in
rise to
power had
Hitler.
trailed in the
Poland and France. Mussolini's
the Battle of France (and the Battle of Britain, in
which the
own
abortive participation in
Regia Aeronautica
had
ingeniously joined) had aroused the derision of neutrals and enemies
briefly
and
He was
alike.
accordingly determined to win in Greece his share of the laurels which had fallen in
disproportionate
The
failure
number
to the
Wehrmacht.
of his invasion of Greece - the
chapter - confounded and outraged Hitler
tale
upset his scheme to transform the Balkans into a
was
also a provocation to the Soviet
he sought
to lull
Union
suspicions. Moreover,
its
at a it
of its miscarriage belongs
he awaited Molotov's
as
satellite
arrival.
in the next It
not only
zone by peaceful diplomacy;
moment and
in
an area
had the immediately undesirable
furnishing the British with a pretext for returning to the continent.
On
31
effect
October
oilfields, his
air units to
main source of supply,
in
in the
southern Greece, thus putting Romania's Ploesti
danger of bombing
attack.
These developments provoked him to an outburst of contingency planning.
OKH
ordered
French
zone
to prepare plans for capturing Gibraltar
libre,
and
of
Britain
occupied Crete and the Aegean island of Lemnos with troops sent from Egypt, and next few days transferred
it
when and where
and occupying,
if
to prepare another plan for the invasion of Greece.
He
necessary, the
These orders
would result in the appearance of Fuhrer Directives 18 (Felix), 19 (Attila) and 20 (Marita) on 12 November and 10 and 13 December. He also curtailed active consideration of Mussolini's request for German assistance in his offensive against the British in Egypt. 'Not one man and not one pfennig will I send to North Africa,' he told - ironically - General Erwin Rommel. The Panzer units Mussolini wanted would instead be earmarked for intervention in Greece from positions inside Bulgaria, Germany's First World War ally, which Hitler was now trying to coax into the Tripartite Pact, while Mussolini's army was left to manage its desert campaign against the British as best it could. Even though distracted by unwelcome developments on the margin of his empire and thrashing apparently between strategic options, nevertheless throughout October and November Hitler remained fundamentally preoccupied by the decision for an eastern campaign. 'What will transpire in the east', he told Bock, his army group commander in Poland, in early November, is still an open question; circumstances may force us to step in to forestall any more dangerous developments.' However, he was sustaining his transfer of divisions
from west
to east, while both
plans. 'Political discussions
have been
OKW
initiated',
134
and
OKH
proceeded with the
he minuted to
his
drafting of
commanders on
the eve
DILEMMA
HITLER'S STRATEGIC
of Molotov's
now
visit,
arranged for 12 November, 'with the aim of establishing what
be
Russia's position will
outcome of these discussions, all the 11 November, therefore, it was
Irrespective of the
preparations orally ordered for the east are to continue.' By
Molotov came bearing guarantees of
clear that only if
Russia's acquiescence in Hitler's
mastery of the continent could Hitler be deterred from mobilising for the eastern offensive.
Molotov came
no acquiescent mood. Despite the extent of Hitler's military victory armed forces, the Soviet Union, he quickly made clear, was hold Germany strictly to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (which in
and the power of determined
to
his
defined their respective spheres of influence in eastern and southern Europe), to pursue its
own
power and
interests as a great
relationship with third parties.
disclosed the
would be
German
Empire
the British
free to
to
demand knowledge of Germany's
Ribbentrop,
on
side of the bargain
in return for siding
offer: Russia
its
to
Germany over
Montreux Treaty of 1936 Mediterranean
The
Soviet
sphere by the pact.
its
to
control of that country.
improve
the Turkish
via
It
wanted
enemy
and
also
wanted
a parting shot,
RAF
Italy
to
know what
and Japan,
when Ribbentrop
Molotov asked,
'If
tried to
dismemberment of that
is
spheres of
particularly Japan, in the
German
night attack, he revealed that Russia's
not stop with the annexation of Finland (Russian, of course,
1918) but included the question
assisting in the
revision of the
a
of Sweden's continuing neutrality and
control of the Baltic exit to the North Sea, most sensitive of all Germany's
which
he
to guarantee Bulgaria's
exchange with Ribbentrop, conducted
in Asia. In a final
interest in the Baltic did 1809.
It
Molotov demanded
between Germany,
Foreign Minister's air-raid shelter during an
by
Hitler,
on Russia's freedom to pursue Union wanted to annex Finland,
of passage between the Black Sea and the
rights
its
Straits.
interest the Tripartite Pact delimited
between
subsequent meetings with
his
(apparently whether or not Bulgaria asked for such a guarantee), thereby
challenging
old
its
the letter of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and
which had been assigned
its
to share in the despoiling of
area of control into Africa.
its
traditional interest in the Black Sea region.
frontiers
was
expand southwards towards the Indian Ocean while Japan completed
Molotov showed himself uninterested. At
on
its
with the Tripartite Pact powers. The Soviet Union
conquests in Asia and Germany extended
insisted
intentions in
preliminary meeting with Molotov,
a
at
so,
then
why
home
waters. As
remind him of how
the British Emprie,
are
we
in this shelter
greatly Russia would profit whose defeat was at hand, and whose are those bombs
are falling?'
Next morning Molotov eight hours, his visit
had
left
lasted
for
Moscow. Although he had been
long enough
in Berlin only forty-
to convince Hitler that 'the final struggle with
Bolshevism', which had been a leitmotiv of his political creed since the earliest days of his 'struggle',
could not
now
be deferred. In the
last
week of his demanded
outrage Molotov's intransigence aroused in him: 'He bases
on Danish
soil
on the
outlets to the
North
135
Sea.
He had
life,
he
still
that
we
give
recalled the
him
military
already staked a claim to
THE WAR
them.
He demanded
supposed draft
of
be the
to
THE EAST
1941-1943
Constantinople, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland - and we were
victors.'
proposed
a
IN
Memory
only marginally exaggerated the
written by
treaty
Molotov reached
reality.
When
the
on 25 November,
Berlin
it
contained clauses requiring the withdrawal of German troops from Finland (an agreement
them to use Finnish territory had been signed on 12 September) and allowing the Union to acquire bases in Bulgaria. Hitler instructed Ribbentrop to make no reply.
allowing Soviet
A The documents
to
not diplomatic.
On
blueprint for 'cauldron' battles
which he devoted himself in the 5
December
first
weeks of December were
the plans for a Russian campaign
which
OKW
military,
and
OKH
had been preparing separately since June and August respectively were brought together for joint staff discussion
Lossberg and
still
under
codenamed
his auspices at the Chancellery. 'Fritz',
OKW's
agreed with that submitted by
plan,
OKH
completed by General Friedrich von Paulus, the future defender of Stalingrad) that the
success.
encirclement of the Red
Army
close to Russia's borders
The danger of engulfment by the
dominated German General
prompted
vast
striking eastward against the tsar's
had been
in accepting
was the preconditon
for
spaces of the Russian interior had
Staff thinking since the
Schlieffen, the author of
prepared by (it
previous century. That danger had
Germany's war plan
for 1914, to
arm) - believed though
it
eschew the option of
then was to be
as inferior to
Army to the Wehrmacht - in favour of attacking France. Schlieffen had recalled 1812, when Napoleon's failure to defeat the Russians in their borderlands had first drawn him to Moscow and then condemned him to drag the the
German army
as Hitler
held the Red
Grand Arm) back again through the winter snows.
Hitler too recalled the retreat
from
Moscow, which had destroyed the Grand Army, but he believed that the Red Army could itself be destroyed by deep armoured thrusts through and behind its frontier positions, creating 'cauldrons' in which its fighting units would be rendered down to inert pulp. OKH's plan was a blueprint for such cauldron battles: the three army groups of the western triumph (to be entitled North, Centre and South) would direct themselves respectively on Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev; but, on their march to the Baltic, the capital and the Ukraine, their Panzer spearheads would encircle the Red Army in three great pockets, w^hich the follow-up infantry would then reduce piecemeal. Lossberg's OKW plan was even more insistent on this point, and, though it was considered on 5 December apparently only in the form of verbal comments from Jodl, the
OKW
operations
advocacy of the
Moscow priority,
at
officer,
OKH
an early
it
stage.
but Haider justified
the Soviet system.
greatly influenced the trend of the discussions.
plan laid great emphasis
Under
There was it,
a
on
the
need
to strike for
degree of traditionalism in
this
Haider's
and capture
accordance of
with considerable reason, by reference to the centralism of
Stalin, all
authority
was concentrated
in
Moscow; moreover,
the
Russian transport system, which in that largely roadless land meant the railways, was also
136
HITLER'S STRATEGIC
centred on the
capital.
So,
too,
DILEMMA
by German intelligence estimates, was
much of
the
country's industry. Haider's war diary reveals that the General Staff believed 44 per cent of Soviet
war production
in the
Ukraine and only 24 per cent
was
facilities to
be located
in the
Moscow-Leningrad
but the rest of Haider's analysis was correct.
faulty;
region, 32 per cent
of the Ural mountains. This industrial intelligence
east
It
was disquieting, therefore,
even on 5 December 1940 Hitler showed himself already more drawn to Lossberg's proposals which argued for postponing
had encircled the Russians
in
sector against the Baltic coast
its
created a great 'cauldron' in the Ukraine.
'In
is
as inferior to us as the
everything else
is
old, reconditioned material
human
had done
to the
made tank,
in the
the
(as
He
field batteries,
inferior.
The armies
is
are leaderless.' Hitler
monstrous purge of experienced generals Sicherheitsdienst (the
then known) with
Nazi security service)
much
of the evidence
failed altogether to identify the progress Soviet military industry
had
vehicles, particularly the T-34
shortly establish itself as the best tank in any army.
two weeks
that
followed the Chancellery meeting,
persisted until Hitler ordered a redrafting its
modern
has a few
the bulk of the Russian tank forces
the
OKYV's thinking derived from Lossberg's
as
is
.
KGB was
co-operated in the
draft plan into a Fiihrer Directive. Jodl
Moscow
.
development of new and advanced armoured
which would In the
its
had
NKVD
.
By contrast, the Abwehr (the intelligence branch of the German
to incriminate them. forces)
Stalin's
Red Army's high command;
had, indeed, supplied the
armed
French.
material
was well informed about the damage
'Fritz'
Army Group North and Army Group South had until
terms of the weapons,' Hitler remarked, 'the
Russian soldier
poorly armoured. The Russian
on Moscow
a final drive
that
objective) to lend
armour
'Fritz'.
when
issued on
18
laboured to transform lending to
it
some of
Moscow
which directed Army Group Centre (which had
Army Group North
to
vital
the
this,
accomplished, followed by the capture of Leningrad
Fiihrer Directive 21,
task,
Nevertheless the emphasis on
Russian armies in the Baltic region. 'Only after
continued with the object of seizing the
OKH
.
.
.
its
encirclement of the has been
task,
are the offensive operations to be
transport and
December,
for
most urgent
armaments
centre,
Moscow.'
actually included an instruction for
Army Group Centre to 'swing strong units of its mobile forces to the north, destroy the enemy forces fighting in the Baltic area, acting in conjunction
in
order to
with
Army
Group North ... in the general direction of Leningrad'. The directive also included a codename for the Russian operation. It was to be known, after the medieval emperor
whom in
legend held lay sleeping
Thuringian mountain ready to
in a
come
to
Germany's
aid
her hour of need, as Barbarossa.
The
prescribed by
preliminary to the attack
December, however, 1941
June 1941, many months in the future; all that way of timing was a stipulation that preparations deployment were to be 'concluded by 15 May 1941'. After
starting date for Barbarossa lay in
Fiihrer Directive 21
he assembled
his
amended commanders at
Hitler
switch of strategic effort to the
east.
the Barbarossa plan
little,
if at
all.
On
7-9 January
the Berghof to hear his justification, in detail, for a
There he indicated
137
that his objectives lay as far
away
as
THE WAR
IN"
THE EAST
Baku, on the Caspian, the centre of the Russian
March (before
1941-1943
industry
oil
penetrated assigned
but the immediate operational zone of the
all
3
which German
March) he issued instructions
in 1918. Earl}" in
Wehrmacht
speech to 250 senior Wehrmacht commanders
the Chancellery
at
had
which
to the responsibility
the SS and 'Reich Commissioners' appointed by himself; the implication, as he in a
forces
to Jodl
made
of
clear
on 30 March, was Communist
measures' (execution, or deportation) were to be taken against
that 'special
and
Party functionaries
Otherwise - although,
'hostile inhabitants'.
Warlimont, deputy chief of
OKW's
operations
words of Walter
'during January and February the
staff,
forthcoming Russian campaign gradually absorbed the
in the
efforts
of the entire Wehrmacht',
in
redeployment, creation of military infrastructure and detailed offensive planning by army group, army, corps, divisional, regimental and battalion
of Barbarossa were altered not
December
which had been
1940,
and which had
France
in June,
had
out to take
set
of
point
at all.
power
in
The decision
in the forefront
in truth
dominated
supervening events might work to
alter
of purpose was not matched
commanders and
when
Brauchitsch,
whether,
England
if a
allies
A
Russia.
visit
Hitler
had
of his mind since
set his
his
hand
overthrow of
his 'world outlook' since the
first
was
in
day he
to
remain the fixed
half of 1941,
however much
earlier,
factor'
among
his entourage.
were intimidated by the
staff
officers
first
discussing the project
on 30
July,
'1812
Numbers of his factor'.
senior
Haider and
concluded: 'The question
decision cannot be enforced against England and the danger exists that herself with Russia,
we should
must be met with the answer
front war,
- the objects and objectives
it.
The '1812 Hitler's certainty
staffs
which
German}" nearly twenty years
he thought and did throughout the
all
to
to Stalin
would be
advisable
Mediterranean, drive them out of
first
wage
against Russia in the ensuing two-
we should do better to keep friendship with ... we could hit the English decisively in the
that
Asia.'
However, though Haider continued
to utter
warnings of the dangers throughout the autumn, he did not carry opposition to the sticking-pomt; Brauchitsch,
opinion with Hitler
who
early
had
his
Hitler's intention,
who had been
after the Polish
own
terrorised by his
one open difference of
campaign, altogether lacked the nerve to do
doubts, suppressed
them when he detected
and on 29 July browbeat Warlimont,
his deputy,
so. Jodl,
the inflexibility of
and the three section
OKW's operations staff into quelling their own. Manstein and Guderian, rising commanders who were to shine in Russia, were disquieted by the '1812 factor' of space chiefs
of
swallowing numbers, and Bock, Hitler 'an
when
enormous country whose
difficult
von
the Fiihrer visited
as a very senior officer,
him
in hospital
military strength
on
3
expressed something of
December:
Russia,
this to
he suggested, was
was unknown' and 'such
a
war might be
even for the Wehrmacht', thus offending his leader without deflecting him. Ewald
Kleist,
the senior Panzer general, claimed (but after the war): 'Most of us generals
138
HITLER'S STRATEGIC
realised
beforehand
that if the Russians
chose to
achieving a final victory without the help of [a
been
DILEMMA
fall
back there was very
their outlook, nevertheless they collectively kept
have been intimidated by the technical
difficulties
little
upheaval.' Although that
political]
it
to themselves.
chance of
may have
The army may
of an advance to the White Sea, the
shores of the Caspian and the banks of the Volga - Hitler's 'AA' (Archangel-Astrakhan) line,
1600 miles east of Warsaw, nearly 2000 from Berlin,
believed
would bring about
marked
the area of conquest he
Russia's collapse - but they did not differ fundamentally
from
him in perceiving the Russian war as inevitable, nor (unless in intensity of feeling) in welcoming a confrontation with the Bolshevik and Slav enemies of Germany. Reasoned opposition came not from the ground commanders but from the representatives of their sister and (to some degree) competing services, the navy and air force. Goering, as head not only of the Luftwaffe but also, however improbably, of the economic planning authority, was concerned by the economic effort a war with Russia would entail. He continued to believe, moreover, in the benefits to be won by sustaining an air offensive against Britain. Goering had confronted Hitler with his arguments on 13 November, immediately after Molotov's visit to Berlin, forecasting that the course on which Russia seemed bent would draw it into war with Britain, an outcome from which Germany was bound to benefit. Meanwhile, he advocated, Germany should maintain its current strategy. When Hitler turned the economic argument against him, however, claiming that Russian conquests would supply the food and oil needed to beat Britain down, he withdrew his objections and thereafter largely co-operated in the Barbarossa preparations.
Raeder, Hitler's Grand Admiral, was
day
after
Germany's leaders had always sought
no new
a
more
persistent
opponent. He saw Hitler the
Goering, raised the danger of fighting a two-front war, rightly emphasising that to avoid
such
a strategic
enterprise should be undertaken until Britain
with Hitler.
It
was he
who had
reinforced his prestige.
and
against Britain,
It
was
advocated the attack on Norway, the success of which had
also
who had
warning of the likelihood of
predicament, and urged that
was beaten. Raeder had influence
he
who had
persuaded Hitler to prepare invasion plans
then deflected the Fuhrer from undertaking Sealion by its
miscarriage.
He had
already produced alternatives to
Barbarossa - notably Felix, the plan to hamstring Britain in the Mediterranean by capturing Gibraltar -
and he was
also
proposing
initiatives in the
Balkans and towards Turkey, which
would put pressure on Britain at the Mediterranean's eastern end. Goering shared his strategic outlook. They were both attracted by the opportunities presented by seizing French North
Africa, so that Italy
Egypt. Raeder
went
and Cape Verde
further:
islands,
could be supported
he wanted
in Libya
and
Britain outflanked in
to take the Atlantic islands - the Azores, Canaries
Spanish and Portuguese possessions - which would give
control of the western mid-Atlantic, particularly since he was outraged 'the glaring
at
Germany
what he
called
proof of [America's] non-neutrality'. However, while Hitler was excited by the
prospect of bringing the Atlantic islands under
139
German
control, he continued to set his
THE WAR
THE EAST
IK
face inflexibly against the idea of adding the a year, his curious
into
concept
war with America.
thought of risking
as if
United
honour between
autumn of
In the
thirty-six
Channel, he clung
oi
1940,
1941-1943
States to the
allies
enemies. Within
oi his
list
would prompt him
however, even
to follow
of the Wehrmacht's best divisions on the turbulent tides of the
by the force of dogma
to the principle of placating Britain's natural
would brave
co-belligerent in the face of almost any provocation she might offer. Russia he in
den; the United States he would not confront
lion's
its
There was more than
in the at
immediate term. He did
all.
was
It
against
German)'
United
all
war had run
its
that that capacity
course
provocation she might offer him
making. The maintenance of diplomatic,
was
a
fear their military
States as a military
much
further.
if
in the
his
in
could be brought to bear
However,
because his attitude to America was devoid of ideological content disregard
He had no
of policy.
nor did he
commercial and productive capacity which figured
its
until the
British,
not, indeed, view the
and he did not believe
'correlation of forces',
at all.
strategic calculation to this diversity
admiration for the American people, as he did for the
power power
Japan
he withdrew from the
as
it
that
was precisely he chose
months while Barbarossa was
to
in the
not friendly, relations with the United States
necessary simplification of the strategic
balance sheet that would allow the
preordained struggle with the Soviet Union to be brought on and carried through with the least possible
diversion of
many
sources -
ambitions into 'story'
effort.
towards Russia, by contrast, was suffused by ideology, drawn from
Hitler's attitude
racial,
economic,
a self-intoxicating
of German history:
how
historical -
potency.
and fermented by
He was
The
lands.
their
Sicily, as
in the
among
on
'civilisation' in
monologues which passed east
settlers
million
raised warrior
the northern seas and founders of princedoms along the Russian
outposts of
the east, as
German
theme
Norman conquerors of England and which he returned night
to
for his 'table talk'.
The
colonists
'manifest destiny' of the
were
German
after night
and implantations of
survivals
of consolidated Deutschtum's central European front -
Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, even 1.8
down,
it
by the
all,
on Rome's
the peoples
then turned eastward to carry their standards into the Slav
knights of the Baltic shore, formed a
German
rancours and
epics of the Teutons, as Varangian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperor, as
Viking venturers rivers, first
own and
own
obsessed, perhaps most of
the Teutonic tribes, alone
western borders, had resisted the power of the empire, beaten
kingdoms of
his
in
Poland,
in Russia proper, outside the Baltic states,
where
- evoked
of the
living as late as 1914
in
him
feelings
race akin to those of the British, as they contemplated the
diaspora of the English-speaking peoples about the oceanic world, in Victoria's heyday. Yet
while the British saw the bounds of their world destined to grow wider and wider
by the operation of some
obsession with the tribulations of the Germans, to see them as
which they were
The
threat
to
still,
as if
beneficently divine hand, Hitler was conditioned, by his
be preserved only by unrelenting
was manifold and amorphous, but
140
it
a
people under
threat,
from
struggle.
lay in the east,
its
instruments were
DILEMMA
HITLER'S STRATEGIC
the 'motley of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs and Croats, etc' (the 'etc' included
diverse Slav and non-Slav peoples of Russia), 'and always the bacillus
of
human
society, the Jew',
subjection of the
by Jewry,
German
his
in
and
its
invested
that
which he was determined
threat
'Cosmopolitan' Judaism denied the principles of at
term of contempt, and
its
with
its
on,
its
his appeal to his folk. 'Jewish
dominions wrested from
its
the
to see as directed force.
and purity which stood
espousal of the cause of the 'masses',
substitution of faith in
economic
forces for trust in the
populism on which Hitler had
warrior's strong arm, repudiated the creed of aristocratic
founded
all
the solvent
and aggressive
unifying
racial singularity
the pinnacle of his value system; Bolshevism, by
itself a
is
permanent trend was towards the fragmentation and
nation. Bolshevism,
lifetime
which
Bolshevism' had therefore to be confronted head
leaders by brute force, and the
'life
space' (Lebensraum)
thus liberated settled with the 'higher peoples' - Germans of the Reich proper, Germans of the eastern settlements, associated 'Germanics' of northern Europe -
win supremacy
in war,
were
who,
if
they did not
and enslavement by the myriad hordes of
fated to subjection
their inferiors.
'Irrevocable
and
terrible
in
its
characterised his Barbarossa decision,
finality', it
as
David
Irving,
Hitler's
was therefore 'one he never
biographer, has
regretted,
jaws of ultimate defeat'. However, though the decision was certainly fixed by 1940, six
months were
to elapse before the forces necessary to -
motion. In the meantime Soviet
power
attention
politics
of
battle,
the
it
in the
December were
set in
sequence of events centred on the Balkans, where German and
were most
directly
engaged against each other, was
from the inception of the coming campaign. For
was characterised by field
a
implement
even
a certain 'stark simplicity':
Wehrmacht
or the
Red Army?
all its
appalling
to distract his
risk,
Barbarossa
which would prove the stronger on the In the Balkans, during the
months while
German army's divisions completed their redeployment to the start-lines from which Barbarossa would be launched, Hitler found himself embroiled in the complexities of an ancient strategic quandary: which way to throw his power among small states, militarily the
insignificant in themselves,
protectors, disrupt the
which might nevertheless, by invoking the help of stronger
smooth unrolling of his chosen
141
strategy?
THE WAR
IN"
THE EAST
1941-1943
7
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD Crossroads more
of Europe'
is
a
catchphrase designation for the Balkans, conveying
than unfamilianty with the region by those
who
use
it.
and herringboned by some of the highest mountains on the continent, highways, and none deserving to be called a path of conquest. the
Roman Empire
height, has
at its
consistently declined to
No
little
The Balkans, spined
single
offer
few
power, not even
dominated the whole region: cautious generals have
campaign there
if
the) could.
It
has been a graveyard of military
Emperor Valens succumbed to the Goths at Adrianople in 378. Yet, though the Balkans do not offer easy passage to conquerors, it is the fate of the peoples who inhabit them to be campaigned over. For, precisely because the region is a jumble of mountain chains and blind valleys, where even the rivers must negotiate defiles and gorges impassable by man or beast, it marks a natural barrier between European and Asian empires. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Islam was on the march, the Balkans were the battleground where Turk fought Habsburg. In the nineteenth, when Turkey had fallen sick, they offered the fronts on which her enemies - Austria, Russia and their satellites - drove the Ottomans back upon their Anatolian fastnesses. And possession operations ever since the
of the coasts of the Balkans and their archipelagos - the Ionian
islands, the
Dodecanese,
the Cyclades - have been contested by power-seekers even longer and more consistently; for, as Sicily
does
in miniature,
sea-passages and seas by
and Malta on
which they
are
yet a smaller scale, the Balkans
washed. Venice, greatest of Italian
herself mistress of the Adriatic by control not of her
own
dominate the
city-states,
made
lagoon but of the fortress
harbours which run the length of the Adriatic's Balkan shore - Zara, Cattaro, Valona - and the Ionian islands
at its
mouth.
In her heyday, Venice also
142
extended powerful tentacles
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD
Greek Peloponnese and
into the eastern Mediterranean by her occupation of the
its
of Naxos, Crete and Cyprus. The Turks, whatever the ebb and flow of their
satellite islands
military fortunes, always assured themselves of an ultimate base of Balkan
clinging to possession of the Bosphorus, channel of communication
and the Mediterranean. In the
face of bribes, threats
and
power by
between the Black Sea - by the Russians in
direct attack
the nineteenth century, the emergent Balkan states in the early twentieth, the British and
World War - Turkey clung limpet-like to Istanbul (the Constantinople and Byzantium of old) in the sure knowledge that it was control of the 'the Straits' which in European eyes made her a power to be reckoned with and not, as she would become if French
in the First
she relinquished
merely
it,
Levantine appendage.
a
Because the Balkans form both at
where
the point
Asia meets
any
commander drawn
the
one
run
will
at
a
land barrier and a maritime base, or cluster of bases,
Europe and the Mediterranean the Black
into the area will tend to be both 'continental'
German war-making
great
power
the
end of 1940. His Balkan policy
in
relations with the maritime
its
months between
in the
the inception of Barbarossa, has pointed out, fell at
of
and 'maritime', and
cross-purposes with the other. This, as Professor Martin van Creveld,
the closest student of
Hitler
Sea, the strategy
thitherto
and
the
of France and
fall
precisely the complication into
is
had been
which
to allow Italy to play the
historically 'Italian'
sphere of influence -
Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia - while drawing the inland zone - Hungary, Bulgaria and
Romania -
Hungary and Romania had
into Germany's.
signing the Tripartite Pact
and allowing German troops
Bulgaria
had proved more
hostility.
Yugoslavia had successfully trodden
Balkan scheme. Having failed Britain,
as
a
Then
Britain,
middle path,
insisting
down
her
from another
direction.
diminish Britain's capacity to prosecute
on Greece
attack
Italian
meeting with Mussolini
air
its
(of
the Brenner Pass
at
sole remaining continental ally
strategic pressure
his sway,
their territory;
on
its
Britain's persistence in belligerence
defences
preliminary to an invasion in which he did not
at his
whose
a
in his efforts to beat
subsequently acquiesced in the
forewarned
be stationed on
but for reasons of understandable caution, not
resistant,
averting a breach with the Axis.
under
fallen willingly
to
fully
neutrality but
had upset
his
in the Battle
believe,
of
Hitler
which he was probably
on 4 October), because
was Greece, thereby came under increased
He had war
in
calculated that the offensive should
Egypt with the
Libyan army, and
Italian
thereby strengthen the 'pincers' he was seeking to construct by drawing Spain and Vichy
France into This
his anti-British alliance.
complex,
but
also
humiliating failure of the Italian
tentative,
German
von Thoma,
rescue his
ally
-
whom
the British
problem of deploying an
Mussolini's invasion of Greece
was compromised
by
the
intervention force to North Africa and had actuall)
a
sent a senior officer (Ritter to study the
design
offensive. Before the invasion of 28 October, Hitler was
considering the dispatch of
opponent)
strategic
would
'Afrikakorps'.
became apparent, however,
who had anyhow
later
Once
Hitler
know
well as an
the miscarriage of felt
constrained to
refused the help of an Afrikakorps - from humiliation,
143
THE WAR
THE EAST
IK
1941-1943
even though direct German intervention against Greece, which required the acquisition of
would alarm
bases in Bulgaria,
allay their anxieties (or even,
hegemony
continental
the Russians
moment he was
precisely the
at
had Molotov brought assurance of acquiescence
to Berlin
on
against her coasts;
also
it
had the
though
Britain,
in
effect
'spheres of influence'
him
indirect effect of committing
between him and
be decisive
to
Stalin
of driving Hitler into
her Mediterranean empire rather than
- useful but not essential to the launching of Barbarossa - which
campaign was
German
in
November, agree binding non-aggression terms
12
with them). Mussolini's Greek adventure thus had the direct heightening his war effort against
keenest to
to a seizure
of territory
made any agreement of
impossible. In that respect the Greek
determining the future course of the Second World War.
in
Mussolini's Greek venture Mussolini's venture into Greece was an operation Hitler was justified in believing ought to
have succeeded. The Greek army was greatly outnumbered and was obliged to divide forces so as to defend Thrace - the coastal strip at the Bulgaria.
but
On
paper
it
should have been overwhelmed
were
forces
Italy's
therefore deploy only
The
Italian
war on
of
its
much
larger
arm) of 1940 was not, moreover, what
a single, equally
one offensive
after
in the
opening
mountainous
army on the Albanian-Greek
it
had been
front against Austria,
another, and not without
effect.
it
in 1915.
in size in
lest its
order to increase their number,
could
frontier.
had fought courageously its
efforts
twelfth offensive
Isonzo succeed in breaking through. Under Mussolini, however,
been reduced
it
Then, committed to
By October 1917
impelled the Austrians to appeal for help to the Germans
its
against
stage of the invasion;
by the garrisoning of Ethiopia and Libya, and
also divided, a fraction
head of the Aegean -
Italian
a typical
in
had
on the
formations had
demagogic
act
of
window-dressing. The divisions which Mussolini launched into Greece on 28 October 1940 were therefore weaker in equivalents; they
were
also
Greece went no further than
Italian client,
assault
emulate
Italy's interest in
None of
his British
German
his
ally's
triumphs,
settle trifling
for
its
Ploesti oilfields earlier in
October)
enemy's eastern Mediterranean outposts might be
these reasons counted for
much
with his soldiers. They began their
through the Epirus mountains without enthusiasm; even the Alpini regiments,
Italy's
best troops, appeared in
with a
will.
poor
heart. Their
Greek opponents, by
contrast,
defended
General John Metaxas, head of government, was enabled early in the campaign
to transfer forces
from Thrace
Bulgarians that
thirty-seven divisions concentrated in Turkey-in-Europe
if
war with
the Balkans (he was piqued that Romania,
had accepted German protection
and secure bases from which attacked.
arms, but particularly in infantry, than their Greek
in motivation. Mussolini's reasons for seeking
a desire to
old scores with Greece, reassert
an
all
weaker
its
Bulgaria tried to profit
Italian attackers to
to the Albanian front, thanks to Turkey's
from Greece's
difficulty. In
wear themselves out
in frontal
144
warning
to the
would be used
meantime the Greeks allowed the attacks on their mountain positions.
the
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD
•:
.'-.•it.
Benito Mussolini inspects the Monterosa Division of troops,
overthrow
his
in July
1943. Second from the right Italian
When
their
own
Marshal Graziani, who had
after
led the
to defeat in Libya.
in confusion. Mussolini
some of which were flown fifteen
is
him
loyal to
reinforcements arrived, they counter-attacked, on 14 November, and
drove the invaders back
opposed
army
who remained
to Albania in
German
summoned aircraft,
reserves
but by 30
from
over
all
November
Italy,
the Greeks
of his divisions with eleven of their own, his whole invading force had
been thrown back inside Albania and the Greek counter-offensive was
still
gathering
strength. Hitler,
plan for
a
who had
German
already ordered
OKW
offensive against Greece,
on 4 November
to prepare an operational
was by then committed
to
its
launching. For
all
would cause - affront to Yugoslavia, Greece's neutralist it neighbour, anxiety to Turkey, which was even more strongly determined to remain neutral, alarm to Bulgaria, which shrank from offending Russia by granting Germany the the diplomatic difficulties
bases the Greek operation required - and for entailed, particularly those terrain in
Europe, he
conceding
his British
all
the military difficulties the operation
of committing mechanised formations to the
now saw no means enemies
strategic
of avoiding the
initiative,
except
least 'tankable' at
the price of
and propaganda advantages he could not allow
145
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
them. Mussolini, for better or worse - and Hitler was never to waver in his loyalty to the founder of fascism - was seen by the world as his political confederate as well as military ally.
the
was determined
Hitler
more
so because he
determined they could
deny the
to
menace war
essential to his
Thus
far
in the just
British
humiliation
long-term possession of bases on Greek
all
from which
soil,
of Balkan resources - foodstuffs, ores, above
all
oil
-
effort.
facilities.
been
more than November were located
careful not to grant the British anything
The bases the RAF had
set
up
since 3
Peloponnese, on the Gulf of Corinth and near Athens, from which
would have brought
bombers. Hitler had good reason to
aircraft
its
could
Greek
the Ploesti oilfields in
victor) over Mussolini. South-eastern 7
bauxite (aluminium ore) used by its tin,
extent,
Europe provided half of Germany's
German
those
oilfields,
and
industry, while Yugoslavia supplied 90 per cent
Hungary provided the only supply of
came from
cereal
was the source of 45 per cent of the
40 per cent of its lead and 10 per cent of its copper. Romania and, to
strategic control; the rest Pact. If
Romania within range of its from a consolidation of the
fear the worst, therefore,
livestock requirements. Greece, with Yugoslavia,
the
the hands of the Greeks,
support the battlefront in Albania. Greece had resisted requests for larger bases near
Salonika which
of
at
held the Greeks in high esteem as soldiers; he was also
his extraction
the Greeks had
short-range tactical
him from
to rescue
rightly
oil
which
lay
marginal
a
within the radius of
German
Russia under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
and the railways which carried ores and
agricultural
bomber
Balkans to German}-, were brought under British
attack,
produce out of his
ability
to
prosecute the war would be seriously compromised. Moreover, he recognised the depth
and antiquity of Britain's penetration of the Mediterranean and generals had campaigned reputation had been
made by
strategic zone. British admirals
the eastern Mediterranean for 150 years; Nelson's
in
his victor)' at the Nile in 1798.
The
British
had ruled the
Ionian islands from 1809 to 1863, had possessed Malta since 1800, Cyprus since 1878, and
maintained
a fleet
and an arm}-
captured the Black Sea against Bulgaria
straits
on Greek
Egypt since 1882. In 1915
in
army had almost
Salonika campaign). Moreover, the intimacy of their
soil (the
relationship with the Greeks
a British
and between 1916 and 1918 sustained an offensive front
was assured by
their
title
as 'lovers
of
liberty',
won
by the
help the British had given them in their war of independence against Turkey in the 1820s. Byron's reputation as a romantic hero in both countries was a touchstone of their peoples'
common
antipathy to tyranny.
However,
Britain's tentacles
reached further than
that.
Although she had fought
World War and established a homeland for the Jews in Palestine after 1918 in the teeth of Muslim antipathy, she was also a historic protector of the Turks against Russia, in which cause she had fought the Crimean War of 1854-6, and a sponsor of Islamic nationalism by her foundation of the states of Iraq and Trans-Jordan. Her reputation as an Turkey
in the First
exponent of self-determination eastern Europe,
for small nationalities also
where Yugoslavia
in
particular
146
owed
stood high in central and southher existence partly to British
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD
support for the cause of Slav independence
the post-1918 peace conferences. Britain's
at
only clear-cut enmity in the Balkans was with Bulgaria, her opponent in the
War, and that was
First
World
by King Boris's concern to placate Russia, which he could not
offset
afford to offend unless assured of full-blooded
German
support.
The ambiguity of a Balkan entanglement - which automatically involves an intrusive land power not only in the conflict between central Europe's vital interests and those of Russia but at the same time in the maritime complexities of Mediterranean politics -
worked to divert and fragment Hitler's strategic purpose in the winter and spring of 1940-1. His overriding aim - to attack and destroy Russia's fighting power in an early therefore
campaign - was fixed by December
Blitzkrieg
ally
from public humiliation and
enemy
1940; his desire to rescue his toppling Italian
to circumscribe the activity
of his irrepressible
British
before he embarked on the Russian war - both in
of the autumn - drew him into
vacillation
adventitious,
which were
to
than he had ever intended
end
a series
some sense residues of his of initiatives, some calculated, some
in his fighting a larger
when he
first
Balkan-Mediterranean campaign
contemplated venturing southward.
'Fox killed in the open'
when he met with his commanders at the Berghof (7-9 January) and them the Barbarossa strategy in its entirety, the southern difficulty seemed to on the Greeks than on the British. Though planning for Operation Marita (the
In early January 1941,
exposed
to
centre less
invasion of the Balkans) was in
occupation of Greece.
A
full
flow,
he was
still
dominate the eastern Mediterranean seemed an adequate in
that
sector.
Mussolini in
a
not contemplating the outright
mere seizure of bases in Greece from which the Luftwaffe might
He was even
strategic solution
optimistic that the Greeks,
spring offensive he was treating with sceptical (and as
caution, might bring the Italians to accept a bilateral peace treaty.
hand,
were demonstrating
superiority.
determination to
a
persist
of the situation
whose promised
in
it
The
defeat by
turned out British,
justified)
on the other
of Axis military
defiance
Not only had they deployed air units to mainland Greece, and troops to Crete islands; they had also inflicted direct defeats on the Italians. On
and some of the Aegean the night of 11-12 Illustrious,
battleships at their
surface
November
Royal Navy task force, centred on the
a
surprised the Italian fleet in
moorings by
its
aerial
Taranto base in the heel of
torpedo
attack.
engagements in July, confirmed the Royal Navy's
despite the
latter's
superiority of
numbers
aircraft carrier
and sank three
This success, following earlier
dominance over the
in the inland sea.
commanded
Italy
Worse was
Italian fleet,
to follow:
on
9
December
the British
launched
counter-offensive against the Italian army which Marshal Rodolfo Graziani had
a
army
in
led sixty miles inside the frontier
Egypt,
from Libya
in
by General
Sir
September. Conceived
Archibald Wavell,
as a 'five-day raid',
it
achieved such success that Wavell decided to sustain his advance. In three days Lieutenant-
General Richard O'Connor, his
tactical
commander, had captured 38,000
147
Italians, for a total
THE WAR
Italian prisoners taken at Sidi Rezegh, offensive caught
Rommel by
surprise.
IK
THE EAST mi-1943
November 1941, when Auchinleck's
The
British took
them
loss
of 624
British
and Indians
position and found nothing
town
inside
the
Italian
killed
beyond
colony,
it
36,500
Italian.
and wounded, overrun to bar his
General
'Electric
but by 5 January Bardia had fallen to the
Armoured
Divisions
enemy
a large fortified
advance into Libya. At Bardia, the
Army of the
in Bardia
and here we
Nile, as the 4th Indian
had been grandiloquently designated by
Churchill,
and 7th
and
spearheads were pressing on along the coast road towards the port of Tobruk. January Tobruk
army with
fell
logistical
yielding another 25,000 prisoners; the port
support for
its
first
Whiskers' Bergonzoli signalled to
Mussolini in the aftermath of the British counter-attack, 'We are stay';
desert counter-
prisoners, the great majority of
was
continued advance. O'Connor
the remnants of the Italian invaders of Egypt were falling back
on
their
On
21
to provide O'Connor's
now
divided his forces:
Tripoli, capital
of Libya,
along the Mediterranean coast road which veered north around the bulge of Cyrenaica; a
through the desert offered the prospect of cutting them off by a fast mobile O'Connor accordingly launched the 7th Armoured Division into the desert behind them and on 5 February it arrived out of the sands ahead of the fleeing Italians at Beda Fomm. 'Fox killed in the open,' O'Connor signalled in clear - to pique Mussolini - to Wavell; the hunting metaphor described a victory which brought the British 130,000 prisoners in the course of an advance of 400 miles in two months. direct route
thrust.
148
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD
Churchill exulted in Wavell's triumph.
he wrote
to Wavell. But the victor)-,
The Army of the Nile was
warfare.
'We
you have got
are delighted that
though spectacular, was not
little
more than
this prize,'
one of modern
really
the sort of colonial 'movable column'
with which the British Empire's native enemies had been defeated in the campaigns of the success was due not to
nineteenth century.
Its
had fought bravely
in defence, but to the
means of making
Greece, the attenuation of their
campaigning over
a
wider front than check
Hitler's efforts to
complained
to his
on
staff, 'that
find drastic
enough language
hand they
are so jealous
soldiers.'
On
3
superiority over the Italian troops,
war, the result of Mussolini's appetite for
had
earlier
he would not brook
the
one hand the
been
refusal.
frustrated
by Mussolini's
'The crazy feature
is',
he
help and cannot
Italians are shrieking for
poor guns and equipment, but on the other
to describe their
and childish they won't stand
for being
Rommel
February, rather than Manstein, he chose
willy-nilly to Graziani's assistance,
who
their leadership and, as in
resources could support.
Italy's
a British offensive
now
reluctance to accept help;
its
incompetence of
because of his proven
helped by German
to lead an Afrikakorps
ability to inspire soldiers;
on
12
February the vanguards of the Afrikakorps, to consist of the ISth Panzer and 5th Light
began
Divisions,
by
to arrive at Tripoli;
21
February
Rommel had
his forces in position to
begin preparing a counter-offensive. Nevertheless
Germany's British still
determination
Hitler's
strategic position in the Balkans
were
profiting
from
restore
to
Axis
could not wait on
their superiority in
arms
in the
one
prestige
and
consolidate
a future desert victory.
strategic region
The
where they
enjoyed freedom of action to puncture the imperial pretensions of Mussolini
On
humiliating detail.
in
9 February their Mediterranean fleet had appeared off the Italian
bombarded the harbour without suffering riposte; it was a foretaste of were to inflict on the Italian fleet at the Battle of Cape Matapan (Tainaron)
port of Genoa, and the defeat they in
Greek waters on 28 March.
British
Somaliland
in
In East Africa,
August 1940 and
British counter-attacked.
A
and the colony of Eritrea,
British force Italy's
and
Italian
to follow.
in
based in the Sudan had entered northern Ethiopia
British
had been
Greek government on the nature of the assistance guarantee against
German
it
intervention. Metaxas, the
January; General Alexandras Papagos, the
was eventually agreed
as
19 January;
in
and on
11
a fight
on
16
Germany
March. Worse
continuous conclave with the
would be Greek
willing to accept as a
dictator,
had died on
army commander-in-chief, was
negotiating measures which might provoke divisions
on
Kenya, began an offensive into southern Ethiopia
Somaliland. British Somaliland was retaken without
During February the
had seized undefended
Italian forces
incursions into the Sudan and Kenya, the
oldest possession in East Africa,
February another British army, based
was
where
made
to action.
A
figure
less
19
cautious in
of four
British
an acceptable contribution to reinforce the eighteen
frontier. Their advance guards - withdrawn from the desert army, which was thereby dangerously depleted - began to disembark on 4
Greek divisions deployed on the northern March.
It
was the
start
of an
ill-fated
venture.
149
THE WAR
made up
This initiative
Hitler's
THE EAST
IN
1941-1943
mind. Bulgaria, which on
17
February had secured
non-aggression pact with Turkey (overawed by Germany's military might in
was
acceded to the
not),
was
which by
decided
Britain's
that Marita's objects
1
March. As
IS February
Danube
free to begin bridging the
Operation Marita. In view of
now
on
Tripartite Pact
observation' in Romania,
into Bulgaria
would not be
of seven divisions,
a strength
and construct
deployment of the four
a
way Greece
Wehrmacht's 'army of
a result the
had reached
a
attack positions for
its
divisions to Greece, Hitler
limited to securing a strategic position in
Greece from which the Luftwaffe might dominate the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean; they were to
He was
comprehend
reopening of another 'Salonika
risk the
fought as a sustain
were influenced by
common
soldier.
his
Then
experience and memories of the
from which
in 1916-18. Here,
World War,
so often elsewhere in his conduct of the Second
calculations
front'
had harried Germany's southern flank of operations
Britain (with France) as
the occupation of Greece outright.
not prepared to
strategic
Hitler's
which he had
First, in
the British had profited from their maritime mobility to
campaigns which diverted Germany's armies from their war-winning task he was not prepared
great theatres;
to
concede them the opportunity
During the spring of 1941 he was, indeed, attempting them. His
German
failure to
Laval
from
to play their
persuade Franco and to pressure Petain his
who had
a
in the
second time.
own game
back
at
dismissed the pro-
December - to join the anti-British alliance had him as a forum of opportunity. In the eastern however, he detected openings for the same sort of
government on
13
closed the western Mediterranean to
Mediterranean and
its
hinterland,
subsidiary campaigning ally,
had conducted
and subversion
as
Germany, with and through
against British interests in 1915-18.
For example, he had hopes of
persuading the French administration of Syria and Lebanon to accept assistance,
and the
and so eventually the basing there of Luftwaffe
oilfields
of Iraq might be brought under
mandate, the nationalist party was pro-German;
calculate East.
on
German
attack. In Iraq itself, a
with
anti-British
were
it
military
which the Suez Canal
units with
his contacts
through the Mufti of Jerusalem, leader of another
then Turkish
its
Arab
former
British
indirect, passing
party, but
he could
dissidence to complicate Britain's efforts to sustain control of the Middle
its
Indeed, throughout the region Churchill's
African empire - those of straining to
make
difficulties
resembled Mussolini's
over-stretched resources
meet
in his
over-large
responsibilities.
The
threat that
German
interference in the Levant and Iraq offered to the British
bulked so large in their assessment of risk
in the spring
of 1941 that
it
would prompt them
to take possession of both areas later in the year. For Hitler, by contrast, any advantage
might win in either was
likely to
investment of force. That was not the case with Greece, where
produced
a direct
and provocative challenge
though they did not guess against Russia.
It
had
in
it,
he
prove ephemeral and therefore did not merit any major
threatened the
consequence
to
Britain's
to his military control
involvement had
of the continent and,
unhampered development of his campaign
be crushed
150
outright;
he could not,
for
example,
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD
count upon any eventual success from Rommel's counter-offensive
Libya (to be
in
delivered in late March) which might oblige the British to re-embark the divisions they had just
deployed from Egypt to the Greek mainland, even
Operation Marita had to produce
During the essential to
first
which
military reasons,
OKH
last
clear to
him
nor Bulgaria provided suitable terrain or adequate
primitive.
air.
open
in relentless detail, neither Albania
logistical
bases from which the Marita
to
troops and could be
Italian
and railways were few and
deploy troops along the southern Yugoslav Monastir and on the Vardar river -
a third front at
traditional invasion routes - if the
overwhelmed with
result.
complete the preliminaries
Bulgaria's roads, bridges
The Wehrmacht therefore needed
railway system in order to
to
was crowded with beaten
reinforced only from the sea or by
probable
its
of which required concessions by Yugoslavia. For
had made
forces could operate. Albania
were
if that
clear-cut victory.
weeks of March he was working
launching, the
its
and
a direct
Greek army and
British confederates
its
were
to
be
dispatch.
Yugoslav resistance German
now
on Yugoslavia to accede to the had done, had been unrelenting
pressure
Bulgaria
Romania, Hungary and
Tripartite Pact, as
With
since the previous October.
great
courage the Yugoslavs had resisted. In their negotiations with Berlin they insisted that the Balkans
would be
best designated a neutral
Prince Paul, the regent, an Anglophile like
zone
in the
who had been
ongoing European war;
educated
an Englishman', did not conceal his sympathies for
husband of a Greek
princess,
at
Oxford and
Britain's cause.
he had no desire to co-operate
in private,
said
Moreover,
in the defeat
with
fill
under
his feet. His
thrust
upon them;
been
a
German
troops, his
ground
on
17
March,
in return for
what must almost
certainly have
worthless assurance that Yugoslav territory would not be used for military
movements,
it
were entered
terminated diplomatic resistance and agreed to join the pact. The signatures at
Vienna on 25 March.
Hitler exulted in the result - but too soon; incautiously as a
former citizen of the
Habsburg Empire with which the Serbs had played such havoc, he had the impetuosity of the Serb character. officers,
On
the night of 26-27
led by the air force general Bora Mirkovic,
capital, Belgrade,
king Peter,
March
denounced
failed to a
the treaty, seized the
next day, obliged Paul to resign as regent and then had the
installed
as
monarch.
Paul,
who
might have
rallied
was heavily penetrated by pro-Axis sympathies, accepted the coup into exile.
A government was
set
as a
among
the
and
accompli
and
fait
air
uncrowned
in politics
support
up under the leadership of the
151
allow for
group of Serb
kingdom's Croat population, which differed automatically with the Serbs
went
finally
German pressure shrank demand that the Germans
for resisting
government nevertheless contested every eventually,
'felt
as the
of his southern
neighbour. During the winter and spring of 1940-1, as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria began to
he
force chief of
THE WAR
staff,
The Mirkovic coup acts
who
General Dusan Simovic,
of defiance
in
still
THE EAST
1941-1943
headed the Yugoslav government
later
modern European it
was
history.
also
which the Serbs could
support them. They were surrounded by
Not only did
bound to provoke on no external
states that
all
of which they had
which would shortly take
its
bitter
it
the
were wholly
and long-standing
own independence under
if
romantic,
threaten to divide a
Germans
to hostile
assistance whatsoever to
call
threatened as themselves, like Greece, or actively hostile, like Bulgaria, with
in exile.
appears in retrospect one of the most unrealistic,
precariously unified country; reaction, against
IN
inert, like Albania,
Italy,
or as
Hungary, Romania and
territorial disputes. If Croatia,
Italian tutelage,
is
added
to the roll
of the Serbs' enemies, the behaviour of General Mirkovic and his fellow conspirators of 27
March appears the
collective equivalent
of Gavrilo Princip's firebrand assault on the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy personified by Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June
ensured the extinction of the Serb national cause as in 1914, to invasion, defeat
whom
the Serbs had
and occupation and with
assumed the leadership
March coup seem encouraged Bill'
in 1918, to
officers, cultural stalwarts
to have taken the least reckoning.
in their foolhardiness
would
it
also
It
Serbia,
the peoples of Yugoslavia, of
it
civil
and
Mirkovic, Simovic or any of the
and the
There
1914.
doom
an agony of protracted
Of none of this do
guerrilla warfare for the next four years.
other Serb patriots - reserve
as if by reflex;
is
like
-
no doubt
who
staged the 27
that they
had been
by the British and the Americans. Colonel William 'Wild
Donovan, future head of the Office of
Strategic
Services
and
in
1941
President
on 23 January bearing an exhortation about the preservation of national honour; Winston Churchill was meanwhile pressing his ambassador to 'pester, nag and bite' the Yugoslav government to stay outside the Tripartite Pact. But Western warnings and encouragement were ultimately Roosevelt's personal emissary to Belgrade, had arrived in the capital
beside the point. The 27 March coup was an hindsight as the
peoples
who
lie
last
autonomous Serb
outright expression of sovereign defiance
was
to
be seen with small
between the millstones of German and Russian power since Poland's and
rejection of Hitler's ultimatum in August 1939 It
initiative, to
made by any of the
their subjection to Stalinism.
be punished with vehemence and without delay. Hitler judged
that the
Serbs' defiance simplified his strategic options in the approach to Marita. Diplomatically
put Yugoslavia in the wrong; for
all
the popular enthusiasm displayed for the
it
coup -
crowds cheering the Allied cause in Belgrade, whose streets were bedecked with British and French flags - the new government could with some reason be denounced as illegitimate.
Militarily,
it
provided
OKH
with a solution of
its
logistic
difficulties:
the
Yugoslav railway system, inherited from the Habsburg Empire, connected with those of Austria,
Hungary, Romania and Greece
Wehrmacht with Hitlers'
a direct
approach
to
(as Bulgaria's
its
Balkan campaign of 1941, a whirlwind less
did not), and thereby provided the
chosen battlefront
affair
Macedonia. Hitler did not
which accomplished
than a month of fighting.
152
in
all
its
objectives in
INVASION OF YUGOSLAVIA
AND GREECE Key
^1
A
i
153
Axis advances
Parachute landing, 26 April Allied retreat
THE WAR IN THE EAST
1941-1943
pause to seize the advantage he had been offered.
have decided to destroy Yugoslavia,'
'I
summoned post-haste to the Chancellery on do you need? How much time?' The answers to these
he told Goenng, Brauchitsch and Ribbentrop,
'How much
26 March.
military force
questions already lay in the In early afternoon
files
of contingency plans in army and Luftwaffe headquarters.
he met the Hungarian minister
country's part in the
the Greek province of Macedonia.
tornado
is
The
him
had decided
Adriatic for his
him
he told him,
'the
eternal uncertainty
told the Hungarian minister
to decline the bribe
cannot help believing
over,'
is
in a
Higher
The Yugoslav conspirators
Justice.
I
am
a British
'Now
awestruck
at
that
the
I
reflect
on
all
this,
I
powers of Providence.'
persisted in blissful ignorance of the opportunity Hitler
Germany by
declining to
mission and that their coup could not be regarded as a repudiation of
Yugoslav accession to the Tripartite Pact because the signature had never been fact
in
(whose head of state, Admiral Horthy,
of an Adriatic port),
they had offered him. They believed that they could placate
accept
on the
a port
the Bulgarian minister, to promise
going to burst upon Yugoslavia with breathtaking suddenness.' Next day
more pensive mood he
felt
to offer
coming campaign, and then
ratified. In
the terms stipulated that ratification was assured by signature, while in Hitler's eyes the
coup put them
in the
Fuhrer Directive No.
enemy camp 25:
in
any
position in the Balkans. Yugoslavia, even
regarded
as
an
case.
On
coup
the day of the
itself
he issued
'The military revolt in Yugoslavia has changed the political if
enemy and beaten down
it
makes
initial
professions of loyalty, must be
as quickly as possible.
.
.
.
Internal tensions in
Yugoslavia will be encouraged by giving political assurances to the Croats.
...
It
is
intention to break into Yugoslavia [from north and south] and to deal an annihilating to the
Yugoslav
my
blow
forces.'
Haider had directed OKH's planning
staff to
prepare plans for such an offensive the
previous October. The forces positioned for Marita easily sufficed for an invasion of Yugoslavia as well: the Second Army, stationed in Austria,
on
would simply advance directly would now
Belgrade, while the Twelfth, positioned to attack Greece through Bulgaria,
move Italy
into southern Yugoslavia before doing so; an Italian
towards Zagreb, capital
city
of the Croats,
army would
who were
Italy's
also attack
clients,
from
while the
Hungarian Third Army would seize the trans-Danubian province of Vojvodina, where
Hungary claimed
rights.
Yugosl avia's fate The Yugoslav army,
a million strong,
was organised into twenty-eight
infantry
and three
cavalry divisions; but it contained only two battalions of 100 tanks, and those antiquated. The whole army belonged, indeed, to the era of the Balkan wars of 1911-12 rather than to the modern world - its movements depended on the mobilisation of 900,000 horses, oxen and mules - and, moreover, it was not mobilised. Its General Staff- which General Sir
John
Dill,
the Chief of the (British) Imperial General
154
Staff, visited
secretly
immediately
after
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD
the
coup on
April - behaved, by his report,
1
'as if ir had months in which to make them into effect'. Though its deputy chief Greek commander, in Athens on 1-4 April, it refused to co-
more months
decisions and
in
conferred with Papagos, the
which
to put
ordinate a joint strategy of concentrating
its
forces in the south to support the Greeks (and
the British contingent arriving to join them) but insisted Italy,
Germany, Hungary and
on
lining the
whole
frontier (with
Bulgaria, a sector 1000 miles long) against the threat
of
invasion - as the Russians were also currently doing in their border zone.
'He
who
defends everything',
in
Frederick the Great's chilling military aphorism,
'defends nothing.' The attempt to defend everything was the mistake the Poles had in 1939,
though with some excuse, since the economically valuable
lay in frontier regions.
It
was
also the mistake towards
parts
made
of their country
which the Greeks were tending,
divided as they were by their urge to protect the exposed salient of Thrace as well as the traditional invasion routes in
dispersed
Macedonia. But no country has perhaps ever
as irrationally
forces as the Yugoslavs did in April 1941, seeking to defend with ancient rifles
its
and mule-borne mountain Panzer divisions and 2000
artillery
modern
one of the longest land
frontiers in
Europe
against
aircraft.
The Yugoslav air force, which had masterminded the coup of 27 March, was overwhelmed in the opening hours of the German attack on 6 April; of its 450 aircraft 200 were obsolete and most were destroyed outright in an initial air offensive which also caused 3000
deaths by
civilian
which those of the
Italian
Yugoslav strategy from the valleys
of the
rivers
a terror raid
on
Belgrade.
start.
It
columns would then turn
had outflanked.
It
plan, with
integrated, nullified
turned on throwing armoured columns
down
the
- the Danube, the Sava, the Drava, the Morava - which penetrate the
mountain chains on which the Yugoslavs had counted the
The German army's
Second and Hungarian Third Armies were
proved
to
to protect their country's heartland;
converge and so envelop the Yugoslav formations they
brilliantly successful.
As the
official
Yugoslav history of the war
subsequently conceded:
Three
initial
attacks
Macedonia, April Hitlerites
determined the
8 in Serbia,
fate
and April
of the Yugoslav army, on April 6
10 in Croatia.
On
all
in
three occasions the
breached the frontier defences, pushed deep into the interior and
dislodged the Yugoslav defences from their moorings. After the breakthrough of the frontier
defences, the Yugoslav troops were soon outmanoeuvred, broken up,
surrounded, without contact with each other, without supplies, without leadership.
What
the official history seeks to conceal
is
much of the
the active responsibility of
'Yugoslav leadership' for the debacle. Yugoslavia - originally, by the designation of the Allied peace treaties with Austria
and Slovenes' - was
in no sense
and Hungary
in 1919, 'the
a nationally unified state.
155
Kingdom of the It
Serbs, Croats
had inherited
all
the ten-
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
dencies that had racked the Habsburg monarchy's Slav dominions before 1914 and sought to
check them merely by imposing Serb dominance over those minorities which had
always preferred Vienna to Belgrade. The invasion of 6 April was seized by the Croat and
Slovene nationalists
as
an opportunity for secession; on 10 April the Croatian Ustashi, a
group of extreme right-wing
proclaimed an independent
nationalists,
the Slovenes did likewise: both
would
mations of the Yugoslav arm) mutinied and went over to of the campaign; the chief of
staff
of the (Croatian)
with the Ustashi leadership in opening
state,
and on
11
April
Some of the Croat forthe enemy in the opening stages Army Group actually conspired
shortly accept Axis tutelage.
talks
First
with the Germans on 10 April. These were the
preliminaries of a collaboration which were to result in the cruellest of
all
the internecine
wars that would torment occupied Europe during the Hitler years. Nevertheless, Yugoslavia's
Serb majority cannot escape
country's defeat. All but
its
share of responsibility for the suddenness of their
one of the army's
was under Serb command, and most
divisions
of those divisional generals surrendered to the panic which the rapidity of the Wehrmacht's onslaught induced. So feeble was the army's resistance that the suffered only 151
fatal casualties in
single soldier dead,
though
senior Serbian officer
who
it
was
German
invaders
the course of the campaign; the XLI Panzer Corps lost a in the forefront
of the advance to Belgrade. The only
resisted the disabling spirit
deputy chief of staff of the Second Arm),
who
of collapse was Draza Mihailovic,
took to the
hills at
the signing of the armis-
Germany on 17 April. There, with a band of fifty faithfuls, he founded the nucleus of the Chetnik movement, which consisted of Serbian freedom-fighters loyal to the crown. Until Tito's communist Partisans emerged as a major force in 1942, the Chetniks sustained tice
with
the principal guerrilla resistance against the regimes of occupation - German, garian, Hungarian,
Italian, Bul-
puppet Croatian - imposed on Yugoslavia.
which the Germans also invaded on 6 April, the Wehrmacht met stiffer reThe Greek army was already mobilised, had fought a successful offensive against the Italians and was commanded by generals whose campaigning experience stretched In Greece,
sistance.
back to the Graeco-Turkish war of 1919-22. Moreover,
it
was supported by
peditionary force of three divisions which had brought with Hitler regarded the
the
Greek soldiers
Theban Sacred Band -
admired the
braver)' they
a
as the
modern
a British ex-
tanks and
aircraft.
valorous descendants of Alexander's hoplites and
unique mitigation of his disdain
had shown
it
in their
for
war with Mussolini
before the campaign began, to release from captivity
all
non-Teutons - and he so that
he instructed
Greeks taken prisoner
as
OKW,
soon
as
an armistice should be signed.
Neither Greek valour nor British arms would
avail to
postpone an
Greek plan was flawed, and neither advice nor deployments from defeat. Papagos, the
on
Greek commander,
insisted
armistice.
Britain
The
could avoid
on keeping four of his eighteen
divisions
the Metaxas Line, along the Bulgarian frontier, and disposed three with the British for-
mations - the 6th Australian and 1st New Zealand Divisions, with the 1st British Armoured Brigade - a hundred miles to the rear on the Aliakhmon Line hinged on Mount Olympus.
156
SECURING THE EASTERN SPRINGBOARD
He counted on
the Yugoslavs to protect the
left
flank of
both positions and had even
arranged a scheme with the Yugoslavs to react to an Axis attack by opening an offensive into Albania against the Italians vive their
own
who on
20 March had once again tried and failed to
re-
Balkan offensive - with the bulk of the Greek army, fourteen divisions. Pro-
fessor Martin van Creveld describes the dispositions - without exaggeration - as 'suicidal'.
The defending security
on
were aligned
forces
a fourth, entirely
in three separate positions
was
inevitable. Yugoslavia
and Aliakhmon After that
it
a
breaking [the Yugoslavs] rapid and
in
total dis-
and Greece would be cut off from each other, the Metaxas and the Greek army
lines outflanked,
would be
their
extraneous Yugoslav force protecting their flanks. 'Should the
Germans', van Creveld observes, 'succeed aster
which depended on
mop up
small matter to
in Albania attacked
from the
rear.
the rest of the Allied and Yugoslav forces
separately.'
Collapse in Greece The course of the campaign developed
exactly as thus predicated. In
two days of fighting,
6-7 April, the Germans broke the resistance of the Yugoslavs in Macedonia and forced the
Greek defenders of the Metaxas Line,
on
9 April.
New
to turn the
stoutly resisted frontal assault, to surrender
left
Zealanders, and press
Vardar Valley in the
who had
flank of the Aliakhmon Line, defended by on down the ancient invasion route which leads from the Macedonia into central Greece. A detached force meanwhile unhinged
They were thus freed
main body of the Greek army which
in Albania
was confronting the
Italians,
who were
thus granted the opportunity to begin the decisive advance they had been unable to
by
their
own
efforts in six
months of
General George Tsolakoglu,
commanding
was so determined, however,
front,
win
fighting.
to
deny the
the Greek First
Army on
the Albanian
of
a victory they
Italians the satisfaction
became apparent to him, he opened quite unauthorised parley with the commander of the German SS division opposite him, Sepp Dietrich, to arrange a surrender to the Germans alone. It took a
had not earned
that,
once the hopelessness of
his position
personal representation from Mussolini to Hitler to bring about an armistice in which
was included on 23
Elsewhere the Graeco-British front was collapsing concertina-like after
Italy
April. as
one position
another was outflanked by the invaders. The Greek Prime Minister, Alexander
Koryzis,
committed suicide on
to agree with General Sir
18 April, leaving the rest
best to sustain resistance. In fact the British
Line since 16 April.
of the Greek government unable
Henry Wilson, commanding the
Though they lacked
Germans, they had the motorised transport
had been the
in
British expeditionary force,
in full retreat
numbers and equipment
which
to
hands
in the
wake of
the British retreat.
157
to
resist
withdraw; the Greek army,
Yugoslav, belonged to an earlier age of warfare and 20,000 of
its
how
from the Aliakhmon
soldiers
fell
into
the
like the
German
THE WAR
The
British
made
THE EAST
1941-194?
Thermopylae, where the Spartans had
a stand at
Persians 2500 years before, but
IN
fallen defying the
were quickly hustled southward by German
tanks. That
day
and every day they were harried by the Luftwaffe, which, by the report of the Times correspondent, was 'bombing path'.
had destroyed
It
ever)'
nook and
town
cranny, hamlet, village and
Piraeus, the port of Athens,
on the
first
in
so that the fugitives had to head for the Peloponnese to find harbours for their return
just
too
late to cut
them
off.
By then the
Zealanders forming the Anzac Corps,
British
- most of them Australians and
whose predecessor had
military legend at Gallipoli only twenty-six years earlier -
reached haven. Retreating though the) were, 'no one a
Royal Artilleryman, Lieutenant-Colonel R.
Germans might be on our pressed about our
boards to
kiss or
cars,
Waller,
P.
Athenians' farewell. 'We were nearly the
last
who
passed through the
British
wrote
forget the
crowds lined the
heels; yet cheering, clapping
"Come
back - You must
men
streets
and
on the running
leapt
and bloody
civil
come back
again -
war between the
of defeat
in the
Goodbye - Good
luck".'
before British soldiers returned to Athens, then to
a half years
sunny and flower-scented taste
city',
warmth of the troops they would see and the
would ever
parties
learned the politics of violence as guerrilla fighters against the
with the
established the Antipodean
had passed through Athens and
so as to almost hold us up. Girls and
would be three and
participate in a grim
1941,
New
shake hands with the grimy, wear)' gunners. They threw flowers to us and
ran beside us crying. It
flight
and Egypt. A German parachute drop on the Isthmus of Corinth on 26 April was
to Crete
timed
its
day of the war with Greece,
memory
in their teeth, that
of left and right which had
German
of the soldiers
cold and bitter
occupation. In April
who were
leaving Greece
December would have seemed
an unimaginable legacy of the whirlwind campaign they had fought against the Germans.
The three
British divisions
which together with the
Albanian front had battled against eighteen of the
having fought the good
fight.
six
Greek divisions spared from the
enemy
had, rightly, the sensation of
The Greek campaign had been an old-fashioned gentlemen's
honour given and accepted by brave adversaries on each side. In the aftermath, would measure its significance in terms of the delay Marita had or had not imposed on the unleashing of Barbarossa, an exercise ultimately to be judged profitless, war, with
historians
since
it
was the Russian weather, not the contingencies of subsidiary campaigns, which
determined Barbarossa's launch in
date.
wider events. The Greeks, with
The combatants had not
British help,
had fought
to
felt
they were participating
defend
their
homeland from
conquest. The Germans had battled to overcome them and had triumphed, but in token
of respect to the courage of the their swords. That
was
to
enemy had
be almost the
last
insisted that the
Greek
officers
should keep
gesture of chivalry between warriors in a war
imminently fated to descend into barbarism.
Victorious
German infantrymen
27
April 1941.
prepare to raise the Swastika over the Acropolis in Athens,
The Greek campaign had
158
lasted only three weeks.
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
8 AIRBORNE BATTLE
CRETE The in
Balkan campaign, save for
its
brevity,
had been
a
conventional operation of war
every respect. Even the breakneck speed of the in
Blitzkrieg
German
methods, seemed rather
a revelation
of the developing pattern of
further instalment of the military revolution that Hitler's generals
had been the
now
advance,
that
Poland and France had accustomed the world to the Wehrmacht's
less revolutionary
Wehrmacht and
its
than the
victor)'
Balkan opponents,
modern
had
warfare than
a
Indeed,
it
instituted.
of 1940. The sheer disparity in quality between
who had
furthermore brought defeat upon
themselves by the perverse ineptitude of their defensive arrangements, was
the
all
explanation necessary for the catastrophe which had overcome them.
The Balkan campaign might have ended on
that note,
with the hoisting of the
on 27 April as a fitting symbol of a triumph of did not: even as the cost of the campaign was counted -
swastika flag over the Acropolis in Athens the strong over the weak. But 12,000 British casualties (of
dead, against a
it
whom
9000 were prisoners), uncounted Yugoslav and Greek killed, wounded or missing - and its spoils were
mere 5000 German
divided - Yugoslav Bosnia, Dalmatia and Montenegro given to
Greek Thrace Ustashi
to Bulgaria, the
movement -
Hitler
Italy,
South Serbia and
Vojvodina to Hungary, Croatia to the puppet Croatians of the
was lending an
ear to those in his circle
who
argued that the
Balkan campaign was incomplete and urged that Germany's victory should be crowned by a
descent upon Crete by the one largely untried instrument of
Blitzkrieg,
Germany's
airborne arm).
Germany was not cachet belonged to as 1927 the Italians
battlefield
Italy,
the
first
advanced
state to
have created an airborne
where the idea of strategic bombing had
also
force.
That
been born. As
early
had experimented with the delivery of infantrymen
directly to the
by parachute. The technique had then been taken up by the Red Army, which
by 1936 had
sufficiently perfected
it
to
demonstrate
at large-scale
manoeuvres held
in the
presence of Western military observers the dropping of an entire regiment of parachutists
160
CRETE
and the subsequent airlanding of
Red
possible by the
complete units of
Air Force's
The Red Army's primacy Stalin's great military
whole brigade;
made
spectacular operation was
this
development of transport
equipped
full}'
a
enough
aircraft large
to
hold
soldiers.
in airborne tactics
was
be severely retarded, however, by
to
purge of 1937-8, of which forward-looking
were the principal
officers
number of operations in the World War, river Second notably on the Dnieper in the autumn of 1943, but they were never accorded the independent and decisive role their advocates had hoped for them. In Germany, however, the concept of airborne operations was taken up enthusiastically by the Wehrmacht's new generation of military pioneers. As in France, where military parachute training was deemed an airforce activity, it was the Luftwaffe which was victims.
Its
airborne units survived, and were to
mount
a
constituted the directing authority. In 1938 General Kurt Student, a flying veteran of the
World War, was appointed Inspector of Parachute Troops and
First
given
command
of the
which provided the
units
shortly afterwards
parachute division, designated 7 Flieger.
first
used
in
Norway and Holland
in 1940.
By 1941
It
constituting Student's XI Air Corps, stood ready to extend the
was
its
was
this division
associated units,
German conquest of
the
Balkans deeper into the Mediterranean area. Hitler's closest military advisers, the
operations officers of
XI Air Corps should be used to capture Malta.
more important
Malta was the
When
OKW, were
anxious that
asked to advise whether Crete or
objective in the Mediterranean,
of the Section,'
'All officers
General Walter Warlimont recalled, 'whether from the Army, Navy or Air Force, voted
unanimously
conclusions; but
them.
of Malta, since
for the capture
permanently the sea route
He had
when on
to
North
seemed and
to
be the only way to secure
Jodl, their chiefs, accepted their
15 April they confronted Student with this opinion
on the other hand, with
road', offered an ideal target to his parachutists;
its
'sausage-like
makers - not only Malta but sea position intermediate
foothold in the Middle
who saw
the Luftwaffe after
warmly endorsed
its
German
between Fortress Europe and
in Student's
failure to
Britain's
increasingly tenuous
plan an opportunity to rehabilitate the reputation of
overcome the Royal
his subordinate's
Air Force in the Battle of Britain,
conception and on
it
his
21 April
presented
Merkur (Mercury) for the Crete operation. Student, its
to
let
to Hitler.
initially resistant
him use one of the
who was
inception and course,
7th Airborne Division to be brought to Greece from
OKH
it
support and on 25 April issued Fiihrer Directive No. 28,
driving force of the operation throughout
persuaded
strategy-
East.
but eventually agreed to lend
also
single
also Cyprus - and thereby consolidate an impregnable land-
Since the capture of Crete had not figured in his original plans, Hitler was
codenamed
form and
moreover, he argued, they would be
able to reach out towards the other Mediterranean islands required by
Goering,
he overcame
already decided that Malta was too strongly garrisoned and defended to
yield to an airborne assault. Crete,
main
this
Africa.' Keitel
its
divisions
161
at
to
remain the
once arranged
training centre
at
for
Brunswick; he
earmarked to garrison Greece, the
THE WAR IK THE EAST
1941-194?
him some of the light tanks from the 5th Panzer, which The mountain division was to provide a follow-up force, naval protection. The airborne division, consisting under Italian transported in local craft of three parachute and one airlanding regiment, was to storm the island by direct assault, flying in a fleet of 600 Junkers 52 aircraft, some of which would also tow eighty gliders elite
5th Mountain, and to lend
were not needed
for Barbarossa.
carrying light tanks and the
An
Assault Regiment.
air
manpower of the
and support the operation. In
whole campaign was
7th Division's spearhead,
force of 280 bombers, 150 Stukas all,
and 200
I
Battalion of the 1st
fighters
22,000 soldiers were to be committed;
be under General Alexander Lohr's Fourth Air
to
Student's plan was straightforward.
He intended
each of
to use
would cover
command
of the
Fleet.
his three
parachute
regiments against the three towns on the north coast of the island, from west to east
Maleme, Retimo and Heraklion, where
airstrips
were
be used for the landing of heavy equipment and
as
Once
located.
bases to
would
captured, these
up' the British defences
'roll
along the single road which ran along the island's 170-mile length. At Maleme, which he
he intended to commit the
had decided should be
his Schuerpunkt,
which would crashland
in gliders directly
on
outnumbered by the defenders, he was sure and the
them
air
in a
to the airfield.
Assault Regiment,
of his troops
that surprise, the high quality
superiority assured by the Luftwaffe's
few days of brutal
1st
Although he expected to be
overwhelming strength would subdue
action.
His judgement that his force was superior in quality to the British garrison was
Bernard Freyberg,
correct. Major-General
hero of the
First
World War
in
Somme.
Royal Naval Division on the
arms
its
commander, was
a fire-eater, a
which he had won the VC commanding
legendary
a battalion
of the
an equally gallant - and romantic - passage of
after
There he had been among the party which had buried the poet Rupert
at Gallipoli.
Brooke on the island of Skyros and
done
Hellespont, as Leander had
in
later,
on lone reconnaissance, he had swum the reality a hundred years
legend and Lord Byron in
him
before him. Winston Churchill had christened
'the
Salamander' in tribute to his
fire-
resisting qualities.
Few of Freyberg's troops on Crete robustness. One brigade of regular British
in the
summer of
infantry
1941,
however, matched
had been brought
garrison the island and was what the Germans called kampffahig - 'combat fugitives
from the Greek
which Freyberg, intact
and
also
fiasco.
who had
equipment.
'Crete',
double VC), 'was
tripods.'
On
1
May
there
brigade.
The
many of them
wrote the a pauper's
A handful of
island; but the
brigades of the
spent his youth in
one Australian
remnants, disorganised and
a
Two
New
New
rest
2nd
New
Zealand, had
his
from Egypt
direct fit'.
The
rest
to
were
Zealand Division - with a special affinity
- were
of the 40,000 troops on the island were
disheartened.
Zealander Charles
All,
moreover, lacked
Upham (who was
campaign, mortars without base
to
essential
end the war
plates, Vickers
as
guns without
tanks and a regiment's worth of artillery had been brought to the
defenders lacked most essential heavy equipment and, above
all,
aircraft.
were only seventeen Hurricanes and obsolete biplane Gladiators on
162
Crete,
CRETE
and
were
all
withdrawn before the Germans
to be
Worst of
arrived.
all,
the British
defenders could not count on local assistance. Since the 5th Cretan Division had been mobilised for war against the Cretan soldiers
and
five
left
on the
rounds per
and had been captured on the mainland, the only
Italians
were
island
recruits
and
reservists,
with one
The
between
six
role of Ultra
Crete nevertheless might and perhaps ought to have been held;
Germans,
rifle
rifle.
their intentions
were betrayed
for,
to the British well before the
unbeknown
first
to the
parachutists
had
emplaned. The whole logic of an airborne operation was thereby compromised from the start.
Like the proponents of
armoured warfare and
strategic
parachutist pioneers had conceived their operational theory
bombing, the
military
in reaction to the
trench
World War. It was the self-betrayal of the effort needed to mount a trench-breaking offensive which had affronted them: the laborious assembly of men and material, the ponderous and protracted process of preliminary bombardment, the agonised inching forward across no-man's land through barbed-wire barriers and earthwork zones. The bombing enthusiasts had reacted to that spectacle with warfare they had witnessed in the First
the argument that high explosive was better delivered against the centres of production
from which the enemy's
artillery
and machine-gun defences were supplied. The apostles
of armoured warfare had argued - and in 1939—40 demonstrated - that deep defences were best
overcome by launching
against
them
a
weapon impervious
to the firepower the
defenders deployed. The military parachutists proposed an intermediate but even arresting alternative:
aggressive infantrymen
the soft spots immediately behind the enemy's front, his
at
headquarters, communication centres and supply points. strategic imagination; but
over
it
would
the
top
on
success rested
its
unaware of the stroke poised deliver
against
him - otherwise
suffer the same (if not worse)
against
the
enemy
fate as
by
alerted
It
was
a brilliantly daring leap
the precondition that the
they survived,
doomed them
had been warned of
their approach.
The
British
to
the parachutists committed to
the infantrymen of the trenches going
the
preliminary
bombardment. Their
undergo appalling
would use
losses against defenders
to
who
defenders of Crete had been warned. Ultra, the intelligence source
derived from the interception and decryption of enemy ciphers by the Government
and Cipher School
at
Bletchley,
had hitherto yielded British
campaign
difficulty in
in France, Bletchley
German Enigma
had had great
ciphering
headquarters communicated. The
machine difficulties
through
were
163
little
Code
information of value to the
and the Germans. Until the end of the
conduct of ground operations between the
the
of
enemy remain
helplessness during descent, the necessary lightness of the equipment they fight if
more
to overarch ground defences by airpower which would deliver
breaking the cipher 'keys' used on
which
the
different
in part intrinsic - the
Wehrmacht
Enigma machine
THE WAR
was designed
THE EAST
IN
1941-1943
eavesdropper with several million possible solutions to an
to confront an
intercept - and in part those of any experimental enterprise: Bletchley was accumulating
procedures which hastened the process of breaking but had not yet systematised them.
There was another
difficulty: Bletchley's
success
made by German Enigma machine
mistakes
depended
chiefly
upon
the exploitation of
operators in encipherment procedure.
German army and navy operators, perhaps because the)' were drawn from old-established signals services, made few mistakes. It was the younger Luftwaffe which provided Bletchley's listeners with the bulk of their opportunities; but,
though
'breaks' into the
Luftwaffe key considerably assisted the Air Defence of Great Britain to resist and deflect
bombing Germans
attacks during the winter blitz of 1940-1, they in the Battle
of the Atlantic or
in the
were of
use in opposing the
less
ground campaigns
in
Greece and North
Africa.
Crete,
however, was to be
key, as Bletchley 'real
time' -
at a
denominated speed, that
a
it,
is,
Luftwaffe campaign. Thus the vulnerability of
to British decryption
equivalent to that
at
on
a regular,
its
'Red'
day-to-day basis and in
which German
recipients of
Enigma
messages deciphered them themselves - was to compromise the security of the parachute operation from the outset. directive,
Fleet
two intercepted
On
26 April, for example, the day
'Red' messages
mentioned the selection of bases
were found
after Hitler issued his Merkur
to refer to Crete: the
for 'Operation Crete', while
its
Fourth Air
subordinate VIII Air
maps and photographs of the island. Thereafter the warnings accumulated almost daily. On 6 May Ultra revealed that German headquarters expected preparations to be completed by 17 May and outlined the exact stages and targets of the German attack. On 15 May it detected that D-Day had been postponed from 17 May to 19 May. And on 19 May it warned that 20 May was to be the new attack date and that the German parachute commanders were to assemble immediately with maps and photographs of Maleme, Corps asked
for
Retimo and Heraklion.
All this
information, disguised as intelligence collected by a British
agent in Athens, was transmitted in
'real
May, knew exactly when, where and infantry
were going
time' to Freyberg,
in
who
thus,
on the morning of 20
what strength Student's parachutists and
glider
to land.
Between foreknowledge and forestalment, however, there always yawns the gap of capability.
That predicament was Freyberg's. Against an attacking force whose defining
characteristics
bereft of the
were mobility and flexibility he opposed a defending means of movement. Its units were in the right place,
driven from any of the
vital airstrips,
it
lost in
battle for the island
would
consequence.
Defending Maleme
New
totally-
should one be
could not be replaced; the Germans would be
enabled to land reinforcements and heavy equipment and the probably be
force almost but,
airstrip
were the
21st,
22nd and 23rd
New
Zealand Battalions.
Rommel, on his experience in the desert campaign, the best soldiers he met in the Second World War: resilient, hardy, selfconfident, they had little opinion of any soldiers but themselves. When on the early Zealanders were to be reckoned by
164
CRETE
morning of 20 May
the}'
brushed themselves clean of the dust thrown up by the
bombardment and cocked their weapons to resist the parachute follow, they harboured no sense of the harshness of the battle to come. Lieutenant W. B. Thomas of the 23rd Battalion found his first sight of the German parachutists 'unreal, difficult to comprehend as anything at all dangerous': Luftwaffe's preparatory
knew must
assault the)'
Seen against the deep blue of the early morning Cretan
sky,
through
a
frame of grey-
whose billowy frocks of green, yellow, red and white had somehow blown up and become entangled in the wires that controlled them. ... struggled to grasp the meaning behind this colourful green olive branches, they looked
like little jerking dolls
I
fantasy, to realise that those beautiful kicking dolls
horrors
we had known
meant the
ventional ground forces.
of pioneers
unaided
small-scale,
The
lightly
Sprung nach Kreta
Student's
men were
their descent; they
jumped from
witnessing the
in a
from the shock of which
protect them.
reinforced
Norway
unknown, the pitting they could overcome only by their own
sense primitives: the British and American equiva-
incredulity.
The Germans had no control over groups of twelve, their parachutes
a single strap
attached to the harness in
and wind carried them indeed
their padding,
weapons from parachuted
'like dolls' to their
land-
helmets and rubber boots were supposed to
Those not injured by the impact - and jump
collected their
in
strongly supported by con-
leap into the
a true
their Junkers 52s, in
the middle of the back. Slipstream
the assault.
was
but were then suspended by
static line,
the
parachute operations of their own, would regard their
equipment and technique with horrified
opened by
opposed and
in a military revolution against forces
effort.
lents, already training for future
ing,
He was
purposeful parachute operation in history. The Germans' earlier jumps,
and Holland, had been
all
so recently in Greece.
Lieutenant Thomas's sense of unreality was understandable. first
repetition of
injuries
were numerous - then
containers, assembled in squads
The glider infantry of the 1st them with heavier equipment.
Assault Regiment, crashlanded
in
and moved
to
groups of fifteen,
no account of Cretan terrain or New ZeaThe harsh and broken ground around Maleme injured many of his parachu-
Student's theory of airborne assault took
land tenacity. tists as
they landed and pulverised a high proportion of the gliders; the
dealt pitilessly with the survivors.
and kind of straighten up with for".'
lion
The) shot them
as the)
They shot the enemy
a jerk
and then go limp
in the air:
again,
New
Zealanders
'You'd see one go limp
and you knew he "was done
landed, so that next day a visiting staff officer to 23rd Batta-
found 'bodies everywhere, every ten-twelve yards. One stepped over them
went through the centre in Maleme,
Germans The
in
the
olive groves.' Sixty
New
Zealanders released from
where they were serving time
first
hour of the
losses suffered by the
for
minor
a field
as
one
punishment
military offences, killed 110
assault.
German parachute
165
battalions
around Maleme
in
the
first
Junkers
52
aircraft
drop parachutists over Crete,
20 May
1941. Heavy
German
casualties
sustained in Crete led Hitler to suspend further major airborne operations.
hours of 20 May were lost 112 killed
Only
truly appalling.
One company of III
out of 126; 400 of the battalion's 600
hundred men of the glider-borne
a
I
command
the
men were dead
Battalion survived
Battalion also suffered heavily. IV Battalion, led
vive to
It
its
Regiment,
before the day was out. landing
unwounded;
by Captain Walter Gericke (who would
West German army's parachute
preserved the bulk of its strength.
Battalion, 1st Assault
division as a
NATO
II
sur-
general), alone
and the survivors of the other three struggled through-
May to assemble their remaining strength, fight off the remorseless New and move towards their objective, the Maleme airstrip. They made no pro-
out the day of 20 Zealanders
gress; in the 21st village
New
Zealand Battalion's area the parachutists
who
fell
of Modhion were attacked 'by the entire population of the
women hundred
and children, using any weapon, years ago, axes
and even
spades.'
flintlock rifles
They helped
to
in the streets district,
of the
including
captured from the Turks a
add
to the 1st Assault Regi-
ment's casualties, which by the end of the day included two battalion commanders killed
and two wounded, together with the regimental commander. The 1st Assault Regiment, which regarded itself as the Wehrmacht's elite, had by nightfall suffered much - perhaps 50 per cent losses - and achieved nothing. Its sister
regiments,
1st,
2nd and 3rd Parachute, directed
166
against Heraklion,
Retimo
CRETE
and Suda
two
respectively,
all
on
the north coast, also suffered heavily
places, airborne assault achieved
who
ten glider infantrymen
landed close to an
artillery
slaughtered.
(who
also
commanded
the division), had died in a glider crash
Nazism and of
marked
his
relatively
unscathed.
Its III
Battalion,
day's fighting, justifiably in the view of the
had been assault. Its
shot, with II
of the
just east
Assault
1st
commander, SiAssmann on take-off. Its Battalion,
directionless; their
markable memoir of the Cretan campaign and end
down
who
was generally the Germans
I
von der Heydte, an untypical parachutist by reason both of his undisguisedly
aristocratic disdain for
got
it
The 3rd Parachute Regiment, landing
Regiment around Canea and Suda, arrived led by Baron
one or
In
regiment killed 180 gunners
lacked small arms to defend themselves. Elsewhere, though,
who were
on 20 May.
intended suprise: near Suda, Crete's main port,
its
many of his
patients,
Battalion attacked a feature
intellectuality
- he was to write
his career as a professor
a re-
of economics -
however, was almost wiped out during the
New
whose senior medical
Zealanders,
officer
by members of this battalion during their
defended by the
New
Zealand Division's
initial
logistic
Company Sergeant-Major Neuhoff describes the results of his encounter with the petrol company of its Composite Battalion: 'We advanced to attack the hill ... we prosuddenly we ran into heavy and very ceeded, without opposition, about halfway up accurate rifle and machine-gun fire. The enemy had held their fire with great discipline and allowed us to approach well within effective range before opening up. Our casualties were extremely heavy, and we were forced to retire leaving many dead behind us.' Yet their troops;
.
opponents,
as the
New
Zealand
.
.
history records,
official
were
'for
most
the
part drivers
and
technicians and so ill-trained for infantry fighting'. Student,
who had
Athens, remained
all
into the night of 20/21
not yet
day
in
left
May he
map
sat at his
fate his
table, as
posing the attack on the island to Goering
a
in
cherished division had suffered. Far
von der Heydte
news which would bring him confirmation
waiting for the
Grande Bretagne
his rear headquarters in the Hotel
ignorance of the
that
recalled, 'waiting
he had been
and
right in pro-
month previously. Everything had seemed so He had thought that he had taken every pos-
simple in prospect, so feasible and so certain. sibility
into consideration -
pectations.'
The
truth - as
I.
and then everything had turned out contrary M. D. Stewart, the medical
officer
of the
1st
to plans
and
ex-
Welch Regiment,
a
veteran and the most meticulous historian of the campaign, later recorded - was that he
had
'dissipated' his airborne division 'in scattered attacks
Thousands of its young men now
lay
dead
about the
in the olive groves
and among the
cups and the barley. His glider troops and four of
his
been shattered, reduced within the space of
minutes to
survivors.
Other battalions had suffered
tured an
airfield.
Now
hundred men should Division
would have
he had
fail
to
on
come
left
the
by
fifteen
little
island':
parachute battalions
less severely.
a
few dozen
Yet he
still
only his liny airlanding reserve.
morrow sea.
167
[21
May] the only possible
butter.
.
.
had
fugitive
had not capIf
these few
relief for the
.
THE WAR
On
the evening of the
first
day of the
IN
first
THE EAST
1941-1<>43
great parachute operation in history, therefore,
the advantage appeared to have passed decisively to the opposition - an ill-organised force
of under-equipped troops almost bereft of air cover and supporting arms. Yet, despite the agony Student's
men had
suffered and
all
on
the mistakes he had made,
21
all
May he
would succeed in recovering the initiative and turning the battle to his advantage. How so? The explanation, one of Freyberg's staff officers was to reflect ruefully in the aftermath, was the absence of 'a hundred extra wireless sets'; for the defenders had failed to recognise the extent of their own success and had failed to report it to Freyberg's headquarters, which in turn had failed to radio the orders to recoup and regroup. Next morning Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons that the 'most stern and resolute resistance' would be offered to the enemy. Meanwhile Freyberg lacked that clear picture of his battle which would allow him to react as commander. He communicated with the New Zealanders defending the Maleme airfield - Student's Schuerpunkt - through the headquarters of 5 communicated indirectly with its battalion commanders; and W. Andrews, the commander of the crucial battalion, 22nd, mis-
Brigade; the brigade in turn
Lieutenant-Colonel
L.
commander planned to support him. A brave man - he the First World War - he decided on the evening of 20 May,
takenly believed that his brigade
had
won
after
an
failed, to
day,
the Victoria Cross in
initial
and
counter-attack supported by two of the only six heavy tanks
regroup on high ground overlooking the
airfield for a
regrouping inadvertently conceded the
this
rescued them from the inevitability of
spot to the
vital
on Crete had
concerted push the next
Germans and so
disaster.
While Andrews took the wrong decision
for good reasons, Student was arriving at no ground for thinking that fresh troops would fare any better at Maleme than those already dead. Indeed, the universal military maxim, 'never reinforce failure', should have warned him against committing his reserve at that point. He nevertheless decided to do so. On the afternoon of 21 May his last two com-
the right decision for bad reasons: he had
panies of parachutists
among
fell
slaughtered - 'not cricket,
I
the
New
Zealand division's Maori battalion and were
know,' wrote one of their
officers, 'but there
time Student's airlanding reserve, the spearhead of 100th Mountain 5th
Mountain
Division,
began
his
'Machine-gun bullets tear through the pilot grits his teeth. Cost a
vineyard.
We strike the
the
machine half round
we
lose the
bringing 650 like
is.'
At the
same
Regiment of the airstrip
from
defending 22nd Battalion the previous evening. right wing,'
wrote
a
war correspondent aboard. 'The
may he has to get down. Suddenly there leaps up below us ground. Then one wing grinds into the sand and tears the back of
what
it
to the
left.
power over our own standing half on its head.' Nearly
it
on the Maleme
to crashland in Junkers 52s
which Andrews had withdrawn
Rifle
Men,
packs, boxes,
bodies. At
last
ammunition
we come
fort)
Junkers 52s succeeded in landing on the
men
of II Battalion, 100th Mountain
Rifle
Maleme
.
.
machine
airstrip in this
way,
Regiment. The mountain riflemen,
Student's parachutists, also regarded themselves as an
168
are flung forward
to a standstill, the
elite,
and with
justification.
CRETE
THE BATTLE FOR CRETE Key
A
German
airborne and parachute landings. 20
May
Cape Spatha
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Crete, the scene of another Allied evacuation, in
airborne planners drew
While the
New
Zealanders struggled to
neers were moving to consolidate the
many
May
1941, after a
bitter fight. Allied
important lessons from Crete.
come to terms with the new threat, the mountaiGerman position at Maleme airfield, with the in-
tention of extending their foothold next day.
Some of ship.
the mountaineers' reinforcements
They were
to suffer an
unhappy
fate;
were meanwhile approaching Crete by
but so too were the ships of the Royal Navy
which intercepted them. The Alexandria squadron
169
easily
overcame the
Italian escort to the
THE WAR
fleet
THE EAST
IK
1941-1943
of caiques and barges carrying the remainder of 100th Mountain
towards Crete, causing 300 of them to be drowned; but during 22 flicted a far
more
- the
end of the navy's troyers Imperial Valiant,
cruisers Gloucester
commanded
latter
losses;
and
was
and
sunk, together with the destroyers Kashmir and
Fiji
by the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma. This was not the
before 2 June
Greyhound,
and
its
to prove,
effect
on
and
also lost the cruisers Juno
it
Calcutta
which were sunk, and suffered damage
the aircraft carrier Formidable, the cruisers
troyers Kelvin, Napier
shocking in
Regiment
Rifle
the Luftwaffe in-
grievous penalty on the British ships and crews. The battleship Warspite
was damaged, the Kelly
May
When
Herevvard.
British
the
tally
Perth, Orion,
morale than the future
was reckoned the
of any
costliest
loss
and Naiad and the des-
Ajax
was taken, the
Battle
of the
British naval
and the des-
to the battleship
of Crete, though
Prince of
Wales
and
less
Repulse
engagement of the Second
World War.
Student gains the upper hand
New
Ashore, meanwhile, the battle had begun to run irreversibly the Germans' way. The
Zealand counter-attack to recapture Maleme
airfield failed in the early
throughout the day Student, with brutal recklessness, directed the airfield. Those that crashed the next arrival.
on impact,
as
did,
Commons
being fought,' Churchill told the the other side have very that the British
little
'It
a
is
that
off the
runway
overwhelming
most strange and grim
that afternoon. 'Our side have
or no tanks. Neither side has any
had no tanks
in
hours of 22 May;
stream of Junkers 52s
were pushed
Meanwhile the Luftwaffe operated overland
shooting and bombing anything that moved.
was
many
a
strength,
battle that
no
at
for
air
.
.
means of retreat.' The
.
is
and
truth
counted and no means of moving, while the
Germans were accumulating growing numbers of
fresh, first-class soldiers to
manoeuvre
against the defenders.
Freyberg
However,
this
troops, the yet
more
vital
a single unit but
a
counter-attack.
of the bulk of his best
Zealanders and the regular British battalions. The withdrawal conceded
ground
to the parachutists
steadily in
then took
planned
decided to withdraw eastward and regroup for
regrouping was composed not of
New
were growing Galatas,
now
it,
then
numbers. lost
as his decisive riposte;
it
On
and mountain riflemen around Maleme, who
24
May
again to the
but
it
they were repulsed from the village of
New
Zealand counter-attack Freyberg had
could not reach
as far as
Maleme,
into
which the
Germans had now crowded almost the whole of the mountain division. When the Germans resumed their attack the British were driven relentlessly eastward, abandoning one position after another.
On
26 May, Freyberg told Wavell,
commanding
in the
Middle
Crete could only be a matter of time. Next day Wavell decided
East, that the loss
on evacuation before
of
the
dominance of the Luftwaffe made that impossible. The garrison of Heraklion, against which the parachutists had made no impression, was taken off on the night of 28 May. The
170
CRETE
which had
garrison of Retimo,
and had
also resisted
could not be reached by the navy
attacks,
all
be abandoned. During 28-31 May the main force
to
Maleme and began
left its
positions east of
long and agonising trek southwards across the mountains to the
a
little
on the south coast. It was a shaming culmination to a benighted battle. The minority of troops which actually fought kept together as best they could; those who had port of Sphakia
left
now
Greece disorganised
lost
all
semblance of
unity.
'Never shall
on
disorganisation and almost complete lack of control of the masses
Freyberg,
we made our way
'as
he and the
slowly through the endless stream of trudging men.'
of his broken army reached Sphakia they sheltered under the
rest
forget
I
the
the move,' wrote
cliffs
When
waiting
navy to rescue them under cover of darkness. The navy suffered heavily in the
for the
attempt but by
These
confirmed,
figures
catastrophe. Australian
June had succeeded in taking off 18,000 troops; Germans and nearly 2000 had been killed in the
It
and
12,000 remained to
1
prisoner to the
Rommel's expeditionary
the evidence were needed, that Crete had been a
if
had entailed the British, urgently
fall
fighting.
of two formed divisions of troops,
loss
needed
to fight the
burgeoning war
New
Zealand,
in the desert against
It had also added unnecessarily to the roll of humiliation on the British Empire, most of all because both he and his enemies knew by what a narrow margin his parachutists had been rescued from defeat. Had Maleme not been abandoned on the second day, had Freyberg's counter-attack been launched two days earlier, the parachutists would have been destroyed in their foothold,
which
Hitler
had
the island saved and the a blaze
force.
inflicted
first
definitive
of spectacular publicity. As
new and
again to triumph, in a traditional strategic zone,
Mediterranean
it
check to
was, the
a principal
instrument of
could also be seen
refused to
and he
future. Crete
had
nearly half the
1st
now
ambiguous
On
victory.
20 July he told
Assault its III
'Frightful
mounting operations of the same type
set his face against
4000 German
soldiers,
Regiment had died Battalion
was the
most from the 7th Parachute
The
in action. Gericke,
sight that
met our
eyes.
breeze - everywhere were the dead. Those
their harness
had been shot down within
these corpses could be seen
minutes of the
battle
who had come
in the
Division;
across the
on 23 May, was appalled by the evidence of what had .
.
.
Dead
equipment, hung suspended from the branches [of the olive
From
affair.'
'Crete proves that the days of the paratroopers are over.
killed
dropping zone of
light
overseas power, the
weapon depends upon surprise - the surprise factor has now gone.' He had allow the German propaganda machine to publicise the operation while it was
in progress
it.
its
as a highly
Student recorded, was 'most displeased with the whole
paratroop
in
Fleet.
his parachute general,
befallen
campaign of conquest imposed
revolutionary form, in the very centre of Britain's
and against
Yet, not only with hindsight, Crete 'Hitler',
Hitler's
German war machine had been seen once
all
a
few
who had
strides
and
parachutists, trees]
in their full
swinging gently
succeeded slain
still
men
171
from
by the Cretan volunteers.
too clearly what had happened within the
of Crete.' Not only the
in the
in getting free
first
few
but the whole structure of the airborne
THE WAR
had suffered
force
disastrously;
IN
THE EAST
1941-194?
220 out of 600 transport
aircraft
had been destroyed,
material loss quite disproportionate to the material advantage gained.
had not been and would not prove
OKW, would
Malta, desired by
The occupation of
essential to
by contrast have
Crete, moreover,
German justified
hatred of
The
them not erased
mounting.
its
a bitter anti-partisan
the foundations of a
in the island to this day.
and Americans, both energetically
British
attempt on
strategy; a successful
would involve the Germans in name and lay
a
seizure of Crete
any loss suffered by
campaign, their conduct of which would blacken their bitter
The
Crete a conclusion different from Hitler's: that
it
drew from
raising parachute divisions,
was
that particular
form rather than the
underlying principle of airborne operations which had proved unsound. In their great descents on
Normandy and
Sicily,
Holland, they would eschew Student's practice of
launching parachutists directly on to an
enemy
from the objective and then concentrating
position in favour of landing
against
it.
In Sicily
also risk large-scale airborne offensives only in co-ordination with a assault
from the
fragile military
sea,
thus distracting the
instruments of parachute and glider. In
reinsurance was to
justify itself. In
caution and essayed
a
In
the
broad
if
to prove
There
is
major amphibious
Sicily
and Normandy
own, the
when
disaster
this careful
they abandoned
which overtook that
suffered by
not the narrow sense, therefore, Hitler's appreciation of
are loaded against the soldier
a possibility that a
distance
concerted response against the
even more complete than
Operation Merkur was correct: parachuting to war
which the odds
a
Holland, in September 1944,
Crete-style assault of their
Montgomery's parachutists was Student's.
enemy from
at a
and Normandy they would
who
is
essentially a dicing with death, in
entrusts his
combination of luck and judgement
comrades beyond the jaws of danger, enable them
to assemble
life
to silk
and
will deposit
static line.
him and
his
and allow formed airborne
go forward to battle; but the probability is otherwise. 0{ the four great parachute endeavours of the Second World War, two - Sicily and Normandy - managed to evade the probabilities, two - Crete and Arnhem - did not. The demise of independent parachute units to
forces since 1945
is
the inevitable
outcome of
172
that unfavourable reckoning.
BARBAROSSA while the news of flawed Even thoughts were engaged with events
victory in Crete
his
away. Indeed,
far
was reaching him, at
had been preoccupied with two quite unrelated matters: the abortive 'wonder' battleship Bismarck into the North Atlantic and the
Rudolf Hess, bearing an unauthorised 27
May could be
initiative
of peace to the
offer
- which puzzled the British quite
much
as
flight
only an 'old
as
fighter'
but his amanuensis,
who had
taken
Landsberg
after the
Munich
from
comrade-in-arms
at
the
brotherhood during the
List
First
Regiment,
a
a
World War had brought
of his
deputy,
destruction
on
He had Goebbels
describe
it
personal blow. Hess was not
down
society
sortie
May of his
of epic; Hess's crazed mystified his fellow Nazis -
it
of 'hallucination'; but the defection struck him
during their incarceration
10
as a sort
continued to enrage Hitler for weeks and months afterwards. as the result
on
British. Bismarck's
represented by his propaganda machine
Hitler's
the height of the battle he
Mein Kampf from dictation
Putsch
of 1923; he was also
of 'young Hitler the
one
a
whose
Germans'
truly fulfilling
experience of his lonely and confused youth.
Memories of
the sacrifice offered by the List Regiment in the Kindermord
perhaps aroused by Hess's
flight,
and the destruction of the
1st
Assault
survivor of a massacre in 1914 even
May
1941.
No
extensive than the parachutists had suffered in
France and the Balkans, had suffered losses approaching those of Student's
for
little
commonplace by
First
World War
beside the strength which had accrued to the
begun. The Wehrmacht's losses thus
in
far
151; in
in
army had
risen since
less
than 5000.
On
elite.
Countries,
However,
Wehrmacht
since the
Low
in
Poland 17,000 dead
Countries 45,000;
in
Yugoslavia
the other hand, the strength of the
September 1939 from 3,750,000 men
173
German
to 5,000,000; the Luftwaffe
numbered 1,700,000, including anti-aircraft (flak) and parachute The Nazi Party's army, the Waffen-SS, had increased from
400,000.
war had
twenty-one months of war had, by the
Scandinavia 3600; in France and the
Greece and Crete
Low
standards; they also counted
standards of twentieth-century bloodletting, been inconsiderable:
and missing;
Ypern,
Regiment into perspective. Hitler was himself the
more
other division of the Wehrmacht, in Poland, Norway, the
not only were such losses
bei
must have put the devastation of 7th Parachute Division
troops; and the navy
50,000 to 150,000 men.
THE WAR
The most
striking assertion
September
six
THE EAST
German army, with
disproportionately skill
the
stronger
airfleets
in
every
- than in 1939. Hitler's
number of tanks each
which supported
whole of German
society.
One German male
had increased
had been raised 'from the Meuse
contained. For
was not only
it,
all that,
but
larger
soil
to the
war-making had permeated the
was
in four
experienced victory, had trodden the
now
in uniform;
most had
of occupied territory and had seen
The red-white-black and swastika
soldiers of the victor nations of 1918 taken into captivity. flag
roll
way - in weapons, in reserves, above all in rearmament programme of 1935-9 had merely lent
military weight to his adventures in foreign policy; his
directly
mobilisation for war in
motorised and 20 Panzer divisions. The multiplication of armoured
formations had been achieved by halving the
operational
On
army) had included 106 divisions, of which ten were
motorised; by June 1941, on the eve of Barbarossa, the
to 180 infantry, 12
the
1941-1943
of strength was in the army.
1939, the Feldheer (field
armoured and
IN
Memel, from the
Belt to the Adige', as the
anthem proclaimed it should fly, and German soldiers now stood ready to even deeper into the zone of conquest Hitler had worked out as his own: into
national
carry
it
Stalin's
Russia.
The Balkan campaign, often depicted by Hitler's long-laid plan to attack the Soviet
timetable he had successfully
marked out
for
its
historians as an
Union and
inception, had
concluded even more rapidly than
unwelcome
diversion from
as a disabling interruption
been
in fact
no such
thing.
It
of the
had been
his professional military advisers
could
have anticipated; while the choice of D-Day for Barbarossa had always depended not on the sequence of contingent events but
on
German army found
than expected to position the units allocated for
more
it
difficult
the weather and objective military factors.
Barbarossa in Poland; while the lateness of the spring thaw, which
left
The
the eastern
beyond the predicted date, meant that Barbarossa could not have been begun very much earlier than the third week of June, whatever Hitler's intentions. The outlook for Barbarossa nevertheless rested on German over-optimism. 'Massive European
rivers in spate
frontier battles to
end of
be expected; duration up to four weeks,' Brauchitsch had written
April 1941, 'but in further
reckoned
with.' Hitler
development only minor
was more emphatic. 'You have only
resistance
is
then
still
to kick in the door,'
at
the
to
be
he told
commanding Army Group South, on the eve of Barbarossa, 'and the whole structure will come crashing down.' Hitler's prognosis was in part ideologically
Rundstedt, rotten
determined; he was committed to
a
view of Soviet Russia which represented
its
citizens as
the crushed and brutish creatures of a Bolshevik tyrant, 200 million Calibans quailing
under the eye of a Prospero corrupted by absolute power. There was irony image. But Hitler's belief that Soviet
communism had
a
in this mirror
hollow centre was supported not
Red Army had performed lamentably against minuscule Finland; and that humiliation was explained in turn by the massacre of its senior officers - far more complete than any war could have inflicted only by prejudice but also by
instituted
by
realities:
in
1939 the giant
Stalin in 1937-8.
174
BARBAROSSA
In extension of his purge of the party his political primacy, Stalin
convincingly turned coat during the Civil
reconstruction.
who had
1921.
He had
He had
it
Warsaw
go was Tukhachevsky,
was
his
who had
tsarist officers
thereafter provided the
army
such dire need in the era of post-war
in
commitment
in 1920
to the
down
and put
new
Russia.
was
It
the Kronstadt rising of
pioneered the creation of the army's tank arm and the organisation of
also
of modern
whose
for extinction
with seven other generals, on
11
The shootings
thereafter
Red Army
existence had by 1935 put the
development.
military
radicalism, he was singled out
five
to
first
War of 1918-20 and
given firm evidence of his
led the offensive against
the large mechanised corps forefront
convicted and executed for treachery
the leading representative of that group of former
staff,
with the professional leadership of which
he
(NKVD), which had assured
secret police
tried,
commanders of the Red Army. The
over half the senior chief of
and
had then accused,
of his
because
Perhaps
at
very
the very strategic
the outset of the military purge and shot,
at
June 1937.
were
to
proceed apace. By the autumn of 1938 three out of
of the Red Army's marshals were dead, thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, 110
commanders and
out of 195 divisional
and
administrative
186 out of 406 brigadiers.
The massacre of those
appointments was even more extensive:
politico-military
all
in
eleven
deputy commissars for defence were shot, seventy-five out of eighty members of the Military Soviet,
and
military district
all
political administration
commanders, together with most of their
chiefs
of
- those party commissars whose function was to ensure that
commitments which might
soldiers should not take decisions or
attract the disfavour
of
the party.
The It
was
difficult to
many of the
effects of the
purge
detect any pattern in Stalin's bloodlust.
ex-tsarists
who had thrown
in their lot
The purge
certainly exterminated
with the Bolsheviks
after 1917; yet
not spare the chief of staff, Yegorov, whose proletarian credentials were impeccable,
was replaced by Shaposhnikov, the case that
executed
in
commanders
graduate of the Imperial General Staff College.
a
suffered
worse than commissars, since the
even greater numbers than the
murderous motives, formed during the
who had opposed
it
Civil
seemed
to
War. Just
or not assisted
lie
'soldiers'.
in the history
If
Budenny and
faction
had been centred on the
K. E. Voroshilov,
which had
and
signally failed to assist
where
Tukhachevsky
175
it
were
in
its
who had been
struggle with the Whites.
conducted Stalin
as First Secretary after
were those
Cavalry Army,
recalcitrantly
the struggle against the Whites in South Russia 1918-19,
First
'politicals'
of the party purge were those
aggrandisement of his role
Leon Trotsky's command of the Red Army
The anti-Trotsky
who
Nor was
there was a clue to Stalin's
Lenin's death, so the principal victims of the military purge identified with
did
of personal rancours and alliances
as the principal victims Stalin's
it
was
in the abortive
commanded by S. M. own strategy during
its
commissar,
in
advance on Warsaw
in
political
THE WAR
1920.
The
First
Cavalry
Arm)
IN
it
Stalin's early struggle against Trotsky,
and
I.
were
Kulik,
command all
had been the
after the purge,
whom
Budenny,
the purge elevated to high place in
Timoshenko,
K.
S.
L. Z.
Mekhlis,
Cavalry Arm}' officers and veterans of the southern Russian
First
campaign. Voroshilov, already Defence Commissar before 1937 but
power by Tukhachevsky's
- and
Trotsky's
in
military instrument associated with
old comrades, in the years of his triumph,
its
The four men
therefore stood high in his favour.
G.
1^41-1^43
had been an aberrant element
Tukhachevsky's - anti-White war; but
the Soviet military
THE EAST
was
fall,
also a First Cavalry
much enhanced
Their advancement was not to Russia's military advantage. Budenny had
moustache but no Enckson's
military brain. Mekhlis, the chief commissar,
words,
'combined
have
to
detestation of the officer corps'.
than
a military
opposed the
commander.
a
at least
head of ordnance, was
distribution of automatic
seemed,
a
fine
in Professor
John
monumental incompetence with
Timoshenko was
Kulik,
weapons
in
Army man.
competent, but
fierce
a
a political rather
a technological reactionary
to soldiers
on the grounds
that they
who were
them and halted the production of anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. Voroshilov was worst of all; in 1934, apparently for no better reason than Tukhachevsky's advocacy of the independent armoured force, he argued: 'It is almost axiomatic that such a incapable of handling
powerful force
as the
nothing to do with
tank corps
it.'
formations larger than
is
a very far-fetched idea
Immediately
after
and we should therefore have
Tukhachevsky's removal, he abolished
all
tank
a brigade.
Voroshilov's obscurantism - and that of other First Cavalry Arm}- veterans - was
exposed by the Finnish war. The humiliation they
inflicted
outnumbered two-hundredfold, demanded
the comparatively harmless posts of
on the Russians by the
hasty reforms. Voroshilov,
Finns,
whom
nominated
to
Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Defence
Committee on 8 May 1940, was replaced by Timoshenko as Commissar for Defence. Though his conduct of operations against Finland had been less than masterly,
Timoshenko at least grasped that the Red Army stood in urgent need of reorganisation. Under his aegis, steps were taken to re-establish Tukhachevsky's large armoured formations, consisting of two armoured and one mechanised division forming an armoured corps; to begin the construction of fixed defences on Russia's new military frontier, which stood some 200 miles further westward than before the annexation of eastern Poland in 1939; to structure
demote commissars
and to bring forward
those was G. K. Zhukov,
who
soldiers of in
to a consultative status in the
proven
1939 had
won
ability to
high
command.
command
First
among
the Battle of Khalkin-Gol in Russia's
undeclared war against Japan on the disputed border of Mongolia. Zhukov, according to
a
Romanenko, describing his presentation to a high-level staff conference held in the Kremlin in December 1940, had not altogether grasped the dynamism with which Germany's Panzer formations operated, the large scale on which they were organised or the closeness with which they combined their attacks with those of their supporting Luftwaffe squadrons. According to Romanenko, he expected 'a relatively colleague, Lieutenant-General
P. L.
176
BARBAROSSA
weak saturation level of equipment in formations' - an old-fashioned battlefield, in short, where infantry predominated and tanks merely leavened the mass, rather than the dense concentrations of armour with which, as in France, infantry formations were tossed about by the flail of armour like sheaves on the threshing floor. Nevertheless, his was clearly a modern military mind. The fighting potential of a Russian army - Red or tsarist - was never in doubt. Russian soldiers their
had proved brave, hardy and
measure
in the past
patriotic fighters against the
enemies
- Turkish, Austrian, French and British
who
as well as
had taken
German. As
artillerymen the)' stuck to their guns - and the quality of Russian artillery material had
always been excellent. As infantrymen they were tenacious in defence and aggressive in attack.
Russian armies,
poor but because to
when
they had
failed,
were bad.
their generals
be cursed by incompetent leadership,
It
had done so not because had been the
Manchuria, and never more so
than in the First World War. The Revolution had swept away the likes of
and Samsonov
who had
succeeded
by the outnumbered Germans the Civil face
in East Prussia in 1914.
War with young and dynamic
of the enemy. The question
and they were, by confidence to
act
now was whether
for the
mass promotion
479
officers
in the history
product of the purge was
a
to defeat
had replaced them during and
those
who
after
of victory in the had survived the purge -
learned the
art
of conformist quality - retained the
with decision and energy on the
The prospect largest
It
who had
leaders
definition, junior officers
Rennenkampf
overwhelmingly superior armies
in leading
were
of too many Russian armies
fate
in the Crimea, in
their soldiers
newly appointed major-general
in
June 1940 (the
One
of any army) was not wholly discouraging.
tightening of the
self-
battlefield.
Red Army's
disciplinary code,
by-
which
subjected the Soviet conscript to a positively Prussian standard of military obedience.
Another, paradoxically, was a demotion of the commissars; these the Revolution had originally
imposed on the army
political officials,
to forestall treachery
by
whom
ex-tsarist
commanders, had been empowered with the right to veto military orders until 1934. That right was reimposed during the purges but withdrawn again after the debacle of the Finnish campaign. The 'political deputies' of the new divisional commanders were therefore restricted in their responsibilities to the political education of the soldiers and the maintenance of party orthodoxy
among
the officers. There lay an important alleviation
of professional military anxieties. Another encouraging factor was the improvement of
equipment. For material reaching
all its
formations was of good
programme had been
to
quality.
One
effect
propulsion and suspension systems had resulted eventually into the T-34,
of Stalin's industrialisation
encourage the development of modern tanks, based on designs
purchased outright from the American tank pioneer, Walter
World War.
Red Army, the
Kulik's efforts to retard the modernisation of the
which was
Soviet industry
was
also
in
the
Christie. His revolutionary
models
that
would evolve
to prove itself the best all-round tank of the
producing useful military radio
radar; while the aircraft industry, with an
sets
and
a
Second
prototype
annual output of 5000 machines, was busily
177
THE WAR IN THE EAST
accumulating
a fleet
Through
which,
like the
tank park,
would by
of inventive
his arbitrary terrorisation
armaments industry during the
1941-1943
1941 be the largest in the world.
and technologists
scientists
much
era of the purges, Stalin did
in the
interrupt the
to
when he was
transformation of the Soviet forces into an advanced instrument of war; and,
not directly persecuting the innovators, he often spoke with two tongues in their support. Thus,
at
Kulik's
the important Kremlin conference of
advocacy of
transport,
a return to large
comparing him
December
he ridiculed
1940,
his creature
marching divisions of infantry supplied by animal
to the peasant
who
preferred the
wooden plough
to the tractor;
nevertheless he permitted the disbandment of the mechanised transport department and starved the
army of trucks (which, when the time came, would have
to be supplied by
Lend-Lease from Detroit). Yet his influence
was not wholly malign. Having wrought
need
for
showing
reform which the army's disastrous in the Winter
revealed, accepted the
men
of
talents
in
his
he thereafter accepted the
spite in the purge,
War with Finland had commonsense advice
Timoshenko, recognised the
like
who had made
of others
their
name
the Mongolian campaign against Japan,
like
Zhukov
and
Finland, like Kirponos, and
younger
men
and
Rokossovsky,
in
promoted other
of good military standing,
like
Konev, Vatutin, Yeremenko, Sokolovsky and Chuikov. Above
of the Red pride to
him and
arm) was the its
Red
ceives
Army his
soldier rifle.
from Russian central Asia
The
Red
Army mixed
units, a policy to
its
European faces
in the ranks bear testimony.
It
was
as well as
defend
itself
world, and from
and exercise influence
the
'rifle'
divisions
formations
(about 110 in the west) -
though
strong,
14,000
50 tank divisions and 25 mechanised divisions which were
numbered
24,000 and,
output of 2000, of which an increasing
production targets would stand
at
source of
the Russian people that the
largest in the
dependent on horsed transport Soviet tank park
a
beyond its borders. By the spring of 1941 its war strength numbered between 230 and 240
re-
which the
nationalities in
itself.
very size he took confidence in Russia's
ability to
A
he sustained the growth
all
Army
if
of mixed
quality,
number were
between 20,000 and
T-34s;
fully
largely
for supply -
equipped. The
could draw on an annual
by the end of 1941 tank
25,000, while
Germany would
never succeed in producing more than 18,000 tanks in any year. The Red Air Force,
drawing on an annual output of 10,000 machines
178
in 1941,
stood
at a
strength of
at least
BARBAROSSA
10,000
in
lacking as
1940;
equivalents to
yet
subordinate to the army though
it
was,
it
the
German
best
was nevertheless the
and wholly
aircraft,
largest air force in the
world. In crudely material terms, therefore, Stalin as warlord stood
superior, footing to Hitler. As strategist, however, he
provoke war
Hitler's decision to
was
in 1939
to
1936-9. Stalin also operated with ruthlessness
and assessment of
reality
same
won him
had
were clouded by
as yet in
on equal, perhaps no way his match.
prove a catastrophic miscalculation; in
prosecution, however, he displayed exactly the ruthless exploitation of weakness as
was
its
and
cynical estimation of motive
such spectacular diplomatic victories in
and cynicism; but a coarse
of motive
his estimation
and over-cunning solipsism. He
ascribed to adversaries a pattern of calculation as brutal and grasping as his own. Thus,
because he took such satisfaction in the quantity of territory he had added to the Soviet
Union
since 1939, he appears to have thought that
the event of war, to take
it
from him. He
certainly
it
would be
made
it
his
a
primary German aim, in
primary object to hold what
much of Soviet military effort in the spring of 1941 was new frontier defences, to replace those abandoned by
he had. Consequently the construction of
from the 1939 deployed so military
frontier in the previous
as to
defend the
wisdom about
zone under districts,
frontier's every
kink and
same time
the
the advance
Red Army was
defiance of
twist, in
frontier
were
all
fortification,
weapons
actually stripped to provide
armoured formations, which might have been held
in
were dispersed piecemeal throughout the
concentrated neither for
Stalin's
years. At the
traditional
'defence in depth' and the maintenance of counter-attack reserves.
The defences of the 1939 ones; while the
two
dedicated to
a counter-stroke
own
dissipation of his
forces
nor
for
for the
new
support behind the
five
western military
deep blocking operations.
was matched by
his disregard for others'
warnings of the danger in which they stood. Entirely cold-hearted though he was
in his
on regarding reports of his fellow dictator's aggressive intentions as 'provocation'. Such reports came to him in profusion after March 1941, from his own ambassadors and military attaches, from Soviet agents, Russian and non-Russian, from foreign governments already at war with Germany, particularly the British, even from dealings with Hitler, he insisted
neutrals,
including the United States. Primary indications of
provided by the systematic
by the same squadron
flights
of German reconnaissance
commanded by Theodor Rowehl
- and the penetration of the Soviet border zone by
that
German
aircraft
intentions
had overflown
German
were
over Soviet territory Britain in 1939
patrols dressed in Russian
uniforms. These were supplemented as early as April by reports from Richard Sorge, the
Comintern spy
in
Tokyo who was
privy to the dispatches of the
German ambassador
On
(which he helped him compose), that preparations for war were complete.
Winston Churchill, whose source (unrevealed, of course, intelligence,
sent
Stalin
word
that
the
to the Russians)
Germans had deployed armour
3 April
was Ultra
released
by
Yugoslavia's accession to the Tripartite Pact directly to southern Poland. By a strange dereliction of duty, Stafford Cripps, the
warmly pro-Soviet
179
British
ambassador
to
Moscow,
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
mi-m?
delayed transmission of the message until 19 April; but Stalin had had equally good
Western intelligence of German intentions weeks before
that.
Sumner
Early in March,
Welles, the American Under-Secretary of State, had passed to the Russian ambassador in
Washington the
gist
of an
inter-governmental communication which, in
official
its
original
form, read: 'The government of the United States, while endeavouring to estimate the
developing world situation, has
come
authentic, clearly indicating that
it
is
into possession of information
the intention of
Germany
which
it
regards as
to attack the Soviet Union.'
The imprecision of this weighty warning was dissipated throughout the spring by messages from the Comintern agent Alexander Foote and the mysterious but quickly authenticated 'Lucy' network,
perhaps
a
both based
member
in Switzerland. 'Lucy',
whose
identity
remained obscure -
of the exiled Czech secret service, the most effective run by any
government during the war; perhaps outpost of Bletchley - signalled
a cell
Moscow
in
of the Swiss intelligence agency; perhaps an
mid-June with
a
list
Wehrmacht order of battle for Barbarossa and even the current about the same time (13 June), the British Foreign Minister told evidence of an imminent German attack was mounting and mission to Moscow.
of
German
objectives, a
date for D-Day, 22 June. At the Soviet ambassador that
offered to send a military
Stalin's wishful thinking Stalin
by then had
a plethora
of evidence that German (with Romanian and Finnish) forces
stood ready in millions to attack Russia's western frontier. Yet in the face of it to his belief
Western
and hope
ill-will.
that every
unwelcome
interpretation of the facts
Cripps appears to have been so baffled by
consistently represented
to
it
London
Stalin's wishful
proof of Russia's intention
as
ultimatum. In that judgement he was, of course, half
right.
fruit
of
German
Since the failure of Russia's earlier, Stalin
was
chastened mood. Badly frightened also by the Hess mission, which he insisted on
seeing as an attempt by Hitler to Stalin
had reverted
make peace with
Britain so that
he could
now concerned most
of
all
grain
and metals,
as
by
strict
throughout June; what was to prove the
quota, final
Germany by
to placate Hitler
meticulous fulfilment of the economic terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop oil,
attack Russia,
to his earlier policy, fixed in August 1939, of dealing with
granting her concessions, and he was
of
he clung
thinking that he
to yield to a
diplomatic offensive against Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Turkey four months in
all
was the
by
a
Pact. Train-loads
continued to pour across the frontier
delivery crossed in the early hours of 22 June
itself.
In this climate
of appeasement, the Red Army's commanders, denied access to
reliable intelligence ('reliable' intelligence, in Stalin's topsy-turvy world,
deemed offending
'unreliable',
their
measures. M.
P.
as
Professor John
was automatically
Erickson has demonstrated), and fearful of
were prevented from taking any precautionary
timorous
warlord,
Kirponos,
commander of
the Kiev military
180
district,
who was
to
show
BARBAROSSA
himself the most independent-minded of Stalin's generals in the weeks before Barbarossa (and
who
died in the great encirclement battle
outcome of
Stalin's blindness),
was reported by the
NKVD
local
at
Kiev in September which was the worst
deployed some of
his units to the frontier in early June,
to Beria, Stalin's secret policeman, for 'provocation'
required to countermand the order. In mid-June,
when he
tried to
no
war.' This
was not merely
positions again, he was
flatly told,
On
consumption.
for private
Soviet national
'There will be
Germany
his defensive a
statement
14 June, eight days before the launching of Barbarossa, the
newspapers printed
the intention of
man
and
government statement
a
'rumours of
to the effect that
[Molotov-Ribbentrop] Pact are completely without
to break the
movements of German troops which have completed their Germany are connected, it must be supposed, with other motives which have nothing to do with Soviet-German foundation, while the recent
operations in the Balkans to the eastern and northern parts of
On
relations.'
14
June
in 'eastern
and northern
parts
of Germany', which meant those parts
of Poland and Czechoslovakia captured or annexed between 1938 and 1939, nearly 4
German
million
supported by 2000
aircraft,
Romanian
fourteen
organised in 180 divisions, with 3350 tanks and 7200 guns
troops,
stood ready to march to war. They were to be accompanied by
divisions
and shortly
puppet Slovak armies, together with
a
To those Russian commanders
divisions.
to
be joined by the Finnish, Hungarians and
volunteer Spanish (the 'Blue') and several in the front line
who
Italian
sensed the massing of this
mighty host and asked for orders, advice, even reassurance from above, the answer, at Minsk was 'always the same - "Don't
the chief of artillery
Kilch,
recalled,
In reality, Stalin
and persisted lines.
was
as surprised as
in refusing to face facts
When Timoshenko,
offensive issue a
lines
into Russia
would begin
at
primary Wehrmacht objective),
even
Take
avoid complications.'
and
as the
21 June,
that a
Leningrad,
Baltic,
about
it.'"
moved
attack units
to their start-
arrived
staff,
at
the
with news that the Germans had cut the
German
news
deserter had brought
still
it
Implacably Zhukov confronted him with
was too
draft
a
some minor amendments,
directive did not order mobilisation it
Western, Kiev and Odessa military
nor
fully alert
began
to
in
the
early to .
.
.
order to
directive
for
Stalin signed.
the border troops to
reached them too districts
that
be settled peacefully.
must not be incited by any provocation,
the danger in which they stood. In any case,
fell
German
four o'clock next morning, Stalin replied that
districts
bitterly
later all
any subordinate by the unleasing of Barbarossa,
preparatory measures and, after insisting on
However, the
knows
easy. 'The boss'
warning order. He mused, 'Perhaps the question can
The troops of the border
the
it
Defence Commissar, and Zhukov, chief of
Kremlin on the evening of Saturday, telephone
(a
panic.
as
late.
man
Even
as the
their defences,
German offensive was upon them. Mass air raids and a gigantic artillery bombardment upon airfields and fortified zones. Behind this wall of fire the German army in the east,
the Ostheer, Its
moved
to the attack.
three masses -
Army Groups North
(Leeb), Centre (Bock)
and South (Rundstedt)
- were each aligned on one of the historic invasion routes which led into European Russia,
181
THE WAR
Moscow and
towards Leningrad,
IN
THE EAST
1941-194?
Kiev respectively. The
followed the coast of the
first
Baltic,
through territory Germanised by Teutonic knights and Hanseatic traders for 500
years;
from
it
came many of
the families which had officered the Prussian and
who were
armies throughout their history. Manstein and Guderian, greatest eastern victories,
descended from landowners of those
was
to
win
to
Leningrad
20 July 1944, was married to a
woman
by Napoleon
in
formerly Polish
kill
born
Neman. The second route was
the river
Hitler his
who
parts; Stauffenberg,
by the narrowest of margins to
fail
German
at
on Kovno on Hitler
followed
that
running through the ancient,
1812,
of Minsk and Smolensk. The
cities
POLAND
demarcated by the
third,
of the
crest
Carpathian
A
South
mountains HUNGARY'rx'")/
and
south
the
in
from
separated
the
northern and central routes by the huge freshwater
swamp of Leningrad
Germany
Wehrmacht
the Pripet, 'the
would
army
call
hole',
since
it,
no
as
the
military
To Archangel
operations were possible within the 40,000 square miles it
covered), led into the black-earth country of the
Ukraine, Russia's wheatbowl and the gateway to the great industrial,
mining and oil-bearing regions of the
Donetz, the Volga and the Caucasus.
The
Pripet
Marshes
To Archangel
these routes. Russia's
They
rivers,
rivers, as
their
much more
offer
little
natural barrier stood
their objectives
are crossed,
enormous
Dnieper, but
no
apart,
between the Germans and
it
is
true,
on any of
by several of
notably the Dvina and the
the French had discovered in
defensible country the previous year,
obstacle to aggressively led armies, less
still if
the armies are mechanised and supported by airpower. In the vast spaces of the steppe, the Russian rivers
mere
Bucharest
Above:
Plan, August
and
in
in
in
armoured advance. The The evolution of
conquer the Soviet Union.
drives
interruptions
1.
the plan
through Belorussia
the south towards Kiev. 2.
The
liquefy
Russia's
dirt
roads,
summer
crowding the bulk of
drive
was
Lenin-
narrow
Kiev. 3. Hitler's variant (Barbarossa) of
belt
December 1940; the emphasis moved
main
with
at
target.
first
Leningrad
high,
their standing
army
into
by the
streng-
thened at the expense of the advance on
north,
rail
were better protection.
for their onslaught, while the Russians,
added a third major thrust,
The Moscow
for
of the road and
However, the Germans had deliberately chosen dry
grad.
were
suited
network, and the spring and autumn floods which
Haider variant, December 1940, which to
sparsity
ideally
to
The Marcks
1940, placing the main
the north
country
becoming
the
The southern operation was
intended only to occupy the west-
frontier
zone behind the thin and incomplete
of fortifications called the
Stalin Line, liberated the
Wehrmacht from dependence on a road network to make rapid ground into their rear. The shallowest of penetrations would suffice to put the Russian 'fronts' (as
ern Ukraine.
182
BARBAROSSA:
22
JUNE-
30
SEPTEMBER
1941
Lake LadogaN
Key
SWEDEN
AAA
Stalin Line
^—^—
Front
line 21
Front
line
ront
line
I
ront
line
30 September
June 1941
9 July
September
Russian counter-attacks
Trapped Russian pockets
North-Western Front (Voroshilov)
• Vyazma
• Kaluga
Western Front (Timoshenko)
Novgorod
l» Kon °;°p #
Sevastopol
(
BLACK SEA
183
Severski
• Kursk
South-Western Front (Budenny)
THE WAR
THE EAST
IN
1941-1943
army groups were designated) between the Panzers'
their
devoured almost
at leisure
jaws; thereafter they could be
by the columns of marching infantry following
in the tanks'
wake.
armour and committed to the largest encirclement mission was Army whose spearheads were Panzer Groups 3 and 2, commanded by Hoth and orders were to encircle as much of the Russian army in White Russia as
Strongest in
Group
Centre,
Guderian.
Its
hug
possible, hack or
to death,
it
and then press forward
between the headwaters of the Dvina and Dnieper road passes to Moscow.
on
the
Its
attack
was prepared by the
morning of 22 June destroyed 528 Russian quarter of
a
to secure the 'land bridge'
by which the Minsk-Smolensk
aircraft
aircraft
by the end of the day, across the whole front of the machines,
rivers
on
of Second Air
Fleet,
which
the ground and 210 in the
attack, the
Red
had
Air Force
air;
1200
lost
front-line strength.
its
Hoth's and Guderian's Panzers were simultaneously pressing through the Stalin Line. Brest-Litovsk, the frontier fortress city in
three years earlier, was isolated
Corps, described
mortar
For
fire'.
week
it
was
to
which the Germans had dictated peace twenty-
first
fortress as 'literally
its
a
on the
day; V.
covered
Bock, the
it
fell
it
their
first
defenders
to
it
to
garrison;
Centre, was nevertheless misled by the tenacity of
believe
that
they
were covering the withdrawal of
OKH
that his
On
24 June he
Panzer groups should abandon their mission to close
of pincers around Minsk, 200 miles from their
set
its
and
had been by-passed and the German
neighbouring Russian defenders towards the Dnieper-Dvina 'land bridge'. accordingly put
Rifle
artillery
far to its east.
commanding Army Group
Brest-Litovsk
Popov, commanding the XXVIII over with uninterrupted
be defended heroically by the survivors of
but their sacrifice was irrelevant. By the time
spearheads were ranging
S.
all
start-line,
and proceed
immediately towards Smolensk. Haider, not yet accustomed to the headless-chicken behaviour of Soviet troops at this - for them - almost leaderless stage of the war, and
Group 3 might press too deep and get cut off, refused. Hoth therefore turned inwards on 24 June. As he did so, Guderian's Panzer Group 2 began to feel the pressure of Russian troops deflected southwards by Hoth against his flank, fearing that Hoth's Panzer
apparently seeking to escape into the Pripet Marshes where, by Haider's estimation, they
might form
a
behind' arm)
'stay
and menace the German follow-up forces
as
they
advanced to consolidate the ground the Panzers had won. Accordingly he ordered Fourth
and Ninth Armies extending pincers
By 25 June, encirclement
German
to destroy these fugitives trapped as fast as their infantry
therefore,
battles:
Arm)
between Hoth's and Guderian's
formations could be brought forward.
Group Centre was
fighting
no
less
than
three
one, the smallest in scale, around Brest-Litovsk; one in the salient of
assault pioneers
embankment on
the
and infantry wait first
for the signal
to
attack in the shelter of a railway
day of Barbarossa. Three million
Barbarossa, behind
3300
German
tanks and supported by over
184
troops
7000
went into
guns.
%
.
'
*\
,„.
*
.-.
m+
?*gt
3**?
1
7
THE WAR
Bialystok, the
most senseless of the
Red Army; and one
at
when Army Group
battles,
in
which
had marooned the
Stalin
Bialystok
at
and
Centre's infantry had released the Panzer
advance, a fourth encirclement battle - threatening the destruction of
a further
another fifteen divisions - was
These
meanders
frontier
Volkovysk. Twelve divisions were surrounded
Volkovysk; by 29 June,
groups for
THE EAST mi-1943
IN
in progress
around Minsk.
moreover, were being fought with
a brutality
and ruthlessness not
yet
World War, perhaps not seen in Europe since the struggle in the Ottoman wars of the sixteenth century. Not only did many encircled Russians, unlike all but the most intransigent Frenchmen, fight with the tenacity of despair; they were attacked by the Germans with a pitiless ferocity that no displayed in the Second
between
Christians
and Muslims
Norwegian, Belgian, Greek or even Yugoslav soldier had yet had to
face. Hitler
tone of the campaign. In an address to his generals on 30 March
1941
The war
against Russia will
the struggle
is
be such
that
one of ideologies and
it
and
will
with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.
themselves of obsolete ideologies.
rid
making war
beyond
is
the
I
know
set the
he had warned:
cannot be conducted in
racial differences
had
a knightly fashion;
have to be conducted
All officers will
that the necessity for
comprehension of your generals but
...
have to
such means of I
insist that
my
orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly liquidated.
opposed
German
Russia has not participated in the
under
commissars
to National Socialism. Therefore the
soldiers guilty of breaking international law
.
.
.
will
will
be
be excused.
Hague Convention and therefore has no
rights
it.
The Soviet Union had indicated on 20 August 1940 its desire to accede to the Hague Convention - which since 1907 had regulated the treatment of prisoners and noncombatants soldiers
war - but the approach was
in
tentative: after
22 June
1941, therefore,
its
were protected by none of the Hague or Geneva provisions which spared those of
signatory
it was not only commissars who were Omar Bartov has shown, the anti-Bolshevik Wehrmacht's members, many of whom in 1941 had grown up under
powers from mistreatment. As
a result,
subjected to 'special treatment'; as Professor indoctrination of the
Nazism, resulted in the arbitrary massacre of prisoners from the
commander of
start
of the campaign. The
XLVIII Panzer Corps, for example, was obliged to protest to his soldiers
only three days after the campaign had begun that 'senseless shootings of both prisoners
and
civilians
have taken place.
ing a uniform,
and
after
A
Russian soldier
he put up
a
brave
who
fight,
days later he was forced to circulate the corps again: deserters have ner. This
is
been observed, conducted
in
murder.' But his strictures were
Russian prisoners
become
at
has been taken prisoner while wear-
has the right to decent treatment.' Five 'Still
more shootings of prisoners and
an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manfruitless.
So
common
did the mistreatment of
the very outset of Barbarossa that by early 1942 another Ger-
186
BARBAROSSA
man
formation, the 12th Infantry Division, was warning
were 'more
November the
last
news equalled
own
year
enemy
.
.
only a few deserters have
.
few prisoners
a
importance only by
from
fighting hard, while
the course of the
all
word of is
It
effect.
During
year of the campaign, victims
first
made
for feeding,
soldier fears
German
'a
stiffening
a
1941.
While
trans-
circulated inside
of the enemy's resistance because
captivity'.
their Russian
effort to beat a fighting retreat
housing and
document
Germans alone were
Systematic maltreatment was, however, a secret to which
June and July
surprising;
Second World War, the Wehrmacht took 5,700,000 Russians prisoner; of
the Grossdeutschland Division in April 1943, was
in
Since
.
wounded in the army's the wounded discourages
for
porting such myriads. The result, succinctly summarised in
Army
.
rate for
poor prognosis
of the lack of provision the Wehrmacht had
every Red
was not
bad treatment of captives has the opposite
these 3,300,000 died in captivity, the majority in the
above
.
over to us and during battles fierce
taken.' This
of the survival
that
hospitals - but with this difference:
soldiers
come
Red Army men
battlefield.
with lightning rapidity inside any army.
treats prisoners circulates
in
soldiers that
its
of falling prisoner than of a possible death on the
was put up and only
resistance
how
afraid
opponents fought doggedly, they made
out of encirclement, in part because their
privy little
commanders
feared the consequences of ordering any withdrawal - their conditioned fear of Stalin
would
shortly be validated
by the
part because they lacked the
institution
of summary executions for dereliction -
in
means of escape. The German infantry divisions were themup with the Panzer spearheads once they launched at this stage Barbarossa was following a pattern whereby
selves having great difficulty in catching
themselves into the blue;
armoured
divisions lunged forward at
miles a day, pausing only to deal with resistance
fifty
or take in supplies, while the plodding infantry laboured behind across the steppe
twenty miles sion
a
day or
marched 560
weight of 50
ceeded
lb
less.
in distance the
feet
for example, the 12th Infantry Divi-
miles, an average of fifteen miles a day,
all
under broiling sun and the
of equipment, ammunition and rations per man. This marathon greatly ex-
seems probable bloodied
Between 22 June and 28 July,
at
march on
that the
Paris
exhausted
made by von
Landser
Kluck's infantry in August 1914;
were sustained
in their agonising trek,
and wore shoulders raw, only by the knowledge
that the Panzers
it
which
were win-
Army had no such spur. of Stalin's disfavour and the NKVD's execution fight another day, they commonly hunkered
ning the battle ahead of them. The encircled soldiers of the Red
Commanded
by generals paralysed by
fear
squads, denied any prospect of living to
down in the pockets the Panzers drew around them and low when their last rounds were expended. By 9 July those
in the
awaited the end which would
Minsk pocket had capitulated
two armoured groups, now reorganised
as the
to
Army Group Centre, but its Army under the dynamic
Fourth Panzer
(and strongly Nazi) General Giinther von Kluge, were already pressing
complete
a
fourth encirclement
at
Smolensk. This pocket,
'land bridge' lay, contained by 17 July
some
187
fol-
in
far
beyond Minsk
to
which the Dnieper-Dvina
twenty-five Russian divisions, centred
on
V f
j»
jai^B?^T^^^B
nMIn
BARBAROSSA
Left:
A German 240-mm
howitzer, dismounted from
Russian fortifications in the southern front,
summer
of 1941.
its
travelling carriage, in action against
Above: A German armoured column on
autumn 1941, with a Panzer Mark
III
on the
the
right.
and Smolensk itself, the largest concentration of Russian numbers the Germans had yet corralled. Since Army Group Centre's infantry formations on the MinskSmolensk axis lay anything up to 200 miles behind its Panzer spearheads at this date, Bock, who was determined to 'clean up' his front in the shortest possible space of time, was now Vitebsk, Mogilev
obliged to
commit
his valuable
Panzer and motorised (soon to be renamed 'Panzergrena-
A cordon
of tanks, half-tracks and dismounted truck-
dier') divisions to close
combat.
borne
from the Panzer drive
infantry, diverted
down
strung round Smolensk between 17 and 25 July and
Russians
until,
on
5 August,
all
resistance
By then, however, Bock had grasped
came
to
the
Moscow
drawn ever
road,
tighter
was therefore
around the trapped
an end.
that his difficulty in closing the ring
simply to the resistance of the Russians within but also to
a
determined
was due not
effort
from with-
out to reinforce and resupply the trapped divisions. The Dnieper-Dvina gap, while
it
had
ammunition westward as fast as it could be sent by the high command. On 10 July the high command had been reorganised, as Stalin, recovering from the initial paralysis imposed by Blitzremained open, had been used
krieg,
recognised
how
as a 'land bridge' in reverse, to carry
troops and
inappropriate to war was the existing machinery.
189
He had
recently
THE WAR
THE EAST
IN
1941-1943
title of head of government; on 10 Jul) he created the post of Supreme which he had the Supreme Soviet appoint him on 7 August. The State
assumed the formal
Commander,
to
Defence Committee (GKO), consisting of for
Foreign
Affairs)
and Malenkov
June; directly subordinate to
on
10 July included Stalin,
it
deputy
all
Stalin
had been
in the party),
was the Stavka (Operations
set
up on 30
which when reorganised
Staff),
Molotov and Voroshilov from the party and Timoshenko,
Bud^nny, Shaposhnikov and Zhukov from the see
Voroshilov, Beria, Molotov (Commissar
Stalin,
(Stalin's
arm)'.
The General
extended to over-
Staff,
branches of the armed forces, was subordinated to the Stavka on 8 August. By then occupied all the highest appointments in the Soviet state - Chairman of the GKO,
Commander
Defence Commissar and Supreme
- and directly controlled
the
all
rest.
This
The odium of defeat now attached immediately to his person. However, so desperate was Russia's situation, after less than two months of war, that Stalin must have accepted he could not survive the consequences of further disaster. Victory self-elevation entailed risk.
alone could save him.
— There was almost no crisis
of the Soviet
shift
The
or expedient
state to assure
and the
carrot
its
which
at
new
Guards
had had the skin stripped from
units
Stalin
—
would not grasp in this supreme own. In September he decreed
survival - as well as his
the creation of officers
stick
of 'Guards', quintessential symbols of the
white gloves they had traditionally worn.
their
Now
hands
Stalin
ancien regime; in 1917
in revolutionary hatred
decreed
that regiments, divisions,
even armies which resisted the Germans most stoutly should add 'Guards'
New
distinctions
who had
in 1917.
two decades, was suddenly restored
era of collectivisation
on
all
16 July;
to their
titles.
after the generals
which had been torn from
esteem
to
who had
as the servant
of 'Mother
Russia',
violated her children without pity in the
on 27
stick.
The
'dual authority'
July an order sentencing nine senior
of the commissars was
officers to
death was read
and men. The condemned included the signals officer of the Western commanders of the Third and Fourth Armies and of the 30th and 60th Rifle
officers
Front and the
Divisions. Others
were shot
executioners of the
NKVD;
acquire in the Second all
named
and the purges.
But with the carrot went the
out to
victors,
Even the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, persecuted and
matriarch resurrected by the autocrat
restored
heroes and
to be revived, including the 'shoulder boards'
uniforms
vilified for
a
for
fought Napoleon: the Orders of Kutuzov and Suvorov. Old distinctions of rank
were soon officers'
were meanwhile created
of the
in secret, or its
World War -
spelt death to the defenceless
units to shoot deserters
simply committed suicide rather than face the
'Special Sections'
(how
terrible a
'special leader', 'special
and disfavoured) were deployed
190
'special'
'special treatment',
in the rear
and menace with machine-guns those
quitting their posts.
meaning did
command',
who
of the fighting
even thought of
BARBAROSSA
Yet the difficulty of sustaining resistance grew greater with every day of combat. three
10 July
had been
fronts
Western, under Timoshenko, and South-Western, under Budenny - to
Voroshilov,
correspond with the three German army groups attacking them. This was
command
of bringing under
identified; as a it
OKH reckoned
running check on
it
that estimate,
Army Group
dead about them, so tenaciously did the Russian gunners
committed
allow
him
soon
as
to battle, out of 240 mobilised;
Centre was able to
fight). Stalin
industry, suddenly
thrown
that
Hitler
if
would
were being used up
July),
taken, along with 3200 tanks
into high gear,
show
himself counted 180
he hoped eventually,
found: during the Smolensk encirclement battle (4-19
were
like chaff in the
(the majority with their crews
the time, to raise 350. At present, however, replacements
fourth, another 310,000 prisoners
was
scarcely
had destroyed 89 out of 164 Russian divisions
had captured 300,000 prisoners, 2500 tanks and 1400 guns
divisions
means
GKO
new men and equipment were
be found; while existing units and weapons were being consumed
furnace of battle. By 8 July,
a rational
the reinforcements and supplies which the
mobilising for the defence. In July 1941, however, to
On
up - North-Western, nominally commanded by
set
Army Group
as
Centre's
and 3100 guns. Russian
was producing 1000 tanks
month
a
(and 1800
but losses exceeded these figures.
aircraft)
As
Army Group
Centre completed
and Twentieth Armies of advance along the Leeb's spearheads disposal
in the
its
destruction of the Soviet Sixteenth, Nineteenth
Smolensk pocket, Army Group North was accelerating
Baltic coast
towards Leningrad. Lakes, forests and
rivers
the outset. Although he had only three Panzer divisions
at
and he achieved no encirclement
as spectacular as Bock's,
its
rate
had impeded at
his
by 30 June Army Group
North had occupied Lithuania and secured bridgeheads across the lower reaches of the Dvina where the arrived
at
Ostrov,
Stalin
on
Line was supposed to run. Racing through
Latvia's pre-1940 frontier
with Russia, and ten days
Luga, only sixty miles from Leningrad and the
Army Group South had
Commanded
by Rundstedt,
thirteen
months
German
infantry led
earlier,
it
initially
who had
by the
was
made slower
capital
vanguards passed
five
armoured
German
infantry
Meuse
1,
and, to the south,
divisions,
Little
equipped with
Entente.
city
of Russian
civilisation.
through the Soviet frontier defences, swamping the
one of Stalin's
of the Soviet
191
in 1914-15.
to the
satellite
It
Rundstedt's fortifications
then ran up against a
South-Western Front, under the
whose political commissar was Nikita Communist Party, with the outstanding
best generals, Kirponos,
First Secretary
The
and Bug and capture Odessa and the
and tanks marched deep into the steppe
major concentration of Soviet force belonging Khrushchev, the future
Group
divisions of Panzer
of Przemysl, which had sustained siege for 194 days
direction of
city.
progress than Centre and North.
Romanian and Hungarian
of the Ukraine and founding
easily
stood on the
directed the great breakthrough across the
to cross the rivers Dniester
Black Sea ports, while the
towards Kiev,
later
major water obstacle outside the
last
French weapons supplied during the years of the
divisions' mission
Panzer Group 4
consisted of two disparate blocs, a northern masse de manoeuvre of
the allied contingent formed of inferior
it.
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST mi-1943
as one of his tank commanders. The South-Western Front was armoured formations - it contained six mechanised corps - and had a
General K. K. Rokossovsky particular)' strong in
high proportion of the T-34s in service. Kirponos determined to deal with Rundstedt's absolutely correct fashion, by pinching the spearheads of Kleist's Panzer
Blitzkrieg in 1
between concentric
mounted by
attacks
Group
the Fifth and Sixth Armies; Fifth, operating out
had a firm base for its thrust; Sixth, whose open steppe, did not. Although both armies pressed their attacks, their pincers never met and Kleist pushed between to capture Lvov (as Lemberg the Austrian capital of Galicia until 1918, then a Polish city until 1939) on 30 June. The commander of the garrison was General A. A. Vlasov, who managed to fight his way out on this occasion; a year later he would fall into German hands near Leningrad and defect, to set up the 'Vlasov Arm}' of anti-Stalinists. His loyalty to the regime may have been of the impenetrable marshes of the positions
were
Pripet,
in the
shaken. during the evacuation of Lvov, political prisoners rather
than
Kirponos persisted
let
his
in
when
them be
NKVD
massacred
its
Ukrainian
Germans.
mount 'pinching' operations against Kleist's power of the Panzers and the flail of the Luftwaffe
efforts
Panzers on 29 June and 9 July; but the
the local
liberated by the
to
kept Rundstedt's spearhead moving forward, increasingly constricted within a narrow axis
of advance, to be
On ft
11 Jul}'
known
Kirponos held
was there decided
as the 'Zhitomir Corridor', but a
command
that the Fifth
conference
and
at
reaching inexorably towards Kiev.
Brovary, only ten miles east of the
Armies - shadows of
Sixth
their
former
despite constant reinforcement and re-equipment - should continue to hack
approaching Germans.
He was counting on
the arrival of
a
commander.' As the
South-Western Front dispersed from the conference, headquarters came under heavy
danger to which
indeed
his
his failure to
German
air attack.
in
the
John Erickson, what he had
heard disturbed him: 'short of weapons, horse-drawn guns, disorganised
XXVII Corps] only one division had
at
two new corps, LX1V and XXVII,
to lend weight to their efforts, though, according to Professor
sets; [in
city,
selves,
staffs,
no
wireless
military soviet of the
gloom approaching
despair, the
Kirponos had already glimpsed the
pinch off Kleist's penetration of his front exposed Kiev, and
whole command: Panzer Group
l's
advance
now
constituted
one arm of
a
Germans bring down tanks from the north, from Bock's Army Group Centre, a second pincer arm would be created and he, his men and the whole of the Ukraine would be enveloped within it. counter-pincers; should the
The question of Moscow The same thought was simultaneously exercising Hitler. He and the arm)' high command had differed in their view of how the Russian campaign should be fought from the moment of initial planning a year earlier. Their differences had been significantly reconciled in the Barbarossa directive of Haider,
still
December 1940. But OKH, and particularly power could best be overcome by driving
believed that the Russians' fighting
192
BARBAROSSA
Moscow, while Hitler was above all anxious to seize as much Russian territory one gulp, devouring the Russians defending it in giant encirclements on the way. His confidence as a commander, however, was rapidly increasing. He had left the headlong
at
as possible in
conduct of the Polish campaign
and had
to his generals,
largely
been talked
into the
Scandinavian invasions by Admiral Raeder. Before and during the campaign in the west he
had given
his generals orders but
had
from severe
also suffered
of indecision and
attacks
second thoughts, notably outside Dunkirk. Since the inception of Barbarossa, however, he
had found an increasing triumphantly, and as Fiihrer's interference
he enlarged on
is
certitude.
It
was
in the fullest sense his war,
course developed he grew overbearing in
its
becoming
a regular nuisance,'
wrote Haider on
its
had
it
started
direction. 'The
14 July; a
little later,
theme:
this
He's playing warlord again and bothering us with such absurd ideas that he's risking everything our wonderful operations so Russians won't just run away
when
far
defeated in a terrain that's half forest and marsh.
over to him
[Hitler's
have
is
there's only
faith ... I'd
.
tactically defeated; .
Every other day
.
one man
go under
like
who
entities].
Hours of
how
understands
I
have to go
gibberish,
wage wars
to
Brauchitsch [the army C-in-C] who's
and hides behind an iron mask of manliness so
tether
they have to be
now
headquarters and those of OKH, though close to each other
Rastenburg in East Prussia, were separate
outcome
have won. Unlike the French the
been
they've
as
at
and the
... if
the
at
I
didn't
end of his
not to betray his complete
helplessness.
Hitler's differences
issued a
new
tions.
laid
ian),
It
were
to
with Haider and
OKH
emerged
into the
open on
19 July
when he
Fiihrer Directive, No. 33, outlining his conception of the next stage of opera-
down
that
Army Group
Centre's
be diverted from the drive on
two Panzer groups,
Moscow
3
(Hoth) and 2 (Guder-
to co-operate respectively with
A supplement,
Leeb
on 23
advances on Leningrad and July, home. The drive on Moscow was postponed until mopping-up operations around Smolensk had been completed. In amplification of this order, Brauchitsch issued orders to Army Group Centre which Guderian was called to hear at a conference at
and Rundstedt
rammed
in their
issued
the point
Novi Borisov on 26 lead
Kiev.
July.
them southwards
There he was directed to take
to destroy the Soviet Fifth
his tanks off the
Army on
Moscow
road and
the fringe of the Pripet Marshes.
Guderian was outraged. His divisions had been reduced by heavy fighting and long traverses of roadless country to 50 per cent of their tank strength.
On
the other hand, his
leading elements, which had already advanced 440 miles in six weeks, stood only 220
miles from
Moscow
and, in the period of dry weather that could be guaranteed before the
coming of the autumn rains, might certainly be led to reach the capital. As he had been promoted to the status of army commander at Novi Borisov, he was also now independent of Kluge (for whom he nursed a reciprocated antipathy) and so answerable
193
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST l<>41-m3
whose views coincided with his own. With Bock's acquiescence, in which joined, he therefore embarked on a delaying operation to frustrate Hitler's re-
directly to Bock,
OKH
tacitly
ordering of the Barbarossa strategy.
named
Army Guderian)
Panzer
took the form of involving his Panzer group
It
in a battle for the
town of Roslavl, seventy miles
(re-
south-east
of Smolensk, where the roads to Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad met. His purpose was to entangle his forces so deeply with the Russian defenders that the justification for their diversion to
towards
Rundstedt would be overtaken by events and so allow him to proceed
assist
Moscow
ordered.
as originally
Guderian's disguised insubordination almost worked. His argument for heightening the pressure
were
at
was validated by the appearance of Russian reserves
Roslavl
Timoshenko by
sent to
now
Stalin
his only source
from the
training units
and
hastily
embodied
in that sector, militias
Fiihrer Directive No. 34, issued
on 30
Jul)',
he postponed the diversion of Army Group
Centre's Panzer groups to assist their tank-poor neighbours and arranged to
Group Centre on 4 August but
know
arguments sisted his
for
it,
strike against
its
him
for
to assess
its
situation for himself (a
visit
Army
dangerous excursion, did he
headquarters was the focus of the 'military resistance' which would
in July 1944).
Hoth, commanding Panzer Group
going to the assistance of Leeb on the Leningrad
arguments
which
of fresh troops. Moreover, Hitler had had second thoughts. In
for joining Rundstedt.
3,
axis.
accepted the Fiihrer's
Bock and Guderian
There followed what has been called
re-
a 'nine-
teen-day interregnum' during which Guderian edged southwards but attempted to retain the bulk of his striking force
on the Moscow
road.
The 'nineteen-day interregnum' (4-24 August), which ma}' well have spared Stalin defeat in 1941, was characterised not only by slow German progress on all fronts but also by
a
succession of changes of mind.
On
7 August,
OKW and OKH conferred,
and Jodl and
Haider were able to persuade Hitler of the need to resume the advance on Moscow,
which resulted
in Fiihrer Directive
No. 34A. Three days
later
he took
fright at
renewed
re-
on the Leningrad front and insisted that Hoth's tanks depart immediately to Leeb's assistance. The Fiihrer, Jodl told Colonel Adolf Heusinger, the OKW operations officer, 'has an intuitive aversion from treading the same path as Napoleon; Moscow gives him a sistance
sinister feeling.' at
OKW, Bock
demonstrated
how
When
the
whole chain of command - Brauchitsch, Haider and Heusinger
Army Group
at
that
it
Centre, Guderian as Bock's principal field
was continuing
North and South should proceed accusing der,
of
him of a
who had
folly'. It
was refused;
made of a
He
recovered his sense of
repeated his orders that
to their objectives
and dictated
-
Army Groups
a letter to Brauchitsch
lack of 'the necessary grip'. Brauchitsch suffered a mild heart attack. Hai-
urged him to resign Hitler,
ordination. Haider nevertheless
can be
who had
to prevaricate, Hitler,
the campaign was unfolding, lost patience.
commander
high
when
now felt
the letter arrived, did so himself 'to stave off an act
as later, treated offers
of resignation
as acts
of insub-
that 'history will level at us the gravest accusation that
command, namely
that for fear
attacking impetus of our troops.' Bock, in his diary,
194
of undue
echoed
risk
we
did not exploit the
his frustration:
'I
don't want to
BARBAROSSA
Moscow".
"capture
of me.' Both
left
it
I
want
to destroy the
enemy's army and the bulk of that army
is in front
nevertheless to their subordinate Guderian to confront the Fiihrer with
Overcome by Guderian's exposition of what he believed to be the strategically correct path, when Haider visited Bock's headquarters on 23 August Bock telephoned Schmundt, Hitler's Wehrmacht adjutant, with a request for Guderian 'to be granted audience', while Haider agreed to take him back to OKW in his the boldest statement of their anxiety.
liaison aircraft.
Arriving in time to
make
the
onward journey
to the
Rastenburg evening conference
(Hitler
had recently
night),
Guderian was greeted by Brauchitsch with the news:
meeting
instituted a timetable for
noon and mid-
his staff officers at 'I
you
forbid
mention the
to
question of Moscow to the Fiihrer. The operation to the south [the Kiev attack] has been ordered. The problem
now
is
how
simply
it
to
is
be carried out. Discussion
in the
hints about the 'major objective'
on Army Group Centre's
raised
it
is
pointless.'
course of the confrontation dropped so
Guderian grudgingly obeyed, but
many
front that Hitler eventually-
himself Given his chance, Guderian launched into an impassioned plea for sus-
taining the drive
on Moscow. He was heard
out; Hitler
had
a special regard for the
Panzer
pioneer, which had recently been reinforced by his acceptance of Guderian's warnings of Russia's unanticipated tank strength.
went on
to the offensive. His
However, when the general had spoken, the Fiihrer
commanders, he
said,
'know nothing about the economic
aspects of war'; he explained the necessity of seizing Russia's southern
from Kiev
economic zone
Kharkov, and emphasised the importance of capturing the Crimea, from
to
which the Soviet many's natural
oil
air
force
menaced Hungary's
Ploesti region,
the leader, and Brauchitsch and Haider had pointedly not
the
still
made
supply. Since the other officers present
main source of Ger-
clear that they
it
supported
accompanied him, Guderian
felt
obliged to desist from opposition. The only concession he extracted was that his Panzer
group should be committed to support Rundstedt the
Moscow
axis as
soon
as the battle for
in recriminations to his face
him
to
now
when he
Bock on the telephone during
cast.
After nearly three
in
and allowed
entirety
to return to
Kiev was won. Haider and Brauchitsch were loud
returned to
his
its
homeward
weeks of inertia, the
OKH
from
flight to
Ostheer
OKW,
and Haider
vilified
Novi Borisov. But the die was
was
to
resume the
attack with a
Whether it could then complete its thrust towards Moscow would depend on the seasons. The descent of the cold weather was only two and a half months distant and then Generals January and full-blooded offensive into the black-earth region of the south.
February would be fighting on Stalin,
Stalin's side.
however, was already planning
created the Bryansk Front, under A.
I.
a counter-offensive.
Yeremenko,
to close the
On
16
August he had
gap which had appeared
between the Central and South-Western Commands (temporary headquarters superior fronts).
To
this
new
front
he consigned
spared, several T-34 tank battalions and the
Germans
called
them) which
as
much of the new
some
batteries
Soviet
equipment
of Katyusha rockets
as
to
could be
('Stalin
organs'
fired eight fin-stabilised projectiles with very large war-
195
THE WAR
heads. With these
menko attempted
IN
weapons and two new
THE EAST
1941-1943
armies, the Thirteenth and Twenty-First, Yere-
which yawned between Rundstedt's
to counter-attack into the gap
armoured spearhead, supplied by Kleist's Panzer Group 1, and Guderian's Panzer Army, approaching from the north. He was simply putting his head into a trap. Kleist had already pulled off
a successful
verging Panzer groups
encirclement of 100,000 Russians
now
Uman on
at
stretched out their pincers to enclose the
concentration around Kiev. Guderian,
who
Moscow
axis,
was vulnerable
16
a future
army group commander, and
in the desert against the British,
September joined hands with
Kiev.
It
would
Kleist's
tank force
to
von Thoma, who was
filter.
at
Lokhvitsa, a
the gaps in
all
walls through
its
However, on 26 September
closed and 665,000 Russian soldiers were prisoners within
been destroyed, uncounted thousands an ambush close to his
final
his
killed;
command
at
Air Fleets sat-
had been securely en-
it
fifty
Lokhvitsa
divisions
had
wounded
on 20 September.
The aftermath of the Kiev encirclement yielded the worst of the
among
of
which escaping
they included Kirponos, mortally
post
east
- the largest single mass ever
it
taken in an operation of war before or since. Five Russian armies and
in
make
to
hundred miles
which the Second and Fourth
take another ten days, during
managed
slic-
generals, Walter
brooked no opposition. They drove forward and on
urated the pocket with bombs, to close
handfuls of Russians
Ritter
to a Russian
young
ing stroke; but his 3rd and 17th Panzer Divisions, led by thrusting
name
larger Russian
offered an exposed flank eventually 150 miles
long as he beat his way southward from the
Model,
The con-
8 August.
much
German conquerors,
spectacles
which
were marched back across the steppe to the wholly inadequate prisoner cages in the rear. 'We suddenly saw a broad, earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us,' horrified even the hardest-hearted
recorded an eyewitness. 'From of war, Russians,
six
deep.
.
.
.
it
came
rounded them, then what we saw
Were
these really
towards only
us,
some
human
a
We made
the
subdued hum,
transfixed us
beings,
of will to
live
from
way of the
a beehive. Prisoners
foul cloud
where we stood and we
which
sur-
forgot our nausea.
these grey-brown figures, these shadows lurching
stumbling and staggering, moving shapes
last flicker
like that
haste out of the
as the captives
at their last
gasp, creatures
enabled to obey the order to march?
All the
which
misery of
seemed to be concentrated there.' Nearly 3 million Russians had now been taken prisoner and of these half a million would die, of lack of shelter or food, in the first three months of the approaching winter. the world
'General Winter' The sense of the approaching winter had already in late
September, with
blizzards
threat
and snowdrifts which
Guderian was hastening
open
its
the final drive
his
its
first
started to
touch the whole of the
of liquefied roads and swollen
men and equipment were
Panzer army back to the central
on Moscow before the
Ostheer
then of
equally unprepared to meet.
front,
weather broke. To
196
rivers,
burning with anxiety to
the south, the
Romanians
BARBAROSSA
were
which was defended by
laying siege to Odessa,
a hastily constituted Special
Maritime
Army of 100,000 men and would not fall until 16 October, and the Eleventh Army, commanded by Erich von Manstein, was pushing on across the estuary of the Dnieper to reach the neck of the Crimea on 29 September. That thrust largely settled Hitler's fear that
bombardment of the
the Crimea might be turned into an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the
Hungarian
Manstein's advance also brought the coastal industrial region of the
oilfields.
Donetz and the Don under
on
unloosening of the Red Army's grip
threat. Nevertheless, the
striking force on the central on Moscow did not constitute a comprehensive solution to the development of the Barbarossa strategy. The unlocking of the northern front and the investment and eventual capture of Leningrad were also a necessary stage in the conquest. Army Group North's concerted effort to take Leningrad had begun on 8 August with
renewed
front for a
a
and the reassembly of Bock's
Russia's southern provinces
determined
which was Karelia -
drive
on the
assault
line
annexed by was
first
defeat of Finland in 1940 -
Circle. Leeb's offensive
Leningrad
that the
370
ditch,
city
defences,
and extending
was complicated by three
far
factors.
and any encirclement from the north. The
command had
concentric defence lines around the anti-tank
city's
Leningrad was protected from the rear by Lake Ladoga, an enormous
that
body of water interposing between the second was
of the
line
Finnish-German offensive across the isthmus of
after the
Stalin
northward towards the Arctic
The
of the river Luga, the outermost
to be co-ordinated with a
city,
mobilised the
entanglement and
of barbed-wire
miles
population to construct
city's
including 620 miles of earthworks, 400 miles of
members of
5000 pillboxes - an
Young Communist numbers to men, were committed. The third factor was that Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, was determined, even at this low point in Soviet fortunes, to give no hostages by capturing more territory than that to which he had title. While Leeb laboured forward along the extraordinary labouring effort to which 300,000
League and 200,000
civilian inhabitants,
Mannerheim's Finnish
Baltic coast, therefore,
September,
when
including
women
hung
units
Centre. Hoepner's Panzer
A Zhukov,
fire
above Lake Ladoga
after 5
Army Group Centre were returned to Army Group
the tanks of Hoth's Panzer group, detached from
following the Hitler-Guderian conclave of 23 August,
take the
the
in equal
Group 4 was
left
by
itself to
breach Leningrad's
fortifications
and
city.
fourth
impediment
who had
to Leeb's Leningrad
Blitzkrieg
advised Stalin to abandon Kiev before
had been dismissed
as chief
to energise the defences.
of
staff,
He found
arrived
the
at
it
emerged
in
the North-Western Front
Germans on
mid-September.
was encircled and
on
for his pains
13
September
the outskirts of the old tsarist capital;
Tsarskoe Selo (now called Pushkin), the Russian Versailles, had fallen on 10 September
enchanting
and
follies
imported Western
pavilions, like those of the Peking
architects,
were
Summer
to perish in a conflagration
caused by the invaders).
Shortly afterwards Leeb's vanguards reached the Gulf of Finland isolated
from the
rest
(its
Palace designed by
at
Strelna. Leningrad,
of Russia by the Finnish advance to the 1939 frontier and by Leeb's
197
THE WAR
occupation of the
Baltic littoral,
The
across Lake Ladoga. constriction kill a
now
lifeline
THE EAST
1941-1943
connected with the
was tenuous and
and would shortly begin
million of them before the
IN
to experience the
lifting
interior only
Under
the
of the siege in the spring of 1944. In the immediate
and mortar
artillery
penetration of the defences'.
felt
pangs of starvation which would
term, however, Zhukov's arrival had achieved a decisive
smother the enemy with
by the water route
Leningraders quickly
erratic;
effect.
and
fire
air
command,
his resolute
His
first
order was permitting
support,
'to
no
the energy of Hoepner's
Panzer assaults was broken in the lines of trenches and concrete that the citizens of
Leningrad had constructed. The situation has 'worsened considerably', Leeb reported to the Fiihrer's headquarters
stopped'; the
city,
of 4000
inflicting a toll
canals
and
with
its
civilian casualties a
classical palaces
took part in the
on 24 September; Finnish pressure in Karelia had 'quite 3 million inhabitants, was intact. German bombardment was
final assault. Hitler
Group 4 must be diverted
but the great
had already decided
that the bulk
enceinte
OKW had
and
of
Only twenty tanks
of Hoepner's Panzer
Moscow.
which resolved the ambiguity of the Barbarossa
OKH
direction since
its
fires;
to the Panzer thrust.
to the climacteric Operation Taifun (Typhoon), to take
Fiihrer Directive No. 35,
inherent in
day and starting 200
remained impervious
strategy
each presented their conception of the
on 6 September. It laid down that, following the encirclement and destruction of the Red Army on the front of Army Group Centre, Bock was 'to begin the advance on Moscow with [his] right flank on the Oka and [his] left campaign's conduct
on the Upper
year earlier, was issued
a
Volga'. Panzer
Group 4 brought from effort on the Moscow
Groups
2
and
3
were
to
be reinforced by Hoepner's Panzer
the Leningrad front to assure the largest possible breakthrough
The
axis.
principal
aim of the operation was the defeat and
annihilation of the Russian forces blocking the road to
Moscow
'in
the limited time
which
remains available before the onset of the winter weather'.
The army which greatly different
wounds and compared to morale
at
The war front,
set off on the last stage
from
that
sickness
of the road to
which had crossed the
had reduced
its
Moscow
frontier ten
weeks
in late
earlier. Battle deaths,
strength by half a million, casualties not to be
the ghastly loss suffered by the
Red Army but
clearly
enough
the front and cast a pall of misery and apprehension over family
diarist
September was
life
to depress
in the Reich.
of the 98th Infantry Division, diverted northward from Kiev to the
recorded the ordeal of
The modern
its
general-service carts with their rubber tyres
wheels had long since broken up under the replaced by Russian farm
Moscow
400-mile march.
carts.
Good-quality
stress
and ball-bearing mounted
of the appalling
German
tracks,
and been
horses [600,000 had begun the
campaign] foundered daily through exhaustion and poor food but the scrubby Russian ponies, although in reality too light for the heavy draught doing, lived
including
on
many
eating birch twigs
and the thatched roofs of
work they were
cottages.
Equipment,
tons of the divisional reserve of ammunition, had to be abandoned
198
BARBAROSSA
at
the roadside for lack of transport to carry
Gradually the most simple necessities
it.
of life disappeared, razor blades, soap, toothpaste, shoe-repairing materials, needles
and thread. Even and
rain
September and before the advent of winter, there was incessant
cold north-east wind, so that ever) night there was the scramble for
a
7
shelter, squalid
the troops
in
and bug-ridden though
plumbed
increased sickness
had
march with
to
twenty-five miles a day, since there was
not be
left
behind
falling to
no
the
[in
the
column over
The
regulation boots, the Kommisstiefel,
were
and bearded, with
filthy
of conquest can rarely have been
those great victors' armies, however, stood
much
at risk
ahead of it before
opening stages promised
it
well. In an
Kiev, Centre's Panzer groups, Hoth's
accelerate
and
rotting
different. Alexander's hoplites en-
came
of
to Paris in rags. Neither
from the Arctic winter. Both, moreover,
The Ostheer Moscow. The of Army Group South's at
had already defeated the enemy's main force before they entered a great battle
would dirty,
to follow.
tered Persepolis almost barefoot, Wellington's redcoats
had
distances of up to them and they could
their iron-nailed soles
verminous underclothing; typhus was shortly
realities
cold and lack of rest
coming winter
the onset of frostbite]. All ranks
The
could not be found
this
rain,
transport to carry
in the bandit-infested forest.
pieces
The
normal circumstances, would have warranted admission
that, in
to hospital; but the sick
were
When
usually was.
it
the very depths of wretchedness.
his capital.
could be certain of finding shelter
encirclement rivalling that
in
and Hoepner's (detached from the Leningrad
front),
surrounded 6S0,000 Russians between Smolensk and Vyazma. Many gave up without fight;
a
embodied militiamen of the Osoviakhim, the pre-war citizen on which Stalin drew for his reserves. Others fought more doggedly. Guder-
they were the hastily
defence force ian, visiting
the 4th Panzer Division, found 'descriptions
Russian tanks very worrying'.
Our defensive weapons
when
the conditions
(It
to
great
be scored on
skill
to
.
.
of the
had recently encountered T-34s
available at that period
tactical
handlings of the
for the
first
were only successful
time.)
against the T-34
were unusually favourable. The short-barrelled 75-mm gun of
the Panzer IV was only effective
had
.
if the
the grating
manoeuvre
T-34 was attacked from the
above the engine to knock
into a position
from which such
it
even then
rear;
out.
a shot
It
was
a hit
required very possible.
The
Russians attacked us frontally with infantry, while they sent in their tanks in mass for-
mations against our
flanks.
They were
Even more ominously, he reported the approaching winter. difficult to
difficulties
know,
It
learning.
in his
war
diary
on 6 October the
first
snowfall of
melted quickly, leaving the roads, as before, liquid mud. which was preferable - a prolonged autumn, with
at that stage,
of movement that that rainy season brought, or an early winter, which
firm, frozen
going on the roads but threatened blizzards before the
199
final
It
was
all
the
made
for
objective was
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
reached.
could repose no solid hopes in the turn of the seasons. Winter might save Mos-
Stalin
cow;
it
might not. There was the gravest doubt whether the remains of the Red Army in
European Russia could do
so.
had
It
one - and
cavalry, only
of war with the Japanese,
by
whom
contrast,
had
it
the other
a strength
of 800,000 men,
nine of the divisions were of
aircraft;
moved
could not be
tanks.
A
large
while there was
army was still
sta-
the danger
two years preGroup Centre itself to
the Russians had fought in Mongolia only
now increased
the strength of Army
and
eighty divisions, including fourteen Panzer craft;
reduced to
independent brigades - of
thirteen
tioned in the Russian Far East, but
viously. Hitler,
now been
770 tanks and 364
divided into ninety divisions, with
two army groups, though depleted by tank
retained the bulk of their infantry and
by 1400
eight motorised, supported
were sustaining
transfers to the
Moscow
air-
front,
their pressure against Leningrad
and
into the southern steppe.
supreme
In this
the
summer had
talents
was
turned again to Zhukov. Though their disagreement in
crisis Stalin
led to Zhukov's removal as chief of staff, Stalin recognised his superlative
which had recently
if
Now, on 10 October, he Moscow. Rumours of panic were already who on 5 October reported German columns
only temporarily saved Leningrad.
called south to energise the defence of
touching the
Red
city;
Air Force pilots
away driving towards
fifteen miles
it
were threatened with
arrest
by the
NKVD
as 'panic-
mongers'; on IS October, however, fear took hold in earnest. The 'Moscow panic' began
with
a
warning by Molotov to the
British
and American embassies to prepare
on
ation to Kuibyshev, a city 500 miles eastward
Erickson, 'The real
crisis,
spontaneous popular
however,
flight
added
spilled itself to
on
for
an evacu-
the Volga. According to Professor John
to the streets
and into plants and
offices; a
the hurried and limited evacuation, accompa-
nied by a breakdown in public and Party disciplines. There was a rush to the railway tions; officials
used
junctions
.
.
.
and
their cars to get east; offices
The panic was not merely
unofficial. 'Railway
factories
were disabled by
troops were told to mine their tracks and
deep within the city were mined and crews at other mined blow their charges "at the first sight of the enemy".'
sixteen bridges
objectives issued orders to
Zhukov, however, kept
his nerve.
As
at
Leningrad, he mobilised citizens, 250,000
Muscovites (75 per cent women), to dig anti-tank ditches outside the
proven commanders, including Rokossovsky and
found
a public resolution
city.
He brought and he
Vatutin, to the threatened front
concentrated every reserve that Stalin could send him on the too,
sta-
desertions.'
he had not always shown
Moscow
approaches.
Stalin,
in the closed meetings of the
Red Square parade held on 7 November, even though Bock's Panzers Kremlin, he denounced those who thought 'the Germans
Politburo and the Stavka earlier in the campaign. At the traditional to
commemorate
were only
the October Revolution
forty miles
from the
could not be beaten', declared that the Soviet
invoked the name of every Russian hero -
state
had been
pre-, post-
in greater
danger
in 1918
and even anti-Revolutionary -
to
and stif-
fen the sinew of his audience. Inspired by those 'great figures', and fighting under 'great
200
BARBAROSSA
Women
citizens of
Moscow
]ing
an anti-tank ditch
Army Group
path of
in the
Centre's
advance in October 1941.
Lenin's victorious banner', with or without the opening of the 'Second Front' promised by the British, he forecast the
The
first frosts
Red Army's eventual triumph.
of winter were
Panzer groups were making
now
hardening the ground for the enemy, and the
faster progress
towards
Moscow
than they had done in
October. Their tank strength, however, was reduced to 65 per cent, and Guderian, Hoth
and Hoepner were
all
concerned about
objective. Accordingly,
Centre's headquarters
at
on
13
their ability to
November Haider
push
arrived
their
from
spearheads to the
OKW
Orsha to canvass opinion from the army group
Sodenstern of South, Griffenberg of North, Brennecke of Centre duct of the campaign. Should the
Ostheer,
he asked, make
a final
at
final
Army Group
chiefs
of
staff
as to the further
-
con-
dash or instead dig in for
the winter to await fairer weather for a culminating victory next year? Sodenstern and Griffenberg, respectively overstretched
wished to
halt.
Brennecke replied
into account, but
ground only
it
and blocked on
that 'the
would be even worse
thirty miles
to
from the tempting
danger
be
left
answered
that
they
not succeed must be taken
snow and the cold on open Moscow. Since Hitler had already
lying in the
objective' -
201
their fronts,
we might
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
(who was himself already looking beyond Moscow) he wanted, the issue was decided on the spot. told Haider
The The
final stage
flight to the front'
of Operation Typhoon began on 16 November.
envelopment of the Moscow defences, Panzer Groups north of the
Panzer Group 2 towards Tula
city,
the Ostheer as the Flucht nach
Napoleon's
and the the
Moscow
stood Zhukov's
last line
man-made
Moscow
Sea of
Despite the arrival of hold. Guderian, blocked
chose
a
new
Panzer Group
3;
flight
in the south.
to
for shelter
was organised
It
It
was
to the north
from the snows. But between the
of the
and the
city
Oka
river
reinforcements, the Mozhaisk position
Tula,
merely swung
Moscow and
in
Ostheer
to the south. at first
did not
Panzer group around the town and
his
on 27 November,
the Volga Canal
the 7th Panzer Division,
Rommel's old command,
linking
up with
actually got across the
on 28 November. The German
was
effort
now
at
was only twenty-five miles from the
crisis-point. At
There
to the south.
is
a
legend that
city.
Krasnaya Polyana, Panzer Group 3
army expiring on Westerner,
frostbite
now
was
temperatures would casualties,
fall
of
If
it
beginning
a burst
did, that
The Russian winter
its feet.
to
in
at
Burtsevo,
German
unit
saw the a patrol
an advance
was the
all its
bite;
below -20 degrees
whom
outposts
of evening sunshine and that
in the following days
even penetrated an outl)ing suburb.
its
Guderian's Panzer Group 2 was sixty miles away
golden domes of the Kremlin illuminated by
a
become known
of defence, the Mozhaisk position, which included
stood only eighteen miles from Moscow. The Fourth Army, with
to
to
the front', a desperate attempt, like
some
at
double
as a
and 4 moving towards Kalinin
3
advance on Moscow. To the north, the German Ninth Army broke
axis for his
through to the Sea of
canal
'the
vorn,
in 1812, to get to
city
was the answer
that this
of energy from an
last flicker
unknown and unimaginable season was approaching when
cruelty,
the
Celsius,
inflicting
on
the Ostheer 100,000
2000 would suffer amputations. After 25 November,
made no further advance, having failed to take Kashira on the main southern rail line; on 27 November he ordered a halt. After 29 November there was no movement by the northern pincer either, both Ninth Army and Panzer Group 3 having Guderian's Panzer Group 2
lost the ability to drive
Army Group
forward. Bock, writing to Haider
at
OKH on
1
December, explained
Centre's predicament:
After further blood) struggles the offensive will bring a restricted gain of ground it
will
destroy part of the enemy's forces but
strategical success.
The
idea that the
enemy
it
is
facing the
most unlikely
and
about
army group was on the point
To remain Moscow, where the road and rail systems connect with almost Further offensive whole of eastern Russia, means heavy defensive fighting.
of collapse' was,
as the fighting
of the
last
fortnight shows, a pipe-dream.
outside the gates of the
to bring
.
202
.
.
BARBAROSSA
action therefore
when
very near
By the
first
seems
to
be senseless and aimless, especially
week of December
German
the ordinary
were almost incapable of movement. Jodl had refused winter clothing,
appearance
lest its
cast
before the coming of the snows. The their
were accustomed
tary or civilian,
time
is
coming
doubt on
men
soldiers of the fighting divisions
to allow the collection or supply of
his assurances that Russia
in the firing line stuffed torn
uniforms to repel the cold. Such expedients worked scarcely
contrast,
as the
the physical strength of the troops will be completely exhausted.
to
and equipped
would
collapse
newspaper inside
The
at all.
Russians, by
against the temperature; every Russian, mili-
possessed a pair of felt boots which experience proved best protected feet
was to supply 13 million pairs during the course of the war) and Red Army accordingly continued to manoeuvre while the Ostheer froze fast. In the meantime Army Group South had occupied the Crimea (except for Sevastopol) during November. Late in that month, Timoshenko's front met Rundstedt's Panzers head on at Rostov-on-Don (the 'gateway to the Caucasus' and so to Russia's oil), recaptured the city on 28 November after it had been in German hands for only a week, and then forced them back to the line of the river Mius, fifty miles behind Rostov, where they dug in for the winter. Army Group North was meanwhile halted outside Leningrad and after 6 December driven back from Tikhvin, its furthest point of advance along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. There it established a winter line which subjected the city to slow starvation - a million were to die in the three-year siege, the majority in the first winter - but did not quite cut it off from supply across the lake, by ice-road in winter, later against frostbite (America
the
by boat.
The Red Army's
great
manoeuvre, however, began outside Moscow on 5 December.
Reinforcements had been found from mobilised a source
factories; a
new waves
of conscripts and from the output of her
few tanks had even arrived by Arctic convoy from
of supply which would become
a flood
Britain, heralds
of
- of trucks, food and fuel - as Western aid
developed. Yet the most important source of reinforcement to Zhukov was already in existence: the Siberian force,
from
it
from which
Stalin
November. That he
felt
free to
do so was
Comintern operative who,
to top-secret early as 3
fore
who had made
chiefly the result
one of the most remarkable espionage agents a
-
only small withdrawals
previously - had brought ten divisions, 1000 tanks and 1000 aircraft in October and
as a confidant
in history,
of reassurances transmitted by
Richard Sorge, a
German
but also
of the German ambassador in Tokyo, was privy
German-Japanese confidences and so able
to assure
Moscow
(perhaps as
October) that Japan was committed to war against the United States and there-
would not use
its
Overleaf: Russian June 1941, the
first
Manchurian army
anti-aircraft
guns
light
to attack the Soviet
Union
in Siberia.
up the sky above the Kremlin on the night of
day of Barbarossa. The German advance was halted, suburbs, in the following December.
203
in
22
the city's outer
&*
''
I
I
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
Had Japan decided otherwise - and
1941-1943
historic quarrel rather than
its
ambition lay against Russia, not America - the Battle of
tegic
must have been fought
as a Russian defensive, instead
certainly have resulted in
German
Zhukov's Western Front to
a
As
victory.
it
Moscow
its
focus of
stra-
of December 1941
of as an offensive, and would almost
was, Stalin's reinforcements had raised
strength equal in numbers,
equipment, to Army Group
if not
and in consequence the outcome was the first Russian victory of the war. On the morning of 5 December, the Stavka plan mirrored those by which Hitler's marshals had inflicted such bloody wounds on the Red Army in the summer. Zhukov was to drive headCentre's,
long
at
Germans opposite Moscow, while Konev's
the
Kalinin Front
and Timoshenko's
South-Western Front drove up from the south. Kluge and Hoepner, commanding the Fourth
Army and
Army
the Fourth Panzer
(as
Panzer Group 4 had been renamed),
decided that they could force their troops no further forward and had gone over to the
were
defensive. Accordingly they
when
inert
made by Lelyushenko's
advance was
the Russians struck. In the north, the deepest
Thirtieth
Army, which advanced
cow-Leningrad highway, threatening Panzer Group
December
it
3's link
had reached Klin and with the neighbouring
as far as the
Mos-
with the Fourth Army. By 9
First
Shock Army seemed poised
The Sixteenth and Twentieth Armies, commanded by Rokos-
to bring off an encirclement.
sovsky and Vlasov, operating closer to Moscow-, matched their progress and on 13 December retook axis
Istra,
close to the
Moscow-Smolensk highway up which Army Group
of advance from the frontier had
Centre's
lain.
To the city's south, the Thirtieth and Fortieth Armies attacked Guderian's Panzer Group 2 and by 9 December menaced its main line of supply, the Orel-Tula railway. Guderian's Tula position formed a salient; on its opposite face the Soviet Fiftieth and Tenth Armies succeeded
in separating
Guderian from Kluge 's Fourth Army and driving both
away from the Moscow approaches -
a
displacement widened
the Soviet Thirty-Third and Forty-Third Armies joined
By Christmas Day the
Germans
lost
ground;
in droves.
OKH;
1941 the Russian armies
had retaken almost
in the culminating stages of their drive its
On
Hitler,
leaders
30
on
had
insisted
on
all
the territory
He had
resigning in protest
a visit to his headquarters, recognised the justice
accepted his resignation nevertheless. (Reichenau, mediately of a heart
attack.)
On
17
December when
won
on Moscow. Not only had the
also lost their Fiihrer's confidence.
November Rundstedt
after 16
in.
who
by
Ostheer
dismissed generals at his
treatment by
of his protest but
replaced him, died almost im-
December he replaced Bock with Kluge
at
Army Group
Centre and on 20 December dismissed Guderian for preparing to withdraw his Panzer its exposed position. He also dismissed Hoepner from the Fourth Panzer Army (between October and December 1941 Panzer groups were redesignated Panzer armies) for unauthorised retreat, and the commanders of the Ninth and Seventeenth Armies. Thirty-five corps and divisional commanders were dismissed at the same time.
group from
Most dramatically of
all,
on
19
December,
Hitler relieved Brauchitsch as
commander-in-
chief of the army. Like Bock, Brauchitsch was ailing; but that was not the reason for his re-
206
BARBAROSSA
OPERATION TYPHOON Russian counter-attack
Army Group North
Toropets #
Second Panzer
Army
Moscow Defence
Lines
opens attack, 30 Sept All
other armies
khovo Zuyevo
attack on 2 Oct
est Front
Voronezh •
Operation Typhoon, the
final
German
drive
on Moscow.
winter weather and on 6 December 1941 the Red
moval. Hitler had
come
to believe that only his
from destruction. He therefore announced but that the Fiihrer In that role
Finnish
ally,
(and also
would himself soldiers
made an advance
ground
Army
to a halt
in appalling
counter-attacked.
unalterable will could save the Ostheer
that Brauchitsch
would not have
a
successor
directly act as the army's leader.
he lectured and terrorised
whose
own
It
had marched
his generals to stand.
in parallel
Over Mannerheim,
his
with Leeb's to the gates of Leningrad
into Arctic Russia further north) he could not prevail; the mar-
207
THE WAR
shal,
once
a tsarist officer,
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
was prudently determined
hold no more
to
territory than his
own commanders,
country had possessed before the Winter War. Against his
however, he
used the lash of implied incompetence and imputed cowardice. Fiihrer Directive No. issued
on
several of rogative.
then?'
December, had announced
8
its
formations had already done; where
'Do you plan to drop back
you can - but leave the army
The spectre of 'Napoleonic and of
thirty miles?
he recalled asking those he saw
rapidly as
early January
men on
it
Do you
in
my
charge.
And
the road to the rear and, most disabling of
fight further
back
if
the
retreat' afflicted Hitler in
whatever happens to
its
guns,'
him. Convinced that withdrawal would lose both -
down
think
it
isn't all that
as fainthearts. 'Get yourself
- the spectre of losing not only the line
'Save at least the army,
39,
would go over to the defensive, as would defend was the Fuhrer's pre-
that the Ostheer
the army's heavy equipment.
he recalled the
'How do you
shift his
as
staying at the front.'
but hundreds of thousands
you haven't got any heavy weapons?' - he
the telephone from Rastenburg (he did not
is
those days of mid-December
won
all,
army
cold there,
back to Germany
falterers
pleading to
think you're going to
bullied
and remonstrated
headquarters to Russian
terri-
tory until the following year), until, by force of personality and threat of professional extinction, he infused the commanders at the front with a determination to hold against the Red Army and the Russian winter as inflexible as his own. By mid-January 1942, the worst was over: Army Group South's front was holding; Army Group Centre's was penetrated by a large salient north of Moscow but stabilised; Army Group North was entrenched on the fringe of Leningrad, which its artillery was slowly battering to pieces. The Red Army's
winter reinforcements sustained a sporadic offensive but, advancing too often in
human
waves, were diminishing in numbers and force. Hitler had already begun to think of the spring and of the battle he
would
fight to
destroy Stalin's Russia for good.
208
WAR PRODUCTION The German armoured
pincers
which encircled and crushed the
Soviet armies in
western Russia in June, July and August 1941 were instruments of military victory such
as the
world had never seen; but they were not instruments of
total victory.
Although they destroyed one of the Soviet Union's principal means of making war, mobilised front-line defences, they did not succeed in destroying the
economic expert
path, loading machinery, stocks
shipping them eastward to relocation of industry
new
industrial
A.
I,
Mikoyan, was rapidly uprooting
and workforces on
new
locations
factories
soviet,
from
to the overstretched railways,
beyond the
The
Panzers' reach.
had begun long before the war, with the
its
industrial resources in
European provinces. Even while the Panzers were on the march, an evacuation
directed by the
the
its
effort to
make
their
and
strategic
the output of
and raw-material zones beyond the Urals and elsewhere equal
that
of
Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev and in the Donetz basin. Between 1930 and 1940 new metallurgical plants were opened at Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk the traditional centres around
and Novo-Tagil,
industrial
complexes
Volkhov and Dnepropetrovsk, oilfield in the
plants.
at
Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk, aluminium works
coalfields at
Kuznetsk and Karaganda and
Urals-Volga region, together with no
The pace of equalisation was slow; but by
94.3 million tons of coal, the Urals
and Karaganda
However, Barbarossa stimulated nothing the Soviet Union', in
John Erickson's words.
less
1940,
less
than
'a
at
'second Baku'
than thirty trans-Ural chemical
when
fields
a
the Donetz basin produced
were producing second
In August to
18.3 million.
industrial revolution in
October
1941,
80 per cent of
on the move eastward. The German advance had overrun 300 war-production factories, and would eventually bring the whole immovable
Russian war industry was Soviet
extractive resources of western Russia, particularly the rich coal
Donetz
basin, into
German hands;
but
it
and metal mines of the
was not rapid enough to prevent the evacuation
209
THE WAR
THE EAST
IK
1941-1943
eastward of the greater part of Soviet engineering industry from Leningrad, Kiev and the
Moscow.
regions west of
In the
while transporting two and
first
months of the war
three
the Soviet railway system,
million troops westward, brought back eastward the
a half
plant of 1523 factories for relocation in the Urals (455 factories),
Western
Siberia (210), the
Volga region (200) and Kazakhstan and central Asia (more than 250). The effort was both
On
extraordinary and perilous. tool
works received orders
29 September 1941 the Novo-Kramatorsk heavy-machine-
to strip
down
its
workshops; within
five
days
machinery,
all its
including the only 10,000-ton presses in the Soviet Union, were loaded
on
to
under German bombing, while the 2500 technicians had
last
day to the
to
march on
the
wagons
nearest working railhead twenty miles away.
Ninety factories were evacuated from Leningrad, including the heavy tank works, the last
shipments being made by barge across Lake Ladoga
from the
Donetz
rest
basin,
When
of Russia. all
workable
similar
German advances
was cut off by land
Dnieper dam, was dynamited.
In
economic managers succeeded
in
plant, including the gigantic
the teeth of this appalling industrial turbulence, Soviet
after the city
interrupted evacuations from the
bringing the relocated plants back into production after an almost miraculously brief delay:
according to Erickson, on 8 December 'the Kharkov Tank Works turned out twenty-five T-34 tanks
engineers
left
[at
Chelyabinsk
in the Urals], just short
Kharkov, trudging along the railway
These beginnings of Russia's 'second for the
worm
Wehrmacht, even though in the
it
of ten weeks
its
first
after the last
tracks.'
industrial revolution'
remained unaware of them
were the worst of news
for
months
come. The
to
apple of Hitler's spectacular campaigns of 1939-41 was that they had been
fought from an economic base too fragile to sustain a long war, but with effects on the will
of his enemies which ensured that the war would inevitably lengthen into
he could quickly crown
struggle unless
it
with
swift
a
Germany, behind the panoply of the Nuremberg
Wehrmacht, was Britain,
a
hollow
vessel.
As
a
rallies
and decisive
a
do-or-die
victory.
Hitler's
and the massed ranks of the
producer of capital goods
in 1939 she
stood equal to
with about 14 per cent of world output, compared to 5 per cent for France and 42
per cent for the United
States,
earnings were added into
even
in
her
her gross
still
depressed condition.
national
When
British invisible
product, however, Germany's output
declined to third place below the British and American (excluding the Soviet Union); and
when allowance was made metals but particularly
oil,
German economic
raw
for access to essential
the size of the
strategy, quite as
materials, including non-ferrous
German economy appeared
much
as
its
military one,
smaller
still.
was therefore geared
to
The need was for a quick victory to spare German industry the pressure of producing weapons and munitions in quantity; once the war protracted, and Hitler decided upon the necessity of attacking Russia, German economic strategy changed.
the concept of
On
Blitzkrieg.
the material front the drive was to lay hands
on the
extractive resources of the
including those of the Balkans but particularly the coal, metal and (above
all)
regions of south Russia (together with the vast agricultural wealth of the Ukraine).
210
enemy,
oil-bearing
On
the
WAR PRODUCTION
industrial front the
adamant
emphasis shifted
that the military effort
in
two
different directions. Until 1942 Hitler
should not depress
civilian living
had been
standards or curtail the
output of consumer goods; between January and May 1942, at the insistence of his Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, and then (after Todt's accidental death) Dr Albert Speer, he accepted that military output as a proportion of gross national product would have to rise. However, while Todt and Speer introduced centralised measures of economic control which did indeed begin to raise output at a spectacular rate (for example,
armaments,
as a
proportion of industrial production, increased from 16 per cent in 1941 to
22 per cent in 1942, 31 per cent in 1943 and 40 per cent in 1944), they did not commit
Germany to attempt to match the production of their enemies' economies in quantitative German war-economic philosophy rested on the concept that the country's weapons output should and could outdo the enemy's primarily in quality. terms.
The
'quality war'
This concept proved difficult to implement in aircraft production, individual
models of propellor-driven
American equivalents satisfactory strategic effort to
develop
development fighter,
the
bomber;
this
in 1943.
Me 262,
after
type of Its
was
1942.
aircraft fell
The German
as early as
aircraft
fighters
industry
were
all failures.
a spectacular success,
and
if
By
and
never produced
1934 the Luftwaffe had decided not to
aircraft. Its single-seat fighters
heavy
where both types and
progressively behind their British
a
make an
had reached the
limit
contrast,
jet-propelled
Hitler
its first
had encouraged
of their
its
early
would have confronted the Allied strategic bombing campaign with a severe challenge. German tanks, designed for serial development from a basic model, were also of the first quality, as were German small arms. For example, the MP-40 production
in quantity
sub-machine-gun, in use in
simplified
it
known
to Allied soldiers as the Schmeisser,
was both the best of its kind
any army and one of the simplest to produce. German design engineers had its
components so
that almost
all
could be produced by repetitive stamping,
only the bolt assembly and barrel having to be machined.
German 'secret weapons' were also Though Germany's electronics
philosophy. the British,
which consistently produced
a
testimony to the success of the
industry failed to better radar
'quality'
match the achievements of
equipment of every
sort
and
supplied the scientific and technological basis for American industry's advances in that field,
and though
its
nuclear
weapons programme was an
abject failure,
its
success with
weapons and advanced submarines was impressive. The perfection of the it came too late in the war to revitalise the U-boat campaign, introduced a method of operation which all post-war navies adopted and used until the coming of the nuclear-powered boat; while the development of the hydrogen-peroxide propulsion system, allowing a submarine in pilotless
schnorkel air-breathing system for submarines, though
theory to cruise submerged indefinitely, in a sense anticipated the principle of the nuclear-
211
THE WAR
powered submarine. respectively the
pilotless
Its
other of the superpower
ballistic missiles. All
modern
states.
running
in
war economy must, however, be
a 'quality'
factors. In the first place, Hitler's
consumption should be maintained by mid-1944. Thereafter the German
requirement
1943,
bit
deeper - and
as a
declining gross national product. Gross national product, moreover, had
a
risen only slowly during the war,
and
of civilian
that levels
of military output could not be observed standard of living fell sharply, both in absolute terms in the teeth
imports began to decline and the strategic bombing campaign
proportion of
equivalents of the
because their German designers emigrated to one or
largely
Germany's limited success balanced against other
1941-1943
weapons, the V-l 'flying-bomb' and the V-2 rocket, were
operational cruise and
first
two types descend from them,
as
THE EAST
IN
and then only
from 129
were increased; imports of raw
billion to 150 billion
Reichsmarks between 1939
of emergency or extraordinary
as a result
materials,
goods or
credit
Working hours
factors.
were exacted from the occupied
by requisition or on terms of trade highly favourable to Germany; and the German labour force was swelled by an import of foreign labour - some induced, some conscripted, some enslaved - equivalent to a quarter of its pre-war size, or nearly 7 million territories
people. Since German) was not wholly self-supporting before the war, this workforce was at first
fed by imported agricultural produce, but
1944 the swollen labour force became
a
when food
charge on the war
imports declined sharply
economy
structure.
to
its
its
occupation area in the west and the remains of its conquests in the east were
The economic four
after
rather than a benefit
months of June
strangulation of
to
Germany
in the
September, manifested
autumn of 1944, when
itself in a
sharp and devastating
index of war production. The general index (1941-2 = 100)
fell
lost in the fall
in the
to 310
between
to 270, the
index of
from 330
June and November, the index of ammunition production from 330
whole of
the
move or the more catastrophic decline in output from the May, when imports made their last contribution to consumption,
explosive from 230 to 180. Oil, without which the army's tanks could not Luftwaffe's aircraft
fly,
synthetic-oil plants. In
suffered an even
supply exceeded consumption for the Allied
bombers'
'oil
offensive',
first
time in the war; by September,
as a result
tons, one-sixth of consumption,
which
itself had
been reduced by
stringent
economy from
195,000 tons in May. Only the onset of bad weather and disagreements
bomber
chiefs spared the oil plants oil
economic
alone in 1944; as
effect
from further sustained
attack
between the
and so averted the
total
supply before Christmas 1944. Germany narrowly escaped defeat by
interruption of
refiner)' released
of the
production from the synthetic-oil plants was only 10,000
enough
it
oil for its
was, a revival of production
armies to go
down
fighting
the main Politz synthetic on the Rhine and in Berlin
at
the following spring.
last
Japan was even more vulnerable to economic strangulation than Germany, and in its weeks of war-making it was brought almost to that point. Its shipping stock had by
then been reduced by sinkings, largely the work of American submarines, to 12 per cent of
212
WAR PRODUCTION
the pre-war stock, a desperate state of affairs for a country
which depended not only on
food imports to survive but also on inter-island movement state.
Japan had, of course, largely been motivated to war,
economic
calculation.
home
Its
to operate as an organised
at least at
the objective level, by
population (excluding that of Korea and Manchuria) of
about 73 million was too large to be supported by domestic agriculture (which supplied only 80 per cent of consumption), and else
which tempted the army
it
open
to
was the
its
supplies
'rice offensives', forays
harvest time,
at
as
anything
general offensive into mainland China in 1937.
After the effective defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1938,
China took the form of
much
lure of Chinese rice as
which continued
operation in 1944. However, since Japan was
most Japanese
military activity in
into the rural districts designed to capture
until the institution
of the major Ichi-Go
a rapidly industrialising nation,
it
needed not
only rice but also ferrous and non-ferrous metals (both ores and scrap), rubber, coal and,
above
all,
cent of cent,
62.2 per cent, of
of copper 40 per cent.
pursue
essential for steel production.
is
a
aluminium 40.6 per
its
own
living
to
more
oil
were imported, and
had no reserves of coking coal
do
to
reversed the terms of trade
set their face against the
reduction of
merely commercial approach to the acquisition of
a
would have
entailed.
strategic exports to
likewise, the
as a result, so
Japanese cabinets
militarist
standards that
resources
embargoes on Dutch
it
per
policy of exchange through trade; but the world slump, and protectionist
that progressively
essential
coal
16.7
manganese 66 per
The government might, of course, have resolved
measures imposed by Western importing nations domestic
cent, of
of nickel, rubber and
All supplies
although Japan produced 90 per cent of
which
from domestic resources was only
In 1940 the supply of iron ore
oil.
demand, of steel
When
impose
the United States began to
Japan during 1940, and encouraged the British and
army-dominated cabinet rapidly decided on making
a surprise
attack.
In practice the capture of the 'southern area' - Malaya,
yielded a
much lower economic
Burma and
the East Indies -
return than the Tojo cabinet anticipated. Imports of raw
rubber, for example, which stood
at
68,000 metric tons in 1941, declined to 31,000 in 1942,
reached 42,000 in 1943 but declined again to 31,000 in 1944, largely
American submarine campaign, which
as a result
of the
also progressively curtailed imports of coal, iron
ore and bauxite. The effect on Japanese industrial production was direct and proportional;
although the Japanese 1941 (= 100)
aircraft
and 1944 (=
the output of
motor
industry sustained a remarkable increase in output
465), as did the naval
vehicles in the
significant increases in the
ordnance
factories (1941
same period declined by
=
100,
between
1944 = 512),
two-thirds. There
were
launching of naval and merchant ships, which respectively
as sinkings exceeded launchings the effort was more than The Japanese gross national product overall grew by a quarter between 1940 and government war expenditure, however, increased fivefold during the same period
doubled and quadrupled; but nullified.
1944;
and eventually represented 50 per cent of GNP, thus leading to
a
stifling
non-military production and
harsh curtailment of civilian consumption. The end result of the war effort was
213
THE WAR
to leave Japan with a population
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
on the brink of
starvation,
though with
a significantly
enlarged workforce of trained engineering operatives. In the era of post-war economic
workforce would win for Japanese products the overseas markets whose
revival, that
denial
had provoked Japan
to aggression in the
—
war
Britain's
the other great island combatant,
Britain,
had
means of an enemy submarine
strangulation by
Japan upon imports for food, since
a
first
place.
effort also
force.
—
been threatened with economic was even more dependent than
It
century-old policy of utilising cheap shipments from
America, Canada, Australasia and Argentina had depressed farming to a level where only half of consumption
and
was met from domestic resources.
partially so in ferrous ores;
but
it
It
depended upon
was wholly
self-sufficient in coal
foreign supply for
rubber and most non-ferrous metals. Moreover, though equal to Germany greatest industrial
power
in the capitalist world,
chemicals and machine-tools. The war effort particularly in 1940-1
when
it
it
imported certain
itself,
it,
which fought the
and the tanks which contested the
Battle
moreover,
won
which would require
Had Germany deployed
fifty
at
the Battle of
of the Atlantic and the merchant ships sunk
issue with
obliged to liquidate almost the whole of sacrifice
and
second
bore the burden of confronting the Axis alone, could not be
sustained out of domestic revenue. In order to pay for the fighters which Britain, the escorts
oil
its
products such as
vital
had imposed upon
it
all
as the
its
Rommel
in the
in
western desert, Britain was
overseas holdings of capital, an economic
years of effort to restore.
the outset of the war the force of 300 U-boats
which
Donitz had advised Hitler was necessary to win the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain would surely have collapsed as a
United
States' entry.
until 1943,
when
combatant long before events
in the Pacific
brought about the
Fortunately Donitz did not achieve the deployment of that
the balance of forces
between the Axis and
its
number
enemies had already
altered to Hitler's fatal disadvantage. In the interim, as the result of the
most
ruthless
imposition of centralised direction attempted by any country other than the Soviet Union, British industry
had achieved
a
remarkable surge in output of war material. For example,
number of tanks produced increased from 969 in 1939 to 8611 in 1942, the number of bombers from 758 in 1939 to 7903 in 1943 and the number of bombs from 51,903 in 1940 to the
309,366 in 1944. Britain
equipment.
also Its
world, while
its
deployment of a the closing
Me 262). P-51
achieved
remarkable
advances
in
quality
as
well
as
of
quantity
inventiveness in the field of electronic warfare was unequalled in the
pioneering development of jet-propulsion systems for jet fighter,
the Gloster Meteor, to
two
front-line
weeks of the war (although they did not engage
British aero-engine designers
their
aircraft led to
the
squadrons in Europe
German
in
equivalent, the
produced the power plant which transformed the
Mustang into the most potent long-range
214
fighter
of the war. The de Havilland
WAR PRODUCTION Mosquito proved one of the most elegant and performing with distinction
and intruder
roles.
as a
The Avro Lancaster
night
combat
versatile
bomber, day and night
and
fighter
of the war,
aircraft
in
its
reconnaissance
bomber, although approaching obsolescence
bombing campaign. There is bombing led to a war structural imbalance in the British economy, absorbing as much as onepronounced third of the nation's war effort and the cream of its high technology. The sheer weight of British industrial effort committed to the bombing offensive meant that Britain had to turn
by
1945,
was the supreme instrument of the RAF's
to the
United
States for
ammunition and first
strategic
doubt, however, that the heavy emphasis placed on strategic
little
tank in the First
their
all its
a large
German but
transport
aircraft,
many of its
landing
quantities of
craft, vast
proportion of its tanks. Though British industry had produced the
World War,
also their
1939-45 were notably inferior not only to
British tanks in
American equivalents; by 1944
armoured
British
all
divisions
were equipped with the American Sherman.
The
British
economy
increased in size by over 60 per cent during the war; but civilian
consumption declined by only British
war production, when
fats
all
between 1939 and
1943, about the
luxuries
and proteins from the rationed foodstuff allocations, together with
clothing.
sustain
The
its
effect
of the shortfall was nevertheless disguised.
military outlay
The same was
from domestic resources,
true for the Soviet Union. Despite
all
its
the
utilisation
of marginal
also to the
armed
forces,
where they formed
women a
a severe shortage
Britain
of
attempted to
the sacrifices made, in the extension of
farming land,
accustomed commodities, the conscription of
Had
economy would have been broken.
working hours, the liquidation of foreign and domestic standards,
peak of
were consuming 50 per cent of the
The home population felt the shortfall, notably in the disfrom the market and the reduction of many essentials such as
gross national product.
appearance of
21 per cent
military expenditures
capital, the
the
reduction of living
substitution
to the
of ersatz
workforce (and in
for
Britain
higher proportion than in those of any
other combatant country) and a dozen other emergency measures, neither the British nor the Soviet
economy could have borne the strains of war without came from the United States.
external assistance. That
outside help
Early in the course of his invasion of Russia, Hitler expressed regret to General
Guderian
that
he had not heeded
his
warnings of the extent to which Russian exceeded
German tank production. 'Had known they had as many tanks as that,' he conceded, 'I would have thought twice before invading.' Russian tank production, 29,000 in 1944 when German tank production reached its peak at 17,800, was but one index of the degree to which the Allied war economy exceeded Germany's in scale. It was ultimately the United States which dwarfed Germany as an industrial power, at every level, and in each category I
of available natural resource and manufactured product. The shortfall
production had been
offset since
March
1941 by
in
British
war
American provisions under the Lend-
Lease legislation, which allowed the recipient to acquire war material against the promise to
pay
after the
war was
over. Lend-Lease helped Britain provide military aid to the Soviet
215
)
—
i V
)
Left:
A
B-17 production
12,731 B-17s were the
^
war
the
line;
built in the
American
GNP
during the war
United States. In
shot ahead by
60
per
cent. In the course of the hostilities the United
States provided
civil
and military aid
sufficient for her to raise
Above:
2000
to her allies
infantry divisions.
Artillery rolls off the line at a Soviet fac-
tory east of the Urals.
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1941-194?
Union between June and December 1941. As soon as Germany declared war on the United on 11 December 1941, Lend-Lease shipments began to flow to Russia directly from America, via Vladivostok, Murmansk and the Persian Gulf. These shipments were on an enormous scale. The Soviet Union became the States,
beneficiary of an outpouring of aid;
some, such
as aircraft,
were not properly
some of the
were needed -
donations, such as tanks,
for Soviet aircraft
Although the Soviet forces preferred
utilised.
other donations provided the Soviet Union with
requirements but also of
industrial
[American
its
means
a
transport]'; at the
Stalingrad
needed
American industry
in the field.
trucks,
which
to
forces held 665,000
of which 427,000 were Western, most of them American and
Dodge
quality - but
own weapons,
to fight. 'Just imagine', Nikita
end of the war, the Soviet
magnificent D/i-ton
their
did not need;
it
first
high proportion not only of
'how we would have advanced from
remarked,
later
were not of the
its
the
war-
Khrushchev
Berlin
without
motor
vehicles,
high proportion the
a
effectively carried everything the
Red Army
also supplied 13 million Soviet soldiers with their
winter boots, American agriculture 5 million tons of food, sufficient to provide each Soviet soldier with half a
pound of concentrated
rations every day of the war.
railroad industry supplied 2000 locomotives, 11,000 freight carriages rails,
and
with which the Russians 1939.
laid a greater length
of line than they had
American supplies of high-grade petroleum were
of aviation
fuel,
The American
and 540,000 tons of built
between 1928
essential to Russian
production
while three-quarters of Soviet consumption of copper in 1941-4 came from
American sources.
Wartime Russia survived and fought on American While
British
raw material
So too did wartime
Britain.
(equivalent, at current prices, to the annual defence budget for 1989), other
convoys, which included an increasing proportion of American ships, were
British
bringing from across the Atlantic the
armed
aid.
convoys were shipping eastward some £77 million-worth of equipment and
forces
and
to
means both
to sustain the British civil population
equip the American expeditionary armies preparing to invade
and
Hitler's
Europe. The percentage of military equipment supplied to the British armed forces from
American sources
in 1941
was
11.5,
in 1942 16.9, in 1943 26.9
percentage of American-supplied food
which continued
at that level
This outpouring of aid, forces
which increased
damage
to the
United
consumed
and
in Britain in 1941
in 1944 28.7;
was
29.1, a
and the
proportion
throughout the war.
combined with the equipment and maintenance of armed between 1939 and 1945, was achieved at no
in size thirtyfold
States
economy
at
all.
On
the contrary: though annual Federal
expenditure rose from 13 billion dollars in 1939 to 71 billion in 1944, inflation was easily
contained by tax increases and successful war-loan campaigns. The gross national product
more than doubled during
the
same period, and
industrial
production also nearly
doubled. This achievement had a simple cause.
The United
States
economy had been
depressed since the slump and bank collapse of 1929-31, and, despite the application of
218
WAR PRODUCTION
Roosevelt's like the
New
Deal policies of state-financed reflation,
same extent
Keynesian credit programme, or
Britain,
nevertheless encouraged a mild
boom
economy was both
unemployed and
week. By 1944 the average
had not recovered
utilisation
had run
Hitler
during the 1930s. As in a
still
depressed
policies
had
the American
result,
a
to anything
a full-blown
where more orthodox budgetary
and absolutely
relatively
8.9 million registered
it
economies of Germany, where
as the
There were
state in 1939.
the average utilisation of plant was forty hours a
of plant was ninety hours a week, there were 18.7
more people in work than in 1939 (the 10 million excess over inducted surplus women), and the value of industrial output represented 38 per cent of national income compared to 29 per cent in 1939. million
largely representing
In
absolute terms these figures represented an extraordinary economic surge.
doom
Relatively they spelt
to
Germany and
Japan,
where productivity per man-hour was
The American economy was, in short, not only much larger than that of either of its enemies. It was also greatly more efficient. As a result, from having been a negligible source of military equipment in 1939, by 1944 it was producing 40 per cent of the world's armaments. In specific categories, respectively half and one-fifth of that in the United States.
output of tanks had increased from 346 in 1940 to 17,565 in 1944, of shipping from million tons in 1940 to 16.3 million tons in 1944 and of aircraft - the
1.5
most spectacular of all
America's wartime industrial achievements - from 2141 in 1940 to 96,318 in 1944. In 1945 the United States 1939, but the richest there
of the
that
was
to find itself not only the richest state in the world, as in
had ever been, with an economy almost equal
in productivity to
of the world put together. Her people too had benefited. The pathetic
rest
John Steinbeck's famous novel of protest, The
'Okies' described in
Grapes of Wrath,
1944 enjoying a middle-class standard of living from their earnings in the
of California, whence they had emigrated from their worn-out farms
Neighbours
who had
reward.
was American
If
it
American farmers
on
stuck out the depression factories
who grew
had
better land
were by
aircraft factories
dustbowl.
in the
also received their
which made the weapons which beat
Hitler,
it
was
the crops to feed his enemies. Paul Edwards, before the war a
New
Deal worker, recalled: 'The war was a hell of a good time. Farmers in South Dakota
that
administered relief to, and gave them four dollars a week and bully beef to feed their
I
families,
when
true there
and
I
came home they were worth
was true
in pain. But
In the final
it's
all
forgotten
enumeration of
States.
.
.
.
Hitler's mistakes in
decision to contest the issue with the stand
a quarter
And now. World War Two?
over the United
of a million
dollars.
.
.
.
What was
the rest of the world was bleeding It's
a
war
I
would
still
go
to.'
waging the Second World War,
power of the American economy may well come
first.
219
his
to
THE WAR
THE EAST
IN
1941-1943
II
CRIMEAN SUMMER, STALINGRAD
WINTER is
a
paradox of campaigning
Itcoming
topsoil with thirty inches of
the steppe to
Motorise*
1
in Russia that,
though winter destroys armies,
it
the
is
of spring that halts operations. The thaw, saturating the suddenly unfrozen
swamp,
the
snow
rasputitsa,
melt, turns the dirt roads liquid
of
'internal seas'
mud
and the surface of
which clog
all
movement. and
transport buries itself above the axles in bog; even the hardy local ponies
the
wagons they draw flounder in the bottomless mire. In mid-March 1942 both Red Army and the Ostheer accepted defeat by the seasons. An enforced truce descended
on
the Russian front until the beginning of May.
the light panje
Both armies made use of inflicted.
The Stavka
that the strength
it
calculated that there
of the Red
and the
fighting
had
of military age
in Russia
and
to repair the losses that winter
were
Army could be
16 million
million already taken prisoner and a million dead, there
400 divisions and provide replacements.
men
raised to 9 million in 1942; allowing for 3
Many of the
would
divisions
still
be enough
were
pitifully
men
to
fill
weak, but a
surplus was found to create a central reserve, while the evacuated factories behind the Urals had
produced 4S00
tanks, 3000 aircraft, 14,000
guns and 50,000 mortars during the
winter months.
The Germans were Army)
also enlarging their army. In January the Ersatzheer
raised thirteen divisions
from new
created shortly afterwards. For the
first
recruits
time
(Replacement
and 'comb-outs'; another nine were
women
volunteers
(Stabshelferinnen)
were
inducted to release male clerks and drivers to the infantry in January 1942, and volunteer auxiliaries (Hilfsfreiwillige)
were
also
found among Russian prisoners, most of whom turned
220
CRIMEAN SUMMER. STALINGRAD WINTER
way
coat as an alternative to starvation. In this
were made good, though
a deficiency
when
maintaining divisions in existence even as a third; tank, artillery
1600 the
Mark
and horse strength had
By April the
also fallen.
was concealed by
It
had
their infantry strength
fallen
by
as
army had brought
was short of
Ostheer
had died by the spring of
to Russia, a half
was nevertheless convinced
that the force
1942.
which remained
sufficed to finish
Russia off and was determined to launch his decisive offensive as soon as the
hardened. While
Moscow
- a
'Second Front'
in the
had persuaded himself certain
had been
to take possession of its natural wealth.
The wheatlands, mines and, now more important than south.
It
in that direction, into the lands
the Caucasus, that Hitler 1942, to
ground
that the Germans would strike again at would be weakened by Germany's need to deal with a west - Hitler had an entirely contrary intention. The point of the
Stalin
blow he was
Kaiser's final offensive into Russia in 1918
was
much
and IV tanks, 2000 guns and 7000 anti-tank guns. Of the half-million horses
III
Hitler
the 900,000 losses suffered during the winter
of 600,000 remained by April.
now
recoup and add
planned
to the great
beyond the Crimea, on
send the Panzers
to
had always
ever, oilfields
for the
the river
lain in the
Volga and in
summer campaign of
economic conquests brought
to
Germany by
the
Treat) of Brest-Litovsk twenty-four years earlier. -
The
front that the Ostheer
moment when directly
'final'
had drawn across western Russia
Moscow had been
offensive against
in
November,
at
the
launched, had run almost
north-south from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, bulging eastward between
Demyansk,
much
its
to
Moscow's north, and Kursk,
less tidy configuration.
no longer touched Moscow's
to the capital's south.
Because of the outskirts
effect
and was
of
now
Stalin's
also
By May
it
had assumed
winter counter-offensive,
dented
in three places.
a it
Between
Demyansk and Rzhev an enormous bulge protruded westward, reaching almost as far as Smolensk on the Moscow highway, and a reverse loop enclosed a pocket around Demyansk itself which had to be supplied by air. South and west of Moscow another bulge nearly enclosed Rzhev and almost touched Roslavl, on the Smolensk-Stalingrad railway. At Izyum, south of the great industrial
city
of Kharkov, yet another pocket bulged westward
of the Kiev railway and impede entry to Rostov, gateway to the Caucasus.
to cut the line
The Red Army's
sacrificial attacks
of January to March had not lacked
Hitler briskly dismissed the danger that the
The Demyansk pocket, he
calculated, cost the
two Moscow
Red Army more
salients offered to his front.
to guard than
maintain; his occupation of the Rzhev re-entrant kept the threat to Roslavl bulge
was unimportant. As
automatically by the opening of
for the situation at
Army Group
The outline of that offensive (codenamed
OKH
on 28 March 1942 and issued
comprised
five
In
'Blue')
still
holding out
after five
it
it
cost
alive;
him
to
and the
would be resolved
was discussed by Hitler with Haider and Fuhrer Directive No. 41 on 5
the Crimea,
Manstein, would destroy the Russian army Sevastopol,
Izyum,
Moscow
South's drive past Rostov into the Caucasus.
in greater detail as
separate operations.
result.
Eleventh Army,
April.
commanded
It
b)
in the Kerch peninsula and then reduce months of siege, by bombardment. Bock (who had
221
THE WAR
IN
assumed command of Army Group South the
THE EAST
1941-1943
recovering from
after
Izyum pocket and enclose Voronezh on the Don
Panzer and
six
Hungarian,
Italian,
motorised divisions for the task
drive
down
the
Don and
was
illness)
armoured
to 'pinch out'
he had nine
pincers;
well as fifty-two less reliable Romanian,
(as
Slovak and Spanish divisions).
Group Centre would
in
Once
that
had been accomplished, Army
on the
cross the steppe to Stalingrad
joined by a subsidiary force advancing from Kharkov; finally
Volga,
spearheads would drive
its
army done in 1918), penetrate the mountain range between the Black and into the Caucasus (as the Kaiser's
had
Stalingrad
RUSSIA
Caspian Seas and reach Baku, centre of the Soviet oil industry.
To protect these
conquests. Hitler intended to construct
an impermeable East Wall. 'Russia will
then be to
us',
he told Goebbels, 'what
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
India
^
is
to the British.'
The economic arguments
Key
SAUDI ARABIA
Oilfields
operation
were
for the
immeasurable.
Hitler
declared to his generals that a success in
would
south
the
forces
release
to
complete the isolation and capture of • Stalingrad
•
Leningrad in the north. However, the point of 'Blue' was to capture Russia's
Proletarskaya
Not only did CASPIAN
need
Hitler
for
it
oil.
Germany
(he confessed to intimates of nightmares
SEA
which
in
he
saw
the
Ploesti
fields
burning out of control from end to end); to deny it to Stalin. The Barbarossa had damage already inflicted on the Soviet Union was immense. By mid-October 1941 the
he
wanted
also
economic
Top: The Axis grand at
securing
Above
the
oil
Fuhrer
left:
strategy for 1942,
fields
of the
Directive
original, limited plan for the
Above,
aimed
Middle East. 41,
Hitler's
summer
of 1942.
Ostheer
was
had occupied
where
right: Fuhrer Directive 45, Hitler's ex-
45
per
population
tended plans for 1942.
cent
lived,
Soviet Union's coal
per cent of two-thirds of
its
pig-iron, steel
territory
to retain until the
its
(which
summer of of
the
it
1944)
Soviet
64 per cent of the
was extracted, and 47
grain crops,
more than
and rolled metals and 60 per cent of its aluminium were
produced. The frontier evacuation of factories (of which 303 alone produced ammunition)
behind the Urals had saved expense of
essential industrial capacity
a grave interruption
of supply; but the
222
loss,
from capture, though
at
even the impairment, of the
the oil
CRIMEAN SUMMER, STALINGRAD WINTER
supply would prove catastrophic, as Hitler well knew. The 'General Plan' of Fiihrer
wipe out the
Directive No. 41 stated quite baldly: 'Our
aim
remaining to the Soviets, and to cut them
off, as far as
centres of
war
industry.
.
.
.
First,
therefore,
all
to
is
possible,
entire defence potential
from
southern sector, with the aim of destroying the
enemy
before the
their
most important
be concentrated
available forces will
Don
in
in the
order to secure
the Caucasian oilfields and the passes through the Caucasian mountains themselves.'
opened
'Blue'
as
soon
as the
ground was hard enough
Manstein's attack into the Kerch peninsula of the Crimea.
to bear tanks,
A week
170,000 Russians had been taken prisoner; only Sevastopol, which July,
still
on it
8
May, with
was over and
would not
fall
until 2
held out in the Crimea. Meanwhile, however, the main stage of
'Blue',
codenamed Kharkov,
later
a
'Fridericus',
had been compromised. A Russian counter-attack towards
main tank-building centre
'Fridericus'
would have
to be
key industrial
as well as a
Izyum pocket.
anticipating Bock's 'pinching out' of the
abandoned
for a frontal
city,
In a panic
began on 12 May,
he warned Hitler
Hitler dismissed the interruption of his plan as a 'minor blemish', retorted, 'This
"blemish" -
a
matter of
life
resolve itself as
is
no
and
death.' Hitler
was unmoved: he repeated
soon
as 'Fridericus'
gathered weight and merely insisted
launch date be advanced one day. Events proved him
that the First
it's
would
situation
that
when
defence of Kharkov and,
right. Kleist,
that the
commanding
Panzer Army, easily penetrated the Russians' line north of their Kharkov thrust, joined
up with
Paulus's Sixth
Army south of Kharkov on
22
May and
thus achieved yet another of
which had dismembered the Red Army the previous
the encirclements
year.
By the
beginning of June 239,000 prisoners had been captured and 1240 tanks destroyed on the
Kharkov
battlefield.
'Fridericus IF,
which
Then followed two set
forces isolated by the
subsidiary operations
Kharkov
battle respectively.
That was D-Day for 'Blue' proper. abreast,
codenamed 'Wilhelm' and
out to destroy the Izyum pocket and the remnants of the Russian
It
was
Both were over by 28 June.
to
be mounted by four armies in line
the Sixth, Fourth Panzer, First Panzer and Seventeenth, the
first
two armies
subordinated to one army group, the second two armies subordinated to another. Bock
command Army Group South, and List, who had begun his rise in the Polish commanded the new Army Group A on the Black Sea sector. They were
continued to campaign,
opposed by four Russian armies,
Fortieth, Thirteenth, Twenty-First
lacking reserves because of Stalin's belief that the principal
and Twenty-Eighth,
German
threat lay against
Army was
destroyed in the first two days; the other three were forced The southern steppe - the treeless, roadless, almost unwatered 'sea of grass' which the Cossack horsemen had made their own in their escape from tsarist autocracy - offered the army no line of obstacles on which to organise a defence. Across it
Moscow. back
Fortieth
in confusion.
Kleist's
and Hoth's armour swept forward. Alan Clark has described the advance:
The progress of the German columns [was distance.
An enormous
discernible] at thirty or forty miles'
dust cloud towered in the sky, thickened by
223
smoke from
THE WAR
burning
villages
lingered in the
IN
THE EAST
1941-1943
Heavy and dark
and
gunfire.
still
atmosphere of summer long
at
the head of the column, the
smoke
had passed on,
after the tanks
hanging barrage of brown haze stretching back to the western horizon. correspondents with the advance waxed
lyrical
about the
.
.
'Mot
.
a
War
Pulk',
or
motorised square, which the columns represented on the move, with the trucks and artillery
enclosed by
a
frame of Panzers.
However, the unexpected ease with which the Panzers had broken across the Donetz from Kharkov into the
great grassland 'corridor'
hundred miles eastward
Don and
Hitler to agree to a
to the
change of plan -
which stretched from
led southward into the Caucasus
disastrously, as
it
would turn
that river a
now prompted
out. Bock,
worried that
down the Don-Donetz 'corridor', by Russian forces operating out of the interior towards the Don city of Voronezh, directed Hoth's Fourth Panzer Arm)- to attack and capture the city. Paulus's Sixth Army was to be left to march down the corridor alone, unsupported by tanks, and then leap across from the 'great bend' of the Don to the Volga at Stalingrad, which it was to seize and hold Army Group South might be
as a blocking-point, to
proceeded
mounted from
miles from the vanguard of the Ostheer,
might waste both time and tanks
the interior against
passed by to penetrate the Caucasus.
it
directing the Russian
still
it
prevent further Russian attacks
main body when
the flank of the Hitler,
attacked in flank as
at a
now
campaign from Rastenburg,
became anxious
moment when
separated by 700
that in fighting for
Voronezh Bock
time lacked and tanks were precious.
Accordingly he flew to see the general on 3 July but was reassured by Bock's apparent
promise it
was
that
he would not embroil
clear that the
the fighting for
his striking force in close
combat. By 7
however,
July,
promise would not be made good. Hoth's tanks had been drawn into
Voronezh instead of breaking
off the battle to join Paulus's infantry in the
and looked to be engaged for some time to come. Peremptorily them away, and on 13 July replaced Bock with Weichs as commander of Army Group South (now renamed B); but. as he would complain for months afterwards, the damage had been done. His generals' hopes of repeating the great captures of the pre-
march on
Stalingrad,
Hitler ordered'
vious year had been reawakened by the success
Donetz-Don corridor
the
at
Kharkov
in
May. However,
Red Army, commanded by Timoshenko, had grown
the Stavka, A. M. Vasilevsky had succeeded in persuading Stalin that 'stand
issued for their
own
fast'
orders
sake were undesirable, since they served the Ostheer's ends, and in
extracting permission for threatened Russian formations to slip the) did, assisted
in the
wilier. At
between
halted Hoth's Panzers.
9
and
Between
11 Jul)-
8
and
by
a
temporary
15 July, after
away out of danger. So
fuel crisis in
Army Group B which
three aborted encirclements between
Arm) Groups A and B had captured only 90,000 prisoners - by standards of the previous year a mere handful. The heightening tension of crisis on the steppe front now prompted Hitler to leave
the Donetz and the Don, the
Rastenburg for
a
headquarters nearer the centre of action.
224
On
16 July
OKW
was
trans-
CRIMEAN SUMMER, STALINGRAD WINTER
THE GERMAN OFFENSIVE, SUMMER
1942
•Bryansk
Bryansk Front
Orel
Key
Army Group South Second
Army
Thirteenth
(Wekhs)
Army
Fortieth
Voronezh Front (newly formed I* Voronezh
Twenty-Fjghth
Army Group A Zaporozhye
Panzer
6 July 1
1
July
front line 22 July line 18
November
M _«Kletskaya T^**. •Kachalinskaya
"••Stalingrad
Army
m
(Kleist)
Seventeenth
line
Army
^^\ First
line
The front
The front
• Povormo
.
Dnepropetrovsk *
offensives
front line 28 June, 1942
The front
The
Mi
Volchansk#
7 July)
Army /
Army + One Pz Cp -^^
(Paukis)
The
' <• . Twenty-First Army^Y
Army Group B Sixth
^^^^
/
/
(Hoth)
Army
\
Kursk*
Fourth Panze r
German
Yelets*
/
Army
.'
Stalingrad Front (formed
Tsimlyansl
\
otelnikova
rth
Panzer
Yergeni Proletarskaya .
12 July)
Army Group B
.
,uy 31
%
Army*
Hills
Kalmyk Steppe
_.
^^^ JulyT* "Elista
Astrakhan •
t
North Caucasus Front.
Trans-Caucausus Front
The advance of
Army Groups A and B
to the
Russia's oil-bearing regions
ported
en bloc to Vinnitsa in the
Ukraine,
tenburg-like pine forest - malarial,
as
it
lie
still
Volga and the Caucasus,
beyond the Caucasus
summer 1942.
crestline.
400 miles from the
Don and
isolated in a Ras-
turned out - but nevertheless handier for direct
From the Vinnitsa headcodenamed 'Brunswick', for the continuation of 'Blue'. It directed the Seventeenth Army and the First Panzer Army of Army Group A to follow the Russians across the great bend of the Don and destroy them personal intervention by the Ftihrer in the conduct of operations. quarters
on 23
July
he issued Fiihrer Directive No.
225
45,
THE WAR
THE EAST
IN
beyond Rostov. Meanwhile the
Sixth
thrust forward to Stalingrad, 'to
smash the enemy
town and
to block land
nected with
this,
1941-1943
Army, supported by the Fourth Panzer Army, was forces concentrated there, to
communications between the Don and Volga.
from the Rhineland,
it
was
place almost
but in 1942 a vast
his infantry
the
at
end of the
space and
columns and the
— Once
Maikop, where the Luftwaffe
a
still
German
unsubdued Red Arm)- interspersed dream of empire.
—
A
at first
went even
faster
across the Don, Kleist's tanks raced over the derricks
had campaigned
soldiers
'Never contradict the Fuhrer'
first oil
and 1500 miles
in Silesia
earth. Hitler's imagination leapt
fulfilment of his
advance southward with Arm) Group
than expected.
the
a
home
from
such objectives and he remembered that
as far as that in 1918;
List's
Closely con-
land fabled even to Russians; to
lay in the far Caucasus, a
the Landsers tramping eastward, already 1000 miles
between
.
fast-moving forces will advance along the Volga with the task of thrusting
through to Astrakhan.' Astrakhan
effortlessly at
.
.
to
occupy the
were seen on 9 August. The
and more smoothly
Kuban steppe
oilfield
to reach
was wrecked but
commander, Wolfram von Richthofen, whose Fourth
Air
was
Fleet
supporting the operation, was certain he could drive the Russians out of the Caucasus passes and clear a
way through
to the
main
oilfields
beyond.
A
breakthrough was also
important to secure possession of Tuapse, the Black Sea port through which the
could be supplied from Bulgaria and Romania.
On
21 August, Hitler
Bavarian mountain troops had raised the swastika flag
enemy
was brought news
on the peak of Mount
that
Elbrus, the
highest point in the Caucasus (and in Europe), but the achievement did not please him.
wanted more tank advances, not foothills
of the Caucasus, however, the advance began to slow and Hitler vented
impatience against those around him,
Moscow and
and Haider's defence of soldiers consigned
Jodl,
faced by the troops
Caucasus front
on
the ground.
OKH,
When
Army Group
that
it
A.
He found
Leningrad also
called 'the last
shared
its
failed in August,
what he thought 'impossible masonic
lodge'.
understanding of the
difficulties
the reports of two emissaries he had sent to the
failed to soften the Fiihrer's
visit
at
to carry out
what he
orders' only inflamed Hitler's rage against to Haider's
his
Haider, then Jodl. Haider was in disfavour for
first
other reasons: subordinate operations near
though no friend
He
of mountaineering. As the tanks reached the
feats
harshness towards
the 4th Mountain Division stuck
had no hope of breaking through
List,
Jodl himself
fast in a defile
to the Transcaucasus
and
its
oil.
went
to
so narrow
The
force
advancing on Tuapse was equally blocked by Russian resistance and had no prospect of getting to the port before winter closed the passes.
When
predicament was insoluble and incautiously indicated
he insisted to Hitler
that the
that List's
Fuhrer had contrived the
impasse, the result was an outburst of fury. Hitler, acutely sensitive to any implied slur on his
powers of command and obsessed by the danger of repeating mistakes made during
the First
World War, declared
that Jodl
was behaving
226
like
Hentsch, the General Staff officer
CRIMEAN SUMMER, STALINGRAD WINTER
who had his
He banished him and
sanctioned the retreat from the Marne in 1914.
command
headquarters mess, installed stenographers in his
Keitel
hut to take
from
verbatim
a
record of his conferences so that his words could not be quoted against him, and dismissed
assuming
List,
command
of
Army Group A himself on
man he
simultaneously sent the black spot to Haider, via Keitel, a
On
widely remarked qualities of lackey and sycophant.
23 September the
army chief of
the Fiihrer's presence in tears, to be replaced forthwith by General Kurt Zeitzler.
staff left
'Never contradict the Fuhrer' was Keitel's advice to Zeitzler on the threshold of
him
'Never remind
him
He
9 September.
chiefly valued for his
that
once he may have thought
differently
office.
of something. Never
tell
subsequent events have proved you right and him wrong. Never report on him - you have to spare the nerves of the man.' Zeitzler owed his promotion
that
casualties to
mainly to his friendship with Schmundt, Hitler's chief adjutant, but he was also infantry soldier with an impressive fighting reputation.
must have the nerve
Keitel, 'he
when he
'If a
man
there
staff,
were
dogged
a
he retorted
to
During the twenty-two months
to bear the consequences.'
served Hitler as army chief of
starts a war,'
to
be repeated passages of blunt
speaking between them. After Haider, a 'swivel-chair' soldier, in Hitler's dismissive phrase,
he brought reassuring,
Such
a
down-to-earth directness to the
and they were
was
a crisis
now
in the
Now
little
on the Volga
making.
even
conferences which Hitler found in the
note of the danger levelled by
danger loomed.
a similar
worst of
Hitler's allusion to the Battle
German army had overextended
not without point. Then the
had taken too
command
to rub along effectively
a strongly
Army Group
itself and
crises.
of the Marne was
command
the high
garrisoned city on
A, reaching
flanks.
its
southward towards
the Caucasus, maintained - with difficulty - lines of communication 300 miles long it
lacked the strength to protect against Russian forces located in the steppe to
Army Group
B,
which had
being drawn into transforming the
a battle
city into a
1942 was not exact. At the
earlier
around
dawdled down the Donetz-Don Stalingrad,
and
corridor,
which
its
east.
was
now
the signs indicated that Stalin was
all
formidable centre of resistance. The parallel between 1914 and
Marne on
find the force to capture Paris
the its
overreact and, by concentrating too
German army had been beaten because flank.
The
much
risk
force
posed
at
in 1942
Stalingrad,
was
deny
it
failed to
would
that Hitler
his armies in the
mountains and the open steppe the means to defend themselves against an enemy counter-stroke. Such Stavka
were
The
now
first
was precisely the operational outcome towards which
inkling of the plan for a Russian counter-stroke
Winston Churchill by August.
Stalin
Stalin
The moment was
a
when
had been disclosed
the British Prime Minister visited
low point
in
Moscow on
agreement the previous December to release via Iran to
now had
his 180,000 Polish prisoners
form the 'Anders Army' under
reason to reproach the
to
12-17
Anglo-Soviet relations. Although the obstacle
presented by Russia's treatment of Poland had been partially removed - by
them
and the
groping their way.
British. After
British
command
in
the massacre of convoy
227
Stalin's
and transport
Egypt - the Russians
PQ17
in June, Britain
THE WAR
had decided
postponed from 1942
These reproaches
now
a British
army
an
in
On
secret police troops to the region.
and 14,000 tanks
in the
Muslims had
local
prompted
Beria to send
the eve of the leaders' parting, however, Stalin
Western industry could provide - not
were beginning
factories
He was
in Churchill's teeth.
invaders which had
relented. Desperate for the sort of supplies only
weapons, which the Urals
definitively
secede from Russia in 1918 and were even
effort to
German
displaying a favour towards the
threw
Stalin
More
to the Arctic ports.
defend the Caucasus, where the
also suspicious of Britain's offer to help
been supported by
1941-194?
opening of the 'Second Front' had been
in July, the
to 1943.
THE EAST
convoying of Soviet supplies
to interrupt the
Washington
critically, in
IN
second half of
produce
to
in plenty (16,000 aircraft
and finished aluminium - he
1942), but trucks
confronted Churchill with his demands. To smooth the transition from accusation to supplication, he
'let
the Prime Minister into the
immensely
secret prospect of a vast
counter-offensive.'
The
was
outline of the plan
still
vague.
It
was not
be
to
clearly defined until 13
September, by which time the Battle of Stalingrad had been raging for three weeks.
According to Russian calculations,
its
inception was even earlier than
Rostov-on-Don, the sentry-box of southern Russia, had
Army.
tank-heavy neighbours, the
Its
Don
across the
in the next six days and, while the First
Stalingrad. Resistance
had been so
On
24
wheeled south
slight that a sergeant
to drive to the
Army
in the assault
of the 14th Panzer Division
recorded that 'many of the soldiers were able to take off their clothes and bathe
Don] -
as
we had
in the
Dnieper exactly
By
a year earlier'.
August the Sixth
19
positioned to begin the attack on Stalingrad as Hitler's Fourth Panzer a
converging
route.
Stalingrad
surrounding modern factories
which was by the
a
mile wide
VIII Air
comprised
largely
in a strip
a
sprawl
[in
the
Army was
Army approached on wooden buildings
of
twenty miles long on the west bank of the Volga,
Much
at that point.
July,
and Fourth Panzer Armies, broke eastward
First
Caucasus, the Fourth turned north-eastward to support Paulus's Sixth
on
that.
German Seventeenth
fallen to the
of the
city
was destroyed
day of bombing
in a
Corps on 23 August. Through the smouldering ruins the Sixth Army pressed
forward for the culminating advance to the Volga shore. In the
month
that
Stavka had improvised
importance for of the
Stalingrad a defence as strong as they
autumn and
the previous
largest
had elapsed since the crossing of the Don, however, at
for
Hitler; Stalingrad
many
Russian
Moscow had
cities to
December.
be given
over the conduct of the war against the
his
name.
it
It
was
of 28
July,
had
a
and the
Leningrad
symbolic
Not only was
also the place
the party. During August, accordingly, he rushed
clear that his order
Stalin
for
where
it
the
in 1918
Budenny and Timoshenko - had defied Trotsky Whites, the episode which launched his rise to
Stalingrad front, created a ring of defences, appointed
made
All three cities
a particular significance for Stalin.
the 'southern clique' - Stalin, Voroshilov,
power within
in
had found
new and
men and
vigorous
material to the
commanders and
read out to every Soviet soldier - 'Not a step
backward!' - must apply most sternly of all there. 'Unitary command', which would once
228
CRIMEAN SUMMER, STALINGRAD WINTER
A
Soviet
propaganda photograph of the defenders of Stalingrad during the autumn
1942. But the battlescape
is
authentic
-
central Stalingrad
bitter city fighting of the
again relegate commissars
was reduced
fighting of
to rubble in the
most
status beside generals,
was
war.
from an equal to an advisory
reintroduced on 9 October. Meanwhile he counted on his Stalingrad generals to retreat as if
he himself stood
commanders
of Stalingrad
commanded
the Sixty-Second
at their
and
elbows. V. N. Gordov and
South-Eastern
Army
Fronts
resist
Yeremenko were
respectively,
and Zhukov was
in the city itself,
V.
I.
in overall
be
to
the
Chuikov charge of
the theatre.
Zhukov's meeting with advance rather than Chief of the General First
Stalin in the
retreat. In a Staff, a
Kremlin on
13
September, however, concerned
dramatic leap of imagination he and Vasilevsky -
post inherited from
Deputy Defence Commissar - outlined
Zhukov on
a plan for a
229
the
latter's
now
appointment
as
wide encirclement of the German
THE WAR
on
forces
slip
days
forty-five
it
in the city. Stalin's
would allow the Germans
that
could be assembled and equipped.
had come close
on 23 August,
Army
away. So too was his contention that the necessary force did not
was
objections, adding that the 'main business' It
Paulus's Sixth
narrow encirclement were dismissed;
for a
break out and
1941-1943
and the destruction of
the lower Volga
arguments
THE EAST
IN
to
doing
German
the
so. After the
wooden
burning of the
Army had found
Sixth
thereupon withdrew
Stalin
ensure that Stalingrad did not
to
drawn
itself
to
exist; in
his
fall.
quarters of the city
into a bitter battle for 'the
with their copses and ravines, into the factory area of
jagged gullies of the Volga
hills
Stalingrad, spread out over
uneven, pitted rugged country, covered with iron, concrete
and stone
buildings', as
one of
commanders described
Paulus's divisional
For every
it.
house, workshop, water-tower, railway embankment, wall, cellar and every pile of ruins a
was waged, without equal even
bitter battle
By Vinnitsa
13
on
September, the day the battle for the
after
city,
places ten miles from the Volga.
which Chuikov had sixty tanks.
One
just
in the First
World War.
Paulus had returned from a conference with Hitler
the Russian front line was
It
still at
to
command, and I.
which he had learned with the International Brigade Chuikov noted, 'on the pretext of
opposite bank of the Volga.' Between
down
13
and four
illness three
and
of
my
Madrid
in
1936.
left
By
for the
September the Germans, using three
21
and Panzer
infantry
at
deputies had
street
divisions in another, drove
the banks of the Volga to surround the core of the defence - the Tractor, Barricades
and Red October to
at
some
the garrison deployed about
contrast,
thrust
in
Rodimtsev, was experienced in
fighting,
one
and
was held by three divisions of the Sixty-Second Army,
been appointed
of the divisional commanders, A.
infantry divisions in
least four
factories
- and brought
artillery fire to
bear on the central landing stage
men and
supplies
were
However, the
struggle
had exhausted the vanguard of the Sixth Army, and
which
ferried nightly
from the
east bank.
intervened while fresh troops were assembled for the street
battle.
October. Chuikov was no longer defending above ground. His strongpoints had subterranean and his headquarters troglodyte,
a
pause
began again on 4
It
become
staff officers and specialists inhabiting
its
tunnels and bunkers dug into the western bank of the Tsaritsa river near the Volga landing
Only the strongest buildings survived, to be fought over for a fractional advantage of dominance that each conferred. An officer of the 24th Panzer Division during the October stage.
battle wrote:
We
have fought for
fifteen
days for a single house with mortars, grenades, machine-
guns and bayonets. Already by the third day the cellars,
out rooms;
on the it is
landings,
and the
the thin ceiling
fifty-four
staircases.
between two
houses by fire-escapes and chimneys. There night.
From
The
floors. is
German corpses
front
is
a corridor
Help comes from neighbouring
a ceaseless struggle
storey to storey, faces black with sweat,
we bombed
grenades in the middle of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke.
230
are strewn in
between burnt-
.
.
from noon
to
each other with .
Ask any soldier
CRIMEAN SUMMER, STALINGRAD WINTER
what hand-to-hand
means
struggle
in
such a
day
it is
And imagine
fight.
days and eighty nights of hand-to-hand struggle.
.
Stalingrad
.
.
an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke;
reflection of the flames.
And when
it is
Stalingrad; eighty
no longer
is
swim
The Nietzschean-Nazi grad
battle.
men
for long; only
rhetoric apart, this
Chuikov, no sensationalist and
a
is
by the
desperately to gain the
other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee it
lit
one of those scorching, howling,
night arrives,
bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and
hardest storms cannot bear
town. By
a
a vast furnace
this hell; the
endure.
not an exaggerated picture of the
Stalin-
to the war - he had
cool-headed newcomer
previously been Russian military attache in China - describes a succeeding stage.
On
14
October the Germans struck out;
most ferocious of the whole the
Germans threw
battle.
day
that
Along
a
in five infantry divisions
masses of artillery and planes
.
.
.
down
go
will
narrow
front
and
as the bloodiest
of four or
five
kilometres,
and two tank divisions supported by
during the day there were over two thousand Luft-
waffe sorties. That morning you could not hear the separate shots or explosions, the
whole merged
into
men in my headquarters were
killed. After
the
Germans
started to attack with tanks
over the
each other in
a
finally
city.
'From then
on',
.
.
.
That day sixty-one
four or five hours of this stunning barrage,
and
and they advanced one and
infantry,
broke through to the Tractor
marked the penultimate
This lunge lull fell
and
you could no longer
roar. At five yards
were the dust and the smoke.
half kilometres
less
one continuous deafening
distinguish anything, so thick
German
stage of the
noted Chuikov,
deadly clutch; the front became virtually
advance.
On
two armies were
'the
stabilised.' In
some
than 300 yards from the Volga. The Red October Factory had been
mans, the Tractor and Barricades factories were only partly kov's front was split into fight as if 'there
is
two pockets. But the
no land
by
wounded
ried back each night in the boats that brought replacements (65,000
(24,000 tons)
inforced
from the
more
easily,
the local Luftwaffe
and combat troops
far
shore.
were
as
The Germans of the
much
get us anywhere.' But
in a
November
no new
spirit
A German
mortar crew prepares
centre carries the base-plate
and
as their
Hitler
to
advance
231
Ger-
and Chui-
all)
being
Army
left
to
fer-
re-
enemies. Richthofen,
commanders
new
spirit will
appeared to have forgotten to the battle for the city.
at Stalingrad.
the soldier on the
was
it
men) and ammunition
entry in his diary: 'The
was forthcoming.
places
famous slogan
(35,000 in
a
gripping
lost to the
Stalingrad are so apathetic that only the injection of a
whatever reason he had ever had for committing the Sixth
Overleaf:
his
October
left
Army, though supplied and
gripped by exhaustion
commander, noted at
Sixth
18
in Russian hands,
garrisons, inspired
across the Volga', held on, the
a
Plant.
The
soldier in the
a rack of bombs.
THE WAR
Its
waging had come
IN
overshadow the
to
THE EAST
1941-1943
along the line of the Don, against a
city,
Russian counter-attack. Hitler's dangerous tendency to obsess himself
command robbed
his direction
into the Volga,
of the struggle of
all
perspective. If his soldiers
at
best he
would have achieved
Army
initiative
at
in
and
cliffs
catastrophic cost; the
lost half their fighting strength. If
the Ostheer's largest offensive concentration
and the
now succeeded
over the Stalingrad
success
a local
twenty divisions of the Sixth Arm) had already
sult
twice-daily
at his
conferences with yards instead of miles and platoons instead of armies had
pushing Chuikov and the remnants of the Sixty-Second
failed,
even the
strategy of capturing the Caucasus or
consolidation of the 'steppe front' north of the
would have been devastated
for
they
no
re-
given to the Red Army.
mounted a final effort on 11 November, in weather that already heralded the cold which would freeze the Volga and restore Chuikov's solid passage to the far shore. Next day a thrust by the Fourth Panzer Army succeeded in reaching the Volga south of the city, thus encircling it completely. That was the last success the Germans were to achieve at Paulus
six days local and small-scale on both sides but gaining ground for neither. Then, on 19 November, in Alan Clark's words 'a new and terrible sound overlaid' the rattle of small arms - 'the thunderous barrage of Voronov's two thousand guns to the north'. The Stalin— this
easternmost point of their advance into Russia. For
battles flickered on. killing soldiers
Zhukov-Vasilevsky counter-stroke had begun.
The
fragile shell
In order to concentrate the largest possible
had economised elsewhere by city
with his
lining the
that,
this
by breaking the
would
force against Stalingrad
weakness
in the Ostheer's
fragile shell,
fight
it
directly.
gain partial revenge
on
they It
itself,
Hitler
over the steppe front north and south of the
was German; the
Stalingrad concentration, in short,
without having to
German
and
troops, Romanians, Hungarians
satellite
blinded himself to
Don
shell
was
deployment.
Italians.
not. All
Now
The kernel of
autumn
Hitler for those
to suffer at
had
the Russians detected the Sixth
Army
an encirclement by which
Stalin
would surround and overcome
was about
Hitler
his
Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev which had
Red Army the previous year. Zhukov's plan disposed two fronts, South-West
nearly destroyed the
west of the
city
(Yeremenko)
to the south with
with
five
infantry
(Vatutin)
and Don (Rokossovsky),
and two tank armies, and the Stalingrad Front
one tank and three
infantry armies.
Don Fronts struck on 19 November, the Stalingrad November their pincers had met at Kalach on the Don
The South-West and
Front the following day. By 23
west of Stalingrad. The Third and
Fourth Romanian Armies had been devastated, the Fourth (German) Panzer Arm) was in
and the Sixth Army was entombed in the ruins on the banks of the Volga. The inception of Operation Uranus (as the Russians codenamed their counteroffensive) found Hitler at his house at Berchtesgaden, in retreat from the strains of fighting
full retreat,
234
CRIMEAN SUMMER. STALINGRAD WINTER
He
the Russian war.
November
at
once took the
where he met
train to Rastenburg,
and, in the teeth of his chief of staffs advice that the Sixth
on 23
Zeitzler
Army must withdraw
or be destroyed, peremptorily issued the disastrous order: 'We are not budging from the
During the next week he cobbled together the expedients
Volga.'
Army
The Luftwaffe would supply it: of supplies a day was 'realistically' assumed
Sixth tons'
there.
mean
to
currently reaching the city in twenty to thirty Junkers 52 availability
would
of aircraft to match that
relieve
it;
figure.
would begin
break out. At most,
when
300,
and the
would keep the he needed 700
figure
of 60 tons
was multiplied by the theoretical
Manstein, the armoured-breakthrough magician,
would need were
the reserves he
'Winter Storm', that
that
Paulus's statement that
in early
said to
December.
In the
be available for an operation,
meantime Paulus was not
Manstein's attack developed, he was to reach out towards
to
him
(on receipt of the signal 'Thunderclap') so that the Don-Volga bridgeheads could unite to
form the same
threat to the
Red Army they had constituted before the counter-attack of
19-20 November.
commander of the newly formed Army Group Don, disposed of four
Manstein, as
armies for 'Winter Storm': the Third and Fourth Romanian, the Sixth (German) and the
Fourth Panzer. The
two, always defective in equipment and commitment, were
first
now
broken reeds; the Sixth Army was imprisoned; the Fourth Panzer Army could
manoeuvre but had only three tank attempted breakthrough began on
divisons, 6th, 17th 12
and 23rd,
December. The Panzer
to act as a spearhead.
divisions
had some
still
The sixty
miles of snow-covered steppe to cross before they could reach Paulus's lines. Until 14
December they made good
achieved and the Russians,
now
as ever,
German advance. Time might be on military
terms.
On
16
December
escaped the Romanians'
satellites,
the Italian Eighth fate,
it
difficult to resist
their side but they
Against the Wehrmacht's
skill.
progress; a measure of surprise
found
initial
Army
had been
impetus of a
could not match the Wehrmacht in
however, they were on equal
if
not better
north of Stalingrad, which had thus
was struck and penetrated and
On
the
a
new
threat
far
was hurled
December the 6th Panzer Division lurched to enough to hear gunfire from the city; but the pace of advance was slowing, the Italian front was bending and the Sixth Army showed no sign of reaching out to join hands. On 19 December Manstein flew his chief intelligence officer into the city in an effort to galvanise its commander. He returned with news that
against Manstein's Panzer thrust.
17
within thirty-five miles of Stalingrad, close
Paulus was oppressed by the difficulties and the fear of incurring the Fiihrer's disfavour.
On
21
December Manstein tried but failed to persuade Hitler to give Paulus a direct order By 24 December his own relief effort had ground to a halt in the snows of
for a break-out.
the steppe
between the Don and Volga and he could only accept the necessity
Retreat, too,
Group A
in
was
a
consequent necessity
the Caucasus.
for Kleist's
The previous autumn
his
to retreat.
dangerously over-extended
Army
motorised patrols had reached the
shore of the Caspian Sea, the Eldorado of Hitler's strategy, but had turned back near the
mouth of the
river
Terek for lack of support. In early January the whole of the
235
First
Panzer
THE WAR
and Seventeenth Armies began through the 300-mile
summer. As
late
as
to
THE EAST
IK
1941-1943
withdraw from the Caucasus mountain
line,
and
retire
by their headlong dash south-eastward the previous
salient created
12 January, Hitler
still
hoped
to
hold the Maikop
When
oilfields.
Russian pressure north of Stalingrad cast the Hungarian Second Arm) into disarray, he was
Arm) to Manstein to augment his armoured strength. whose Arm)' Group A was now shrunk to a single army,
obliged to transfer the First Panzer
Nevertheless he directed
Kleist,
the Seventeenth, to withdraw
The hope was quite
into a bridgehead east of the
it
offensive operations could be
resumed when the
illusory.
Crimea from which he hoped
Stalingrad crisis ameliorated.
During January the German defence of Stalingrad was
expiring by inches. Daily deliveries by the Luftwaffe to the three airfields within the
perimeter averaged 70 tons; on only three days of the siege
minimum
exceed the
deliveries
of January 1943 the forward
(7, 21
and
31
December) did
of 300 tons needed to sustain resistance. In the
airfield
at
week
first
Morozovskaya was overrun by Russian
thereafter Richthofen's Ju 52s - diminished in
number by
the transfer of
tanks;
some
to fly
paratroops to Tunisia - had to operate from Novocherkassk, 220 miles from Stalingrad. After 10 January,
became regularly
were
when
the
main
airstrip
inside the Stalingrad perimeter
fell,
landing
most supplies were airdropped and the wounded could no longer be evacuated. By 24 January nearly 20,000 men, one-fifth of the entombed arm}-,
difficult,
lying in makeshift, often
unheated
hospitals, with the outside temperature
at
minus
:
30 Centigrade.
On
8 January.
Yoronov and Rokossovsky
promising medical care and
warned. Paulus. fear
who had
sent Paulus a
to surrender,
refused Manstein's appeal to break out three weeks earlier for
of offending the Fiihrer, could not contemplate such, an
terrible struggle
summons
rations. 'The cruel Russian winter has scarcely yet begun,' they
continued.
On
10 January the Russians
opened
act
a
of disobedience. The
bombardment with 7000
guns, the largest concentration of artillery in history, to break the Sixth Army's line of resistance.
By
17 January
its
soldiers
24 January the army had been
had been forced back
split into
into the ruins of the city
itself,
eastern shore of the river crossed the Volga and joined Chuikov's Sixty-Second stalwarts in their pockets
Hoping
marshal's rank by signal the
around the Barricades and Red October
for a gesture
enemy and he
on 30
No German
January. a
[suicide's]
imposition of authority Paulus baulked.
he surrendered with leaving 90,000
more
field
Rastenburg.
his staff to the
unwounded
marshals in 'I
to 20,000
enemy. The
this war,' Hitler
'will
make
would indeed lend himself to
marshal had ever surrendered to
pistol into
Paulus's hand'. At this final
last
survivors capitulated
on 2 February,
soldiers in Russian hands. 'There will be
announced
my
field
30 January his headquarters were overrun and
wounded
won't go on counting
predicted that Paulus
On
field
Army
factories.
of honourable defiance. Hitler promoted Paulus to
thus 'pressed
by
two, and the next day the Russian forces on the
to Zeitzler
and Jodl on
1
February
no at
chickens before they're hatched.' Rightly he
confessions, issue proclamations. You'll see.' (Paulus
Stalin's
Committee of Free German
236
Officers,
which would
CRIMEAN SUMMER, STALINGRAD WINTER
German
Survivors of the
Sixth
Army march
into captivity,
January 1943.
on the Ostheer to cease resistance and work for a Russian victory.) 'In peacetime in Germany about 18,000 and 20,000 people a year choose to commit suicide,' Hitler continued, 'although none of them is in a situation like this, and here's a man who has
call
45,000 to 60,000 of his soldiers die defending themselves bravely to the end -
up
give himself
The
German the
reaction to the Stalingrad disaster was altogether
between
10 January
and 2 February had
broadcasting by
German
Symphony, transmitted
state radio
instead. Hitler, advised
by Goebbels, saw
Army and
epic.
There was no need for the fabrication of epic
its
twenty-two German divisions an opportunity
of the war. The Sixty-Second a future
Army was
in Russia.
and devastated lie
in
and our duty for a city,
it
city.
peace is
to
Will
we
in the
in
the
first
news of
Paulus's
undeniable Russian
as
he
left
it
the following
Stalingrad,
month
for the
'goodbye the tortured
ever see you again and what will you be like? Goodbye, our
land soaked with the blood of our people.
avenge your deaths.'
would be
On
of the
to create a national
redesignated the Eighth Guards Army, and
Marshal of the Soviet Union, entrained
Donetz. 'Goodbye, Volga,' he recalled thinking
in the destruction
at least
surrender the bells of the Kremlin were rung to celebrate the
friends,
and few of
was suspended and solemn music, Bruckner's Seventh
Sixth
Chuikov,
more measured.
in fact totalled 100,000,
captured survived transport and imprisonment. For three days normal
110,000
victor)
can he
to the Bolsheviks?'
official
losses
how
When
We
are going west
next Chuikov and his soldiers fought a battle
the streets of Berlin.
237
— PART — III
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1941-1943
'
f
w%
'sUfifa
ft^r\ Kafc>'/
HaPng P"}
K&>1
-
£l
*
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
12
TOJO'S
STRATEGIC
DILEMMA Throughout
war on
the second year of his
had laboured under
Russia, Hitler
separate and self-assumed strategic burden: war with America. At
afternoon of
11
December
two o'clock
a
in the
days after General Tojo's government in Tokyo
1941, four
had unleashed Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Ribbentrop,
as
Foreign Minister,
read out to the American charge d'affaires in Berlin the text of Germany's declaration of
war on the United
States.
It
was an event which Ribbentrop,
perhaps his only
in
truly-
sagacious contribution to Nazi policy-making, had struggled to avoid. During the period of
American States to
neutrality Hitler too
war
against him.
Ribbentrop emphasised,
if
Harbor
it
lose the war:
tell
we now have
an
and
ally
which might provoke the United
cast the
die,
he hastened
to follow.
terms of the Tripartite Pact bound Germany to go
Japan were to Jodl
acts
Japan had
that
in vain, that the
to Japan's assistance only
Hitler raced to
had shrunk from
Now
directly
On
attacked.
Keitel, exulting that
who
hearing the news of Pearl
'Now
it
is
impossible for us to
has never been vanquished
in three
thousand
on hearing the same news, came to an identical but contrary conclusion: all.'). On 11 December Hitler convoked the Reichstag and announced puppet deputies: 'We will always strike first! [Roosevelt] incites war, then falsifies the
years.' (Churchill,
'So
we had won
to the
after
causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy
leads
mankind
to
war.
Previous page: The
.
.
.
The
fact
that
destruction ol 'Battleship
emptive
strike,
and slowly but surely
the Japanese government,
Row'
at Pearl
7 December 1941.
240
which has been
Harbor by the Japanese
pre-
DILEMMA
TOJO'S STRATEGIC
man, has
negotiating for years with this
such an unworthy way, people
arms
world with deep
in the
renewed the until
of
all
fills
become tired of being mocked by him in German people, and, I think, all other decent
at last
us, the
Germany,
Later that day
satisfaction.'
conclude
Tripartite Pact, contracting not to
a separate
and Japan
Italy
peace nor to
'lay
down
the joint war against the United States and England reaches a successful
conclusion'. Privately Ribbentrop
warned
from her military supplies arriving
'We have
Hitler:
Murmansk and
via
just
one year
to cut Russia off
the Persian Gulf; Japan
must take
we don't succeed and the munitions potential of the United States manpower potential of the Russians, the war will enter a phase in which
care of Vladivostok. If joins
we
up with the
only be able to win
shall
with
it
difficulty.'
member of Hitler's entourage whose commander at the centre of his Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, Commander
This view was not only the opinion of a
reputation was in eclipse.
was
It
by
also held
a
country's policy-making. In late September 1940
Japanese
of the Combined Fleet, had told the then Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye:
am
told to fight
year, but
I
regardless of the consequences,
I
shall
run wild for the
have utterly no confidence for the second or third
been concluded and we cannot help
Now
it.
endeavour
to avoid a
among them; that, less
than a year
How after
did
a fear
that
attack
use
in
when
all
on
ruling caste's
its
defeat
which the country's
would
will
the head of
his
his
country to
a
it?
West go back
far
into the
fear that 'Westernisation' - not that
Portuguese, Dutch and British mariners
Japan's shores in the sixteenth century -
at
Konoye, he should, against
which would commit
roots of Japan's self-destructive conflict with the
term was
you
of war, Konoye
not only that his views were overruled
his anxieties to
power he knew would
country's past, and centre above a
come about
been planning the
life-and-death struggle with a
such
it
he expressed
a
to this pass [that the
hope
I
I
Tripartite Pact has
the opinion of none of them carried the weight of the admiral
better judgement, have
The
States],
Japanese-American war.' Other Japanese had
Japan's operational navy.
but
come
the situation has
Japanese cabinet was discussing war with the United
The
year.
'If
months or
first six
first
appeared off
disrupt the careful social structure
on
internal order rested. At the beginning of the seventeenth century,
world and succeeded in keeping them seamen who commanded a new technology, the steamship, in the middle of the nineteenth century forced them to reconsider their remarkable - and remarkably successful - decision. In one of the most radical changes of
therefore, they closed their coasts to the outside
shut until the appearance of Western
national policy recorded in history, the Japanese then accepted that,
remain Japanese,
must
it
join the
modern
if
Japan were to
world, but on terms which guaranteed that the
processes of modernisation were retained in Japanese hands. The technology of the
Western world would be bought; but the Japanese would not society to the
West
in the
By the end of the towards achieving
First
course of acquiring
World War
that ideal.
a
A popular
sell
themselves or their
it.
reformed Japan had made extraordinary progress children's song of the era of modernisation after
241
THE WAR
the Meiji Restoration of 1867-8,
government over the feudal
IX
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
which re-established the power of the
lords, litanised ten desirable
Western
central imperial
objects, including steam-
engines, cameras, newspapers, schools and steamships. By the 1920s Japan
and highly
efficient
school system, whose products were working
only manufactured textiles for sale also
produced heavy and
ships, aircraft
light
and guns -
as
important wars, against China in the
highly competitive prices
at
on
had
a universal
in factories
which not
the world market but
engineering goods, steel and chemicals, and armaments -
modern
world. Japan had already
as an}" in the
and Russia
in 1894
in 1905,
when
won two
she had established rights
Chinese province of Manchuria; she had also fought on the Western side against
German}'
in 1914-18,
on
that
occasion with weapons largely manufactured
home.
at
Japan's designs on China Japan's emulation of the
West did
not,
however, win her equality of status or esteem with
been
the victor nations in Western eyes. Britain and later America had assistance in the
campaign
share of those colonies British
against
Germany's
and American admirals would
among
a
- they then combined to
bitterly regret after 1941
the world's great military powers.
with the Japanese that they had been compelled to surrender in
conceding her
the peace settlement - a strategically ill-judged concession which
at
deprive her of an equal place
advantageous terrain
grateful for Japan's
Pacific colonies; but, after
China the} had wrested from Russia
much at
the
It
already rankled
of the
strategically
end of the Russo-
Japanese war of 1904-5. Their relegation by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 to a lower
wound on the who had made a brilliantly
place in the world's naval hierarchy by the British and Americans inflicted a national psyche
which
traditional warrior caste, the Samurai,
its
judged leap from feudalism to modernity
new
in
order to retain their social dominance in the
Japan, resolved not lightly to forgive.
personnel and material and potentially
in
United
They
which
States Navies in Pacific waters. set its
numbers of
They knew
terms of
size,
bitterly
capital ships at three-fifths
that their navy,
in
quality of
was the equal of the Royal and
resented having to accept
of those of
its
wartime
a treaty
allies.
The Japanese army was even more strongly affected by rancour. Less Westernised than the navy, whose officers had been raised in the professional tradition of the Royal Navy, it was very early infected by the spirit of intense racialist nationalism which seized hold of Japanese
political life in the inter-war years. Japan, a
had by then ceased sufficient in
raw
to
be
self-sufficient in food;
it
country of nearly 60 million,
had never been, and never could
be, self-
on which an industrial revolution, in laboured, most urgently depended - non-ferrous metals,
materials, least of all those materials
which Japan still rubber and, above all, oil. The solution that recommended itself to Japanese nationalists was a simple one: Japan would acquire the resources it needed from its neighbours and assure its supply by the most direct of all methods, imperial conquest. China was the the throes of
obvious source of supply. The Japanese army despised the Chinese both for their
242
TOJO'S STRATEGIC
economic and chaos
political
after 1912
DILEMMA
incompetence - the collapse of the imperial system into warlord
was the most
striking
Western penetration and exploitation.
evidence for It
- and for their
this
therefore resolved to found an
inability to resist
economic empire
in China.
The
first
was taken
step
in 1931,
when
the Japanese garrison of Manchuria,
Japan enjoyed rights of protection over the railway system through which
it
where
extracted
mineral produce, took possession of the whole of Manchuria from the local warlord, to
end
his
piecemeal
Marshal' was an
Chinese authority
efforts at re-establishing
ally
commander of
of Chiang Kai-shek,
'Young
in the area. This
the
army of the nominally
sovereign Nanking government, and his soldiers were swiftly routed. The 'Manchurian Incident' aroused anger both abroad felt its
authority
and
in Japan,
where the
had been usurped; but no one moved
civilian
government
condemnation from the Americans, who had adopted
at
commercial settlements. This represented right to base troops, a right
power
swiftly
to the
of the
Western traders
the Japanese, since
a threat to
of which they
One
foreign hands in the nineteenth century
the surrender of sovereign
'extraterritoriality',
loud
towards China,
a protective role
based in particular on their missionary connection with the country. humiliations the Chinese had had to accept
rightly
to chasten the army, despite
in
was
their
entailed the
it
took advantage themselves. In 1937 the
Japanese garrison of the international embassy guard
Peking
at
fell
into conflict with
campaign which rapidly spread along the
Chinese government troops there and initiated
a
whole Chinese
China, including the valleys of the Yellow
and Yangtse the
littoral.
By 1938 most of
fertile
was under Japanese occupation. Both the new
rivers,
old capital of Peking
fell
government, withdrew into the
to
the
flotillas,
casualties
aboard
and by entering into
armoured
future Marshal
in
1936. In
units of the extraterritorial river
forces, the Japanese suffered an undeniable defeat
Zhukov, among others. Zhukov,
equipped than the Japanese, 'taken
Red Army on the
another clash with the Red
who had
subsequently volunteered the significant judgement better
head of
had meanwhile incurred the wrath of foreign
and American
unofficial but bitter hostilities with the
Chinese border with Mongolia involving
British
now
Chunking on the headwaters of the Yangtse.
interior, to
Japan's army, and less directly the navy,
powers by causing
of Nanking and
capital
and Chiang Kai-shek,
invaders,
as a
Army
in 1939,
the hands of the
spent training time in Germany,
that,
whole'
at
it
while the
lacked
its
German army was
'real fanaticism'.
The
Japanese army thereafter kept out of harm's way from the Russians - to their very great advantage
in 1941, to Japan's catastrophic cost in
formed no such respectful opinion of the governments protested
at
the attacks
August 1945. By contrast, the Japanese
British or
on the USS
American armed
Panay and
HMS
forces,
Ladybird
whose no
but took
punitive action.
Foremost among the
officers involved in the 'China Incident', as the
spread from Shanghai in 1937 was called
'Manchuria Incident' veteran also and
in
in Japan,
war which
was General Hideki Tojo. He was
a
1938 entered the cabinet as Vice-Minister of War.
243
THE WAR
There he used
IN
his position to urge all-out
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
rearmament
as a
precaution against war breaking
out with the Soviet Union as well as continuing with China's Kuomintang government,
which had succeeded the abolished empire, and of which Chiang Kai-shek was by then the leading figure. Tojo was a fervent, though not an extreme nationalist; but during the late 1930s extreme nationalists
February 1936 as the
came
to play
an increasingly malign role in Japanese
life.
On
26
of soldiers of the Tokyo garrison, rabidly opposed to what they saw
a party
appeasing attitude of the old aristocracy which dominated government, attempted
to assassinate the Prime
Minister and succeeded in killing two of his predecessors,
together with the Grand Chamberlain. This incident temporarily discredited the violent nationalists; paradoxically,
speed with which
it
however,
distanced
strengthened the power of the army because of the
it
from the mutineers. After
itself
governments, Prince Konoye
-
resumed power
in July 1940
and accepted Tojo
cabinet an
of the arm)
ally
a former Prime Minister
nationalists,
as Minister
He
of War.
Yosuke Matsuoka,
combined presence of these two strong-headed
succession of moderate support -
a
who commanded wide as
also took into his
Foreign Minister. The
imperialists at the centre of power
was
to
lead Japan into war.
Matsuoka's
first
achievement was to commit Japan
September 1940 with Germany and the event of any
attacked
otherwise
Germany and a
German)
binding co-belligerency.
'New Order' and
a
to fight the It
United
also recognised
States if
it
attacked Japan, but not
Germany's primacy
itself ruler
of the European empires' Asian colonies
European
in a
Japan's in a 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere', under
Japan was to constitute 1941.
for
bound the three countries to mutual support in power which was not party to the Sino-Japanese was a clear commitment for Japan to fight Russia if
Italy. It
one being attacked by
dispute or to hostilities in Europe. This it
the Tripartite Pact of 27
to
whose guise December
after
Japan had already accepted an alliance with Germany in the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact
against Russia. In April 1941, as a rejoinder to the
Ribbentrop-Molotov
Pact,
Matsuoka
negotiated a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union; but the trend of Japanese diplomacy
was
now
set
firmly against
accommodation with
neutrals
and
towards ever closer association with the victors of 1940, whose
anti-Axis
star
powers and
seemed
fixed in the
ascendant. Hitler's attack
on Russia
in
forewarning - temporarily shook
Matsuoka with
a
June 1941 - of which the Japanese cabinet was given no its
confidence and on 16 July
more moderate Foreign
Minister.
it
reformed
itself to
However, Tojo remained
replace
in place as
Minister of War, and his was the strongest voice in propelling the cabinet towards
confrontation with Hitler's enemies - the British and the Dutch government in exile - and the United States. That policy brought impressive results. In an attempt to appease the
Japanese, in July the British closed the 'Burma Road', through which Chiang Kai-shek's
armies received aid in southern China. The Dutch, British
who were
even
less
capable than the
of resisting Japanese pressure, had also been bullied into agreeing to maintain
rubber, tin and bauxite supplies from their East Indies, not
244
at
the level Japan
oil,
demanded
TOJO'S STRATEGIC
DILEMMA
but in acceptable quantities. In September 1940 the French, beaten in Europe but
power
colonial
transit rights in
in the Far East,
had been compelled
army and
Singapore in Australia
a
fleet (the latter
held in
home
fleet in
also the British possessions
the East Indies,
waters but earmarked for transfer to
Malaya and Burma, more distantly the
in
crisis)
and eventually
from Ceylon
a
northern Indo-China, from which the Japanese armed forces could both
operate against Chiang Kai-shek and threaten the Dutch army and the British
still
to grant the Japanese basing and
dominion of
British
around the shores of the Indian Ocean
to East Africa.
These were alluring
if
distant prospects. In the foreground,
however, hovered the
menace of American power, at nearer hand still the stumbling-block of American disapproval. Not only did Japanese expansion southward threaten the American protectorate of the Philippines, but the United States was also China's protector, almost
guardian angel. Generations of American missionaries cities
and countryside
had no more rewarding pupils than China's traders too
cruised
its
had received
reward
their
waters and tramped
its
ruler,
in China;
plains,
and teachers
and Western learning
to bring Christianity
had worked to
its
its
in China's
people; they had
Chiang Kai-shek, and his wife. American
and America's
sailors
and
had
soldiers
under the colours of peacemakers, since the
troubled time of the Boxer Rising. The 'China lobby' was the most powerful of foreignpolicy interest groups in the United States; cruel it
war which had
now been
was adamant not merely
power
that
in the Pacific but that
it
it
was outraged by the 'China
raging for four years against the
Incident', the
Kuomintang government;
Japan should be checked from further extension of military
should be forced to draw back from the conquests
had
it
already made.
Preparations for In April 1941 Cordell Hull, the
war
American Secretary of State, had
down
laid
four principles
of international behaviour to the Japanese, innocuously high-minded by State Department thinking, but requiring a
moderation of policy which put
a
check on Japanese plans of
expansion and re-emphasised the humiliatingly inferior role
in
the Pacific
United States assigned to their country. The four principles encouraged
which the
a party in
the
Japanese cabinet which thought that the empire's interests were better served by seeking advantages
at
the expense of the Soviet Union, the so-called 'north'
the 'south' party, which insisted extraction
from Vichy of
basing rights in
only effect of Cordell Hull's
programme. However,
on the extension of Japanese power,
demand was
initially
southern Indo-China, remained dominant. The that the cabinet
agreed to continue negotiations
with the United States while pushing ahead with military preparations. Matsuoka, voice for intransigence, was
Unknown
removed
to the Japanese, the
Japanese diplomatic ciphers, as
in a cabinet reorganisation
United
a result
by the
States
had since
on
early 1941
been able
of a remarkable code-breaking operation
245
a
lone
16 July. to read
known
in
RUSSIA
Key Japanese empire
•
Japanese attacks on China
Irkutsk
r
Occupied by Japan by 1941 "-^/
MANCHUKUO
/ Ulan Bator
g
MONGOLIA
J
-
r
o
V.
J
-
^
(MANCHURIA)'
"1
S^
Pekio«
#
V
Vladivostok
SEA OF JAPAN
/"
^ft
KOREA
'Tientsin
CHINA
•
H^
• Suchow
H^^^
(. Brahmapurra
">/—r ^.-J
->
one'
*
Imphal
^i
.tOALi
£AIWAN
»/lEAD ^'Lash.o JP*.
Calcutta*
INDIA
/RICE.
OPIUM
HONG KONG
f"" ' V-jHano Mandalav Ak r#" RUBBER J~!
nURMA jngoo
i
;
'.
1
Hainan
•-'S.
LUZON
THAILAND rice ^Ban^koK T|N JfrenCH Sa.go.•
HEMP
PHILIPPINE
ISLANDS
RICE^INDO-CHINA
GOLD]
•
COAL
MINDANAO
\
SOUTH CHINA SEA STRAIT OF
Iwo Jima
(Formosa)
I
OIL 1-.
MALACCA -.* COAL \
\
TIN
RUBBER
.
R CE |
_
>
MALAYA
i
COAL -'T'£ olD
'
CAROLINE ISLANDS
SARAWAK/'OIL
TIN
—
'^. -'rubber GOLD BORNEO
Singapore
Equator
*"
OIL
SUMATRA
Hollandia
CELEBES
COAL
RUBBER
RUBBER
T
DUTCH EAST
„ Kavieng
NEW
IRELAf
.
NEW GUINEA,r7 BISMARCK ARCH « Rabaul
I
sdLo.
INDIES
Batavia
OIL
JAVA
Geon BE^TTSuSa-S Woodlark
INDIAN OCEAN
AUSTRALIA
ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
Attu
JAPAN'S TERRITORIAL AMBITIONS
Kiska
Key 1
Formosa ceded by China
to
Japan,
1895
2 Japan annexes Korea, 1910 3 Japan occupies Manchuria, September 1931, and Jehol in
1934
4 Japan invades China, July 1937 5 American interest in the Sino-Japanese
conflict
during 1940. Supplies were sent into China at the
Burma Road and
across the Midway
grew
first
along
then 'over the hump', by aircraft
mountains
6 Japanese Mandates 7 Australian Mandate
HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
\
#
\
Pearl
HAWAII
mi nTlir\
%
Makin
Tarawa
:RT
ISLANDS
J
^^^^ PHOENIX ISLANDS ELLICE ISLANDS
TOKELAY ISLANDS
SAMOA ISLANDS >tu
Santo FIJI
ISLANDS
Caledonia
NEW ZEALAND
defensive perimeter for Greater East Asia
Prosperity Sphere
I3>
all n ii
8 Intended
Oahu
Harbor
SOCIETY ISLANDS
Co-
THE WAR
Washington
July to
and equivalent
as 'Magic'
When
ciphers.
IK
THE PACIFIC
1^41-1^43
to Britain's Ultra success against the
Roosevelt learned of the Japanese decision
combine
diplomatic with
a
covert military offensive, he resolved to tighten the
a
On
screws of economic warfare against Tokyo.
Vichy to allow
agreement of the
24
Jul)'
Japan extracted agreement from
troops to enter southern Indo-China.
its
Wehrmacht
the imperial conference of 24
at
On
26 July America, with the
and Dutch, imposed further embargoes on Western trade with
British
Japan, thus reducing Japan's foreign trade by three-quarters and cutting off nine-tenths of
her
supply
oil
at
source.
Japan had by
now
installed an
ambassador
personal relationship with American
views of the Japanese navy,
far
home, however,
genuine. At
in
Washington, Admiral Nomura, whose
was excellent and whose commitment
officials
more moderate and army was pressing
the
to the
than those of the army, was
realistic
for deadlines.
On
6 September,
at a
cabinet conference held in the presence of the emperor, Hirohito, the alternatives were
reviewed in their starkest form: to
including
a
preparations for war
start
at
once;
on Japanese
or to acquiesce in America's restrictions
negotiations;
continue
to
strategic
activity,
withdrawal from Indo-China. Tojo, the Minister of War, had insisted that they
he was abashed when the emperor reminded
be presented
in this form. Like the others
his ministers
of the awesome consequences of what they were deciding. The conclusion
of the conference nevertheless was to continue negotiating while adopting outright preparations for war, the deadline for
a successful
Delays in negotiation over the next weeks
have to be
set back,
and
considering the war option
this
aroused
at all.
outcome
made
it
to be fixed for 10 October.
obvious that the deadline would
and naval doubts over the Tightness of
civilian
Tojo, as leader of the
army
party
and much influenced by
popular impatience with government hesitancy, held out for the aggressive solution.
October
a
conference convened
in
concluded
his office
that
nothing and that the emperor must be petitioned to approve
diplomacy would
a military offensive.
On
5
settle
Over the
week Tojo heightened military pressure on Konoye to choose war and on 14 October made the issue one of the army's confidence in his premiership. Three days later Konoye
next
resigned and Tojo took his place as Prime Minister.
Contrary to Allied wartime propaganda, Tojo was not
a fascist,
nor ideologically pro-
Nazi or pro-Axis; though he was to be executed as a war criminal under the code devised for the
Hitler
Nuremberg and
his followers.
He was
annihilatory.
Zedong
trials,
in China; but
who
his motivation to
He
war and conquest was not the same
as that
of
did not seek revenge, nor was his racism particular or
strongly anti-communist and feared the growing
power of Mao
he harboured no scheme to exterminate Japan's Chinese enemies or
On
the contrary, his chauvinism
was exclusively anti-Western. Tojo cultivated the
alliance
with Germany for wholly
expedient reasons and he harboured no illusion
had Germany rather than America or
any other group
Britain
been
a
might stand
dominant power
in Japan's
in the Pacific,
way
it
in Asia.
that,
would have behaved any more generously
than they to Japan's national ambitions. Tojo's code was simple: he was determined to
248
TOJO'S STRATEGIC
establish Japanese
(eventually
and
if
primacy
in
its
DILEMMA
chosen sphere of influence,
to defeat the
subdue and incorporate China within the Japanese empire, but
Western nations
would not accept
necessary Russia, the traditional enemy) which
it,
to
to offer other Asian states
(Indo-China, Thailand, Malaya, Burma, the East Indies) a place within Japan's Asian 'CoProsperity Sphere' under Japanese leadership. His vision was of an Asia liberated from the
Western presence,
On
1
convened
which Japan stood
in
extraordinary effort
had made
it
November he
chaired
among peoples who would
first
modernise
to a
recognise the
itself.
meeting of army, navy and
civilian representatives
of war, peace and the deadline with America. The
to consider the issues
meeting decided to confront the Americans with one of two new proposals, identified
A and
By the former the Japanese would
B.
Americans
offer the
as
withdrawal of Japanese
a
troops from China to be completed twenty-five years in the future - on the rational
supposition that the Americans would reject
it.
Proposal B would offer a withdrawal of
troops from southern Indo-China, where they had just arrived,
Japan
million tons of aviation fuel. Both
a
a general
military
peace
war
in the Pacific. Tojo, as
party,
was momentarily
moves were
to
Prime Minister but also
he agreed
torn;
Washington would accept
in the
become with
it.
The following
a third-class
but then she will
racial war.'
come
towards us
The emperor did not on to
will
to understand. this
of the issues they were discussing. In
American decision
however, its
nation in two or three years.
justice, the hostile attitude
at first
day,
his fear that, if Japan did not seize
as representative
however
B,
.
.
Also,
if
I
of
of the
should be made to unlikely
it
was
that
am afraid we would we govern occupied areas 'I
probably soften. America
Anyway,
sell
presence of the emperor,
advantage now, .
would
to the establishment
that a final effort
avoid war by engaging America in discussion of proposal
he expressed
the Americans
if
be linked
will carefully
will
be outraged
avoid making
this a
occasion remind his advisers of the awesomeness effect, therefore, in
the absence of a subsequent
withdraw from confrontation with Japan, the decision
for
war was
on 5 November; as the generals had brought the admirals to agree the previous day, 30 November was the last date on which American concessions would be accepted. By 25 November the Japanese naval attack force would have sailed from home ports to open the offensive against the United States bases in the Pacific, and Japanese army forces in IndoChina would have begun moves to enter southern Thailand, with the object of invading the British colony of Malaya and, beyond that, Burma and the Dutch East Indies. sealed
Because of their access to Japanese diplomatic
Americans were aware
as early as 7
November
traffic
1941 that 25
through the Magic system, the
November marked
the progress of their negotiations with Tokyo.
They suspected
which Japan would regard
to war.
itself as
committed
cryptanalytic access to Japanese naval ciphers, they military
moves ordered by Tojo and
his cabinet,
that
it
Army
key date in
might be the day
However, even though they had not
also
after
had
identified the preliminary
because of the stringent radio silence
imposed by Japanese headquarters on the movements of the Combined Twenty-Fifth
a
Fleet
and the
in southern Indo-China. During the second two weeks of November,
249
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
often in conclave with the British, Dutch and Chinese, the State Department discussed
proposal B
length with the Japanese representatives in Washington. The negotiations
at
were fraught with ambiguity. Since Hull knew military preparations while professing to
that the
conduct
a frank
Japanese were proceeding with
diplomacy, he was disinclined to
accord weight to their offers and counter-offers; since they - Nomura and diplomat, Kurusu, sent to assist him - were honourable men, their efforts
were hamstrung by
made them
their personal
at
at
negotiation
the double-dealing to which Tojo had
party.
were resolved on 26 November. Then Cordell Hull bluntly presented
All ambiguities
them with
embarrassment
professional
a
the United States' ultimate position,
position from which
it
had begun. Japan was
to
which was
withdraw
its
a
firm restatement of the
troops not only from Indo-
China but also from China, to accept the legitimacy of Chiang Kai-shek's government and,
membership of the Tripartite Pact. The Hull note reached Tokyo on 27 November and provoked consternation. It appeared to go further than any in effect, to abrogate Japan's
American counter-proposal
embargoes
yet issued.
from the whole
interpretation, a withdrawal
formerly ruled - Manchuria part of ethnic China,
means, policy.
this It
as well as
it
It
territory
link the relaxation
of economic
demanded, by the Japanese which the Chinese emperors had also
China proper. Since Manchuria was technically not
and since the Japanese believed they had conquered
by four-square
it
provision of the Hull note confirmed Tojo's belief in the rectitude of his
revealed, as he
and
his followers
regard the Japanese empire as
emperor and it
Not only did
to a humiliating diplomatic surrender.
his
government
its
to
had long argued,
equal in the
that the
United
community of nations,
that
it
States did
not
expected the
obey the American President when
altogether discounted the reality ofJapanese strategic power.
told to do so, and that The army and navy at once
agreed that the note was unacceptable and, while Tojo instructed his Washington emissaries to persist in the their attack stations.
talks,
ships and soldiers
A longwinded and misleading
were meanwhile directed
to
proceed to
restatement of Japanese grievances was
transmitted to the Japanese embassy in Washington for presentation to Cordell Hull
morning of
7
December, intended by Tojo
was intercepted by Magic, delays formally presented
hour
after the
at
its
meant
translation
that
its
on
the
of war. Although
it
contents were not
the State Department until after two o'clock in the afternoon, over an
deadline stipulated by Tokyo. By then Pearl Harbor was under heavy attack,
with the result that Tojo the
in
to stand as a declaration
as a military leader
most shattering surprise
had the
satisfaction
of presiding over one of
attacks in history but as a Japanese traditionalist
ignominy of inaugurating what Roosevelt denounced
250
as the 'day
of infamy'.
had the
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY Sunday,
December
7
1941
found the American
Pacific Fleet peacefully at
Hawaiian base of Pearl Harbor. Until April 1940 the Diego, California; but the surprise attack
European its
ally,
fleet's
on France
had caused the Navy Department
in
anchor
permanent port was
May by Germany,
in at
its
San
Japan's
to decide that the fleet's spring cruise to
forward base in Hawaii should be prolonged pending the return of calm to
its
western
waters. In the Pacific Japan maintained a fleet as strong in battleships as that of the United States
and even stronger
China which
army
as
still left
and was meanwhile prosecuting a great war in of eleven divisions - considerably larger than the American
in aircraft carriers,
a force
then constituted - for operations elsewhere. The
Harbor throughout
1940.
While
its
active escort operations off the
sister
Pacific Fleet
remained
at
Pearl
formation, the Atlantic Fleet, began to undertake
American eastern seaboard during 1941
support of
in
Roosevelt's policy of denying those waters to the U-boats, the Pacific Fleet continued
its
programme of exercises and cruises. Since June 1940 it had undertaken three major alerts and many anti-aircraft and anti-submarine drills; and since October 1941 it had been at a permanent
state
of readiness. However, the protraction of the warning period had blunted
the edge of preparedness. In peacetime the Pacific Fleet always observed holiday.
The
officers slept ashore, the
crews woke to
December, the day, Roosevelt was shortly
to
tell
The Japanese navy was acutely aware that the attack, and its plans were based on the supposition plans, devised quite separately
from the grand
251
a late breakfast.
Congress, that would Pacific Fleet
as a
was on 7
it
'live in
was vulnerable
that surprise
strategic
So
Sunday
infamy'.
to surprise
could be achieved. These
debate in the cabinet, foresaw
THE WAR
IK
THE PACIFIC
Japan's war falling into three stages. In the
United
Fleet
Pacific
States
simultaneously destroyed
enemy
stage the
Combined
while
other naval
Harbor,
Pearl
in
first
ships
and
units
called 'Southern Area', comprising Malaya, the
1941-1943
and seized
set
Japan's larger islands and archipelagos in the western Pacific,
and
its allies
attack the
military
forces
essential territory in the so-
up
a
Philippines. In an
defensive perimeter in
which would deny America
the opportunity to strike back into Japan's area of strategic dominance.
on
logic of the Japanese plan rested
California
and
Dutch East Indies and the
extension of these operations, the arm) and navy would
would
Fleet
and Hawaii
is
empty ocean,
offering
no bases or points of replenishment
or amphibious force based in the continental United States, the western Pacific
fleet
constellation of islands,
complex impenetrable
The
the perception that, while the eastern Pacific between
whose forward edge might be
to an outsider.
could be so armed with
air
and naval
Western powers' bases
in
Australia
make
to
fortified
the
to a is
a
whole
Moreover, the long eastern flank of this island zone striking forces that
and
New
an American
fleet sailing to the
Zealand would suffer such damage on
no counter-offensive could be mounted there. The second stage of Japan's plan was to make good the
passage that
by constructing Siberia,
fortified bases
through
Wake
logic
American possession), the Marshall
(an
possessions allocated, with the Carolines and Marianas, to Japan (British),
of its
strategic thinking
along a chain running from the Kurile Islands, off Russian
the Bismarcks (ex-German,
now
Australian), northern
Islands
(ex-German
at Versailles),
the Gilberts
New
(Australian),
Guinea
the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. Stage three was to be concerned largely with consolidation:
it
included the interception and destruction of Allied forces which violated
or approached the defensive perimeter, the waging of a war of attrition against the United States
with the object of wearing
of the war,
if
perhaps India
as
the American will to fight, and also the extension
Ocean and
itself
The perimeter who,
down
necessary, into the British area of dominance in Burma, the Indian
strategy
was rooted deeply
in the
psyche and history of the Japanese
an island people, had long been accustomed to using land and sea forces
concert to preserve the security of the archipelago they inhabit and extend national into adjoining regions. Pearl Harbor.
Without
The key that,
to this strategy
was the destruction of the American
the second and third phases of their war plan
in
power fleet at
would crumble
from the
outset. The devising of the plan was consigned, paradoxically, to Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, who was opposed to the Tripartite Pact, admired America and was pessimistic
about the outcome of a Japanese-American war; but he conceived
and
a professional naval officer to construct a feasible
Yamamoto was by
origin a surface fleet officer;
a cruiser at the decisive battle
however, he accepted learned to
and
fly.
his
duty as
a patriot
he had fought and been wounded
in
May 1905. Subsequently, weapon of the future and had
of Tsushima against the Russians in
that the aircraft carrier
However, he
so, early in 1941,
it
scheme.
still
was the naval
mistrusted his grasp of the essentials of air-sea operations
he enlisted the assistance of an outstanding younger naval
252
aviator,
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY
Minoru Genda, were submitted
On
operations.
to help
Combined
They comprised
Fleet
and
in
summer
September
separate but simultaneous
five
opening of battle
signal the
May 1905) two small amphibious forces would move of Wake and Guam islands, to wipe out those footholds in
perimeter surrounding the
the
within the
flown by Admiral Togo to
flag
Tsushima
American outposts
against the
the attack plan. During the spring and
criticised
to the Naval General Staff
Z-Day (Z was the
against the Russians at
inside
him construct
were reviewed and
outline plans
'Southern
Another amphibious
Area'.
force,
concentrated from Japanese bases on Formosa, Okinawa and the Palau Islands, would begin landings in the Philippines, taking the large islands of Mindanao and Luzon as their targets.
Land, sea and
invade Malaya
(via a
Dutch East
Islands in the
Combined
would have approached
carriers,
launched and recovered
and three
eight battleships
confidence
Yamamoto's
on which the success of all
in the central act
with
Fleet,
Pearl
Kra isthmus of Thailand) and the Molucca
its
Harbor by
four large (and later two small) aircraft stealth to within a range
carriers
burning and sinking
1940, an operation
carrier
which
staff officers closely analysed.
There were two impediments in the
One was
of the plan.
to the success
Row
shallow waters of Battleship
be spotted on passage and
security
its
compromised
Hawaii by the most circuitous of routes, beginning
between Japan and
commercial shipping 1941,
Siberia,
and when
it
- even though
it
was
and proceeding south-eastward by
reported that
it
Japanese
Fleet might
to
approach
stormy waters of the Kurile
in the
An experimental voyage was
lanes.
that
Pearl Harbor, but
at
Combined
modifications were soon made. The other was the danger that the
October
moorings. Japanese
their
at
November
the Italian fleet in Taranto harbour in
torpedoes could not run
Islands
of 200 miles,
groups, and departed, leaving the American Pacific Fleet's
of the plan was heightened by the Royal Navy's use of
in the viability
aircraft against
air
its
in the
Meanwhile,
Indies.
other four depended, the
and south China would
forces based in southern Indo-China
air
lodgement seized
sailed
by
a
a
route
far
from
Japanese liner
in
had not seen another ship or aeroplane the
danger of compromise was discounted.
On
26
November
the Carrier Strike Force sailed; the subordinate attack forces
followed from their separate ports in the next few days.
two
battleships
and two heavy
cruisers, three
Nagumo commanded
submarines,
attendant fleet of oilers to support his striking force over
with
the
Americans,
were
pioneers
of replenishment
its
at
a
long voyage; the Japanese, sea,
of his
command, however, was
them embarked over 360
aircraft,
fighter escorts for the air strike
point, 200 miles north of
on
squadron of
technique
which
fleet.
The kernel and which between
including 320 torpedo- and dive-bombers and their Pearl Harbor. If they could
Oahu where
deflected from their mission
his
a
six carriers
enormously extended the range and endurance of an operational justification
six carriers,
covey of escorts and an
Battleship
Row
lay,
be brought to
their launch
the chances of their being
were remote.
Neither American strategic nor
tactical
intelligence of the
253
planned Japanese
strike
THE WAR
against Pearl
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
Harbor was adequate. American historians have disputed
whether Roosevelt 'knew': those in
IX
who
foreknowledge of Japanese 'infamy' the pretext he needed
war on the side of Britain.
into the
for years the issue
It is
to
draw the United
an extension of the charge that there was
understanding between Roosevelt and Churchill, perhaps concluded
meeting
in
Bay,
Placentia
Newfoundland,
overcoming American domestic resistance second
In the
of
believed he did imply that he had sought and found
to
use Japanese
to involvement.
perfidy
at
their
as
a
August
means of
Both these charges defy
want war against Japan, which
case, Churchill certainly did not
States
a secret
logic.
Britain
was
American assistance in the fight against Hitler, which a would not necessarily assure; as we have seen. Hitler's perverse decision to declare war on the United States in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor solved problems of diplomacy which might otherwise have needed months of negotiation between the White House and Congress. In the first case, Roosevelt's foreknowledge can be demonstrated to have been narrowly circumscribed. Although the American cryptanalysts had broken both the Japanese diplomatic cipher Purple and the naval cipher equipped
pitifully
casus
belli
to fight, but only
in the Pacific
JN
25b, Purple was used only to transmit instructions from the Japanese Foreign Office to
its
diplomats abroad; in the nature of things, such instructions did not include details of
war plans and, though
their contents
during the
months of peace aroused the amount to proof. War plans,
last
suspicions of the American eavesdroppers, suspicion did not
which would have supplied proof, were not entrusted radio security in the
Tokyo,
fleet
and arm) by
positions under Pearl
weeks before
strict
Pearl
courier,
Harbor
and the
radio silence. As an
that
to
JN
25b. So stringent
proceeded
striking forces
added precaution, Nagumo's
to their attack
fleet
Harbor inside the forward edge of one of the enormous weather
regularly cross the Pacific
ensured
at
was Japanese
orders were distributed between
all
approached
fronts
which
warship speed. This technique, long practised by the Japanese,
movements would be protected by cloud and rainstorm from the lucky air or sea reconnaissance unit - from any systematic means of
that the fleet's
eyes of any but
a
very
surveillance, indeed, except radar.
The
strike
on Pearl Harbor
Yet Pearl Harbor was protected by radar; in the disregard for the warning principal
A
condemnation of American preparedness
for
war
it
offered
in the Pacific in
lies
the
December
on the northern coast of Oahu in August and it covered. Soon after seven o'clock on the morning of 7 December, just as it was about to shut down its morning watch, its operator detected the approach of the largest concentration of aircraft he had ever seen on its 1941.
British radar set
screen. to
installed
in the sea area
However, the naval duty
officer at Pearl
worry about
told.
had been
monitored movements
regularly
The duty
it'
and the radar operator,
officer
Harbor,
a private in
had wrongly concluded
the
that the
254
when alerted, instructed him 'not Army Signal Corps, did as he was
echo on the screen represented
a
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY
flight
of Flying Fortresses which were scheduled to land shortly
California.
much
There was
1941; Lexington
and
Enterprise,
were currently delivering
Hickam
at
Field
from
reinforcement in progress around Hawaii in December
aerial
the Pacific Fleet's
aircraft to
two
was
carriers (Saratoga
Wake and Midway
islands.
Stateside for a
The radar
blip
refit),
seemed
part
of an innocuous pattern. In fact
it
represented the
Battleship
Row.
come
for
All that
air striking force,
released 200 miles
than one hour's flying time - from
and dive-bombers, with
their escort
its
target at
of Zeros -
the best shipborne fighters in the world -
all of whose model of the Pearl Harbor months beforehand. A meticulous espionage programme had established
then and for two years to
where each
less
totalled 183 torpedo-
It
crews had been relentlessly trained
complex
of Nagumo's
first flight
from Oahu and detected 137 miles -
battleship
remained was
and
mock
in
on an
attacks
exact
group of pilots had been assigned.
cruiser lay; to each target a
for the attackers to evade the defences
and send
their
bombs and
torpedoes home.
There were no defences. Such Sundaying servicemen Japanese
aircraft
appeared over Battleship
Row and
Hickam, Bellows and Wheeler Fields assumed raid
drill'.
their
as
were topside when the
first
the associated airfield targets
appearance to be
'part
of a routine
at air-
Three-quarters of the 780 anti-aircraft guns on the ships in Pearl Harbor were
unmanned, and only four of the army's
thirty-one batteries
were operational. Many of the
guns were without ammunition, which had been returned to store for safekeeping. At 7.49
am
the Japanese began their attacks; by 8.12,
when
the ancient target ship Utah was
mistakenly sunk, the Pacific Fleet was devastated. Arizona had blown up, Oklahoma had
was
capsized, California
sinking; four other battleships
wave of
destruction was completed by the second
nine o'clock.
When
battleships, Nevada
temporarily
they
West Virginia had been
left,
were
all
heavily
168 Japanese aircraft
added
damaged. The
which arrived
was aground - saved by the quick thinking of the junior
commanded
at
to the score of destroyed officer
who
her - and Maryland, Tennessee and Pennsylvania were badly damaged.
Another eleven smaller ships had also been
hit, and 188 aircraft destroyed, most set ablaze on the ground where they had been parked wing-to-wing as a precaution against sabotage. It was a humiliation without precedent in American history and a Japanese strategic
triumph apparently
as
the Pacific in a single
complete
as
Tsushima, which had driven Russian naval power from
morning and established Togo
as his country's
Nelson.
But Pearl Harbor was no Trafalgar. Even as the Japanese carriers began to recover their aircraft, the
first
pilots to return
Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, with the devastation of Pearl Harbor.
had not found the American
It
was
confronted the Strike Force commander, Vice-
demand a
that they
be launched again to complete
disappointment and anxiety to
all
carriers at anchor. Failing strikes against
at least
ensure that the port could not be used
as a
their
that they
them, the next best
thing they could achieve was the destruction of the naval dockyards and
which would
of them
oil
storage tanks,
forward base for
a
counter-offensive against the Japanese invasions of the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch
255
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC
East Indies.
Genda too
lent his
1941-1943
weight to their urgings. Nagumo,
doughty warrior but no
a
Nelson, heard them out and then signified his disagreement. 'Operation
fleet it
had succeeded
Z'
and Yamamoto's wildest dreams. The rational course now was to withdraw the from danger - who knew where the American carriers might be steering? - and hold
beyond
his
at safety
and
in readiness for the
Japanese navy and naval itself in
west
air force,
one-fifth
Who
could say
when and where
The 'southern' operation
tide of
was already
of the Japanese army, was even then risking
Dutch and American empires
perilous initiatives against the British,
Pacific.
The
next stage of the offensive to the south. The rest of the
and
the
Combined
Japanese conquest
in full
swing and the Royal Navy was about to
the weight of Japanese maritime airpower. British plans to defend
and the
in south-east Asia
its
carrier support, to the strongly fortified naval base
of Singapore,
feel
scattered possessions
depended on the timely dispatch of
Pacific
in the south-
would next be needed?
Fleet
capital ships,
with
the tip of the Malayan
at
peninsula between the two largest islands of the Dutch East Indies, Sumatra and Borneo.
As
new
precautionary measure, the
a
Repulse
had been
accompanied them, but
among
casualties
beginning of December.
those in
meant
that the)
had
to sail unescorted.
home
German
only other uncommitted carrier to watch the fiord
and the old
battleship Prince of Wales
sailed to Singapore at the
On
8
A
carrier
battlecruiser
should have
waters and the need to keep the
battleship
Tirpitz
in
its
Norwegian
December, prompted by news
that the
Japanese had begun to land troops off the Kra isthmus, which joins southern Thailand to Malaya,
Prince of
to intercept.
Wales
and
Repulse
with their small escort of destroyers sailed from Singapore
The Japanese landing troops had already occupied the
airfield
from which the
commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, was warned that strong Japanese torpedo-bomber forces were stationed in southern Indo-China he held his course. Early on the morning of 10 December the Japanese bombers found him, and both his capital ships were sunk in two two
capital ships
might have been afforded fighter cover, but although
hours of relentless
attack.
The
loss
was
of a brand-new battleship and
Japanese shore-based
aircraft
only did
preconceptions about
it
upset
all
through naval power;
Winston Churchill, never received
a
which no one
a
famous
in Britain
Britain's ability to
battlecruiser to
was prepared. Not
command
struck cruelly at the nation's maritime pride. 'In
it
who
more
a disaster for
their
all
distant waters
the war', wrote
heard the news by telephone from the Chief of the Naval
Staff,
'I
direct shock.'
News quite as bad was on its way; on 8 and 10 December the islands of Wake and Guam, American outposts within the great chain of former German islands on which the Japanese were to base their south-western Pacific defensive perimeter, were attacked. Guam fell at once; Wake, heroically defended by its small Marine garrison, succumbed to a second assault on 23 December, after an American relief sortie had timorously retreated. The British territory of Hong Kong resisted siege, which began on 8 December, but
256
The crew of the battleship Prince of
Wales abandon
ship,
10 December 1942,
after
an
attack by land-based Japanese bombers and torpedo-bombers of XXII Air Flotilla.
although Day.
The
its
Anglo-Canadian garrison fought to the
atolls
bitter
end
it
capitulated
on Christmas
of Tarawa and Makin in the British Gilbert archipelago were captured in
December. And on
10
December
the Japanese
opened amphibious
offensives designed to
overrun both Malaya and the Philippines.
The collapse of the
British
defence of Malaya has rightly
come
to
be regarded
as
one
of the most shameful Allied defeats of the war. The Japanese were outnumbered two to
one throughout the campaign, which they
initiated
two others
and
against three British divisions
with only one division and parts of
parts
admittedly outnumbered and outclassed in the
air,
of three others. The
and had no
tanks,
British
were
whereas the
Japanese invasion force included fifty-seven tanks. Superior equipment did not, however, explain the whirlwind Japanese success. That victory resulted from the flexibility and
dynamism of their methods, akin to those that had characterised the German Blit/kriea in in 1940. The British were put off their stroke from the outset. Air Chief Marshal Sir
France
257
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
Robert Brooke-Popham, the commander-in-chief, and Percival, his senior general, had
intended to
forestall a
Japanese attack by moving forward across the Thai border to seize
the potential landing places in the Kra isthmus, but the that bedevilled
making
that
American responses
move.
When The
sort
of confused warnings
them from
the Japanese appeared in their forward defensive zone, they did
not contest the advance but further to the rear.
same
to Japan's surprise attacks prevented
fell
retreat
back to what were deemed better defensive positions
surrendered valuable ground, including the
sites
of the
none of which was put out of action and which were soon in use by the Japanese. Much else was left behind which the invaders put to use, including motor vehicles and seagoing vessels. Long columns of Japanese infantrymen three northernmost airfields in Malaya,
with the scent of victory in their nostrils took to the roads in captured cars and trucks,
commandeered
followed by others pedalling southward on
embarked
in fishing craft
abandoned
word of the Japanese appearance
as rapidly as
bicycles.
began to descend on the coast behind
December northern Malaya had been
lost;
Seaborne units
British lines,
in their rear
which were
was received. By
14
by 7 January 1942 the Japanese had overrun the
Slim river position in central Malaya and were driving the defenders southward to Singapore.
The The)'
units
which collapsed so
were not the
winning
first-line
victories against the Italians in the
by recently enlisted
recruits
not learned Urdu, the
command
Command's
Western Desert, but war-raised units manned British officers
language by which the Indian army worked. There was
between
ranks,
and orders
for retreat
collapse.
Few of its
the effort to train themselves.
positions
were too often taken
units
had been trained
in jungle warfare or
had
Even the resolute 8th Australian Division was
bewildered and disorganised by the appearance of Japanese the
most of whom had
withdrawal. However, poor morale was not the only explanation
as a pretext for pell-mell
of Malaya
Japanese onrush were mostly Indian.
and led by inexperienced
therefore a lack of confidence
made
easily before the
regiments of the pre-war Indian army which were currently
infiltrators far to the rear
of
where they were expected. Yet one unit, the British 2nd Argyll and showed what might have been achieved in defence. In the
Sutherland Highlanders,
months before the war
its
their flanks into the jungle
demonstrated
that the
commanding officer had practised his soldiers in extending beyond the roads running through its defensive positions and
enemy's outflanking
tactics
might thus be
Had
nullified.
It
fought with
fellow units adopted this
great success,
though
practice, the
Japanese invasion would certainly have been slowed, perhaps checked,
at
heavy
loss, in central
Malaya.
all its
before Singapore was brought under threat.
By 15 January, however, the Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army, having advanced 400 miles in five
weeks, was only
a
hundred miles from the
island fortress
and
in
heavy fighting over
the next ten days drove the Australians and Indians from Singapore's covering positions.
On 31 January their rearguards,
piped out of Malaya by the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland's two
remaining pipers, crossed the causeway linking Singapore to the mainland and retreated to
258
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY
Surrender in Singapore, 15 February 1942, the single most catastrophic defeat in British military history. Over
130,000
lines covering the naval base against attack
troops were taken prisoner.
from the northern shore.
The tragedy of the Malaya campaign was now reaching been reinforced by the the to
toll
of units
British 18th Division,
lost in the retreat
oppose thirty-one
in General
from the north
Tomoyuku
in India, also
climax. Singapore
Percival
commanded
East,
had
counted on the
Italy
arrival
in
the
just
so that despite
forty-five battalions
Yamashita's Twenty-Fifth Army. General
Archibald Wavell, the victor of the war against
commander-in-chief
its
brought from the Middle
Middle East and
Sir
now
of air and sea reinforcements to
support the troops on the ground and believed that the much-bruited strength of the Singapore naval base defences would assure casual reader of the history of the
its
resistance for several
Second World War
defences 'faced the wrong way'. This legend
is
259
false.
now knows,
The
months. As the most' however, Singapore's
island's strongpoints
and heavy
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
JAPANESE SOUTHERN DRIVE *W
JAPAN
o
9\ t
o
j
/
) TAIWAN
\/(FORMOSA)
Kon£
?*\0
Hong Kong
1
^ „
/ V
,v
Aparn
Gulf^
Imgayen
10
OCEAN
PACIFIC
.
DecX
>/ PHILIPPINES 2 jan
I't^^NC^. *^S „ ^ \ *'_ 5 V £ J^I2Dec
orreg.dor
Legaspi
)
^ X
^JS^ MINDANAO \ S>
^•"^oEastern
>^BR.
\
A
\
• ^^iiV— -**'"
CAROLINE ISLANDS
.
MALAYA
Kuala Lumpur* \ ^*~\> Singapore "<3 v^
Manado^
/
'N'SUMATrlAC^!)
!
/X?-
:b
\f\ INDIAN
I
n\
Forces'?
Dec
8
S
NORTH
-T)[
OCEAN
I
y —
"\ Bandjerriasin
X \ treun Waian ~^\ij M3rcn JAVA Kr'agV
*
30
^ .
Key
J|
'
#
!4J>-
\t
MJan
^
»
Jar,
f
- . i '*% »
^*DUTCH EAST INDIES
~r tl
°
Ca
*0
o
Japanese routes of attack on
/TIMOR' 20
Philippine Islands
Dutch East
"^0
-
Feb
ARAFURA SEA
cP <5
Indies by
Western Force
- by Central and Eastern Forces British territories
and Thailand I0O0 Miles
=1
Japan's drive into the 'southern region' and to the outer edge of the central Pacific, December
1941 - February 1942.
guns had been positioned to repel an attack from the mainland; but the guns had been supplied with the
wrong ammunition,
unsuitable for engaging troops. Singapore
separated from Johore by a channel less than a mile wide
shore of the island, moreover, was over battalions -
when some had been
at its
is
narrowest. The northern
thirty miles long, requiring Percival to disperse his
concentrated in central reserve -
260
at
one
to the mile.
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY
'Who defends
everything', Frederick the Great
had
truth of war. Yamashita concentrated his forces
Division) against six Australian battalions
written, 'defends nothing.'
(now reinforced by
on the north-west corner of the
February launched them across the narrow waters of the Johore
overwhelming
attack the Australian
by the central reserve
attacks
22nd and 27th Brigades
failed to
city,
throw the Japanese back from
a million,
had
the population of which had fallen into
a
harsh
and on
island
Under
Strait.
8
this
rapidly crumbled. Countertheir footholds into
which supplied
the water. By 15 February the reservoirs in the middle of the island
Singapore
It is
the Imperial Guards
been swollen by the
influx of refugees to over
Japanese hands. Percival faced the prospect of an urban
disaster.
marched into Japanese lines to offer surrender. He was photographed Union Jack beside a white flag borne by a staff officer. According to the
Late that evening he carrying the
historian Basil Collier, entailing
it
was
for 'the British the greatest military disaster in their history',
the capitulation of
more than
130,000 British,
Indian,
and
Australian
local
volunteer troops to a Japanese force half their number. Most of the captured Indians,
seduced by the appeals of the mesmeric Hindu
go over
shortly
to the
nationalist,
Japanese to form an Indian National
Japan's side against the British in
Burma
in the cause
defection and the white flag incident were two of forgiven by Churchill's
government or
its
Subhas Chandra Bose, would
Army which would
fight
on
of Indian independence. The Indian
many
reasons
why
Percival
was never
mismanagement of 'non-person', shunned by all in
successor for his catastrophic
became a official life and excluded from every commemoration of Britain's belated Asian victory. Admiral H. E. Kimmel, the Pearl Harbor commander, was to suffer much the same official oblivion, though with less justification. As the coming turn of events in the Dutch East Indies was to demonstrate, no Western commander who stood in the path of Japan's surprise attack of December 1941 could preserve his professional honour, in a theatre hopelessly unprepared for the conduct of modern war, except by death in the face of the the Malaya campaign. After liberation in 1945 he
enemy. Admiral Karel Doorman, the senior Dutch naval
down
in history a
officer in the East Indies, has
battle against fearful
odds with the Japanese
fleet.
The Dutch
East Indies
were even
Doorman may have regarded merciful release from catastrophe, for which he bore no more responsibility in of the 'Southern Area' than Percival and Kimmel in theirs. ready to
resist attack
—
gone
hero - but only because he died on the bridge of his sinking cruiser in than Hawaii or Pearl Harbor;
Unlocking the East Indies treasure-house
less
death as
a
his sector
—
Japanese attacks against the East Indies had opened on the British enclave in Borneo on 16
December.
It
was
clear that they
would
shortly be extended to the
chain which stretches eastward from Malaya through Australia. In 1941 Australia
been shipped overseas
New
Guinea
whole of the
to the
northern coast of
was almost without defences, since the bulk of
to fight with the British in the
261
Middle
East
island
its
and south
army had
east Asia.
A
THE WAR
frantic effort
ensued
to concentrate
IN
THE PACIFIC
1941-194?
such Australian, Dutch,
existed in the region into a coherent
command.
British
was dubbed
It
and American forces
ABDA
Dutch-Australian) and placed under the authority of General Wavell. The strength disposal consisted of the small United States Asiatic Fleet, the Royal Australian
home
the
modern
Navy and
of the Dutch navy in East Indian waters and the Dutch East Indies Army.
numbered some
latter
at his
defence elements of the Australian army, the remnants of the British Eastern
Fleet, the units
The
as
(American-British-
140,000, the vast majority locals,
unequipped and untrained
war; unlike the best of Britain's highly professional Indian army,
it
for
had never even
fought a war. ABDA's naval force included eleven cruisers, twenty-seven destroyers and forty submarines.
The United
rushed
States hastily
of
hundred modern
a
Dutch had only obsolescent models, and the British - and did not survive - the fighting in Malaya.
air
aircraft to Java;
in
The Japanese strategy for the conquest of the East Indies - for them a treasure-house rubber and non-ferrous metal production, as well as rice and timber - was
oil,
They planned
excellently conceived.
to use their plentiful naval
and amphibious forces
attack in close succession at widely separated points across the 2000-mile length
archipelago:
March.
from
and
on
the
component was wholly engaged
Borneo and the Celebes
An important
Java. All forces
Java, the capital
were
eventually to
lies
air link
only 300 miles
between
Australia
combine for the capture of Batavia (today Jakarta)
of the East Indies.
The Japanese landing troops found forces (which the population
showed
met. The Australians -
will to fight
proved
in February, Java in
subordinate aim of the attack on Timor, which
northernmost port of Darwin, was to cut the
Australia's
mounted from
Timor and Sumatra
in January,
to
of the
whose
difficulty in
little
little
overcoming the Dutch
inclination to support)
was
stiffened further
local
wherever they were
by an
air raid
four of the carriers which had attacked Pearl Harbor,
on
19
on Darwin, February -
tougher case. However, they were too few to check the trend of events. The only
a
substantial counter in
ABDA's hands was
Japanese did not employ airpower against
fleet,
its
It
it.
a
formidable force as long as the
enjoyed some early successes.
On
24
January American destroyers and a Dutch submarine sank transports off Borneo and on 19
February Dutch and American destroyers engaged others off Bali. Admiral Doorman's
came on 27 February, when
the
against the Japanese invasion fleet
and three
light cruisers
American
navies.
and two
launched
approaching
Doorman's ships included two heavy British, Australian and
Java.
a
Combined
Striking Force
and nine destroyers, drawn from the Dutch,
Admiral Takeo Takagi,
his
Japanese opponent,
commanded two heavy
and fourteen destroyers. Numerically the encounter looked an even resolution, as Doorman was to display, the Japanese had no edge at all.
light cruisers
match; and in
However, they possessed
which was
The daylight
test
ABDA command
a far
Battle
left.
The
a superior
item of equipment, their 24-inch iong-lance' torpedo
more advanced weapon than of the Java Sea opened initial
its
late in
stage of the largest naval
262
Allied equivalents.
the afternoon of 27 February, with
little
engagement since Jutland took the form of
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY
a
gunnery duel
at
darkness
he
fell
putting
the
refuel.
away
to turn
He
now
moon was
reduced to one heavy and three
bright. At 10.30
pm
light cruisers
he found the Japanese fleet,
and launched the deadly torpedoes. Both surviving Dutch once, De Ruyter taking
Doorman
be sunk the following night ultimately counted
heroic
Beaten
at sea,
was signed
accurately, the
went down almost
HMAS Perth
major
at
escaped, only to
of the force on which
units
and the
Pacific
exist.
the Dutch were also quickly forced to surrender
a formal Allied capitulation
more
again;
another approached unseen
from the southern
repel the Japanese
approaches to Australia had ceased to
to be.
misaimed Japanese torpedoes sank four of
fight;
trying to intercept. All the
to
it
and one destroyer, and
cruisers
with her. The USS Houston and
after a
been
the transports they had
As
nevertheless remained determined to prevent the Japanese
Japanese found him. While he engaged one part of their
ABDA
to protect his casualties.
with the Japanese and shortly afterwards had to detach most
lost contact
troops ashore and so turned back in darkness to where he judged
its
His force was
the Japanese closed to launch torpedoes, however,
and Doorman was forced
hits,
of his destroyers to fleet
When
long range.
they quickly scored
at
Bandung, on
which had taken Singapore, landed the same day
on
land.
On
12
March
Java; the Imperial Guards Division,
in Sumatra, the last
of the large Dutch
The Japanese were by no means unwelcome in the East Indies: the Dutch, unlike the French, had never found the knack of tempering colonial rule by offering cultural and intellectual equality to a subject people's educated islands remaining outside Japanese control.
Educated young Indonesians -
class.
readily to the liberation
message
that the
Another people intractability
their Indian
ruling
were shortly
New
neighbours
at
always resented colonial subjection were the Burmese,
for the British
felt
life,
finally
Empire. Britain had always had
conquered only
had marched on the road
in 1886 (the
become famous
as 'the Thirty',
in
had gone
difficulty in
young Rudyard
to Mandalay).
accepted the outcome of the war and conquest and dissidents, later to
brought
as they certainly
prove among the most enthusiastic of
to
odds with the much more complex mixture of love and hate
Burma, which they had
Tommies, drawn from
responded
Order.
who had
was
to call themselves -
Japanese brought 'co-prosperity',
from Dutch subjection, and were
collaborators in Japan's
whose
as they
Kipling's
Few Burmese had
early 1941 a to Japan,
ever
group of young
under the leadership
of Aung San, to be trained in fomenting resistance to British
rule.
come sooner
the Japanese Fifteenth Army,
than they had expected. During
which had entered Thailand
at
December
Their opportunity was to
the beginning of the month, crossed the
seize the airfields at Tenasserim.
It
was
clear that a
Burmese border
major offensive would follow
to
shortly.
Burma was defended by a single locally enlisted division; part of the 17th Indian it in January. The only other Allied forces to hand were Chiang Kai-shek's Sixty-Sixth Army, based on the Burma Road and (like most Chinese formations) of doubtful value, and two Chinese divisions commanded by the redoubtable American 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell on the Burma-China border. The commander of the Fifteenth Army, Division joined
263
THE WAR
General Shojira
Iida,
had only two
and supported by 300 air
support
Salween
and
divisions, the 33rd
55th, but they
from the
for the British
few troops, the 17th Indian Division soon
on
river
no
Required to defend
start.
lost its
a
wide
forward defensive line on the
14 February, pulled back to the Sittang river, guarding the capital,
and then, through
briefly
a
misunderstanding, blew the only bridge
while most of the fighting troops were on the wrong side.
it
Things quickly went from bad to worse. General Alexander, Britain to stop the rot
was
were well trained
at all.
Rangoon, held there across
1941-194?
the British troops were not well trained and had almost
aircraft;
The campaign went wrong front with
THE PACIFIC
IN
called,
on
would have
5 March, decided that the
Irrawaddy valley
to retreat to the
Mandalay, Burma's second
had
division
city,
on
on
Burmese troops had
21
if a
reinforced by the 18th and 56th
March and forced
a
Chinese
into further
threatened with being outflanked
where the Japanese were
east,
of the country
short of supplies and exhausted, his
He was
started to desert en masse.
both to the west and to the
on
it
now
His British and Indian troops were
retreat.
from
as his force
between Prome and Toungoo, where
a line
he was pushed out of
arrived; but
arrived
Alexander hoped to hold south of
heels.
his
in the centre
now
stand were to be made. The Japanese Fifteenth Army, Divisions and 100 aircraft, followed
who had
remnants of 'Burcorps',
driving the Chinese back
towards the mountains of the China border. Faced with the dilemma of following the
Army (in Burma
Chinese Sixty-Sixth
led from north-east
embarking on opted for the
Burma
a trek
latter
reality
about
a division strong)
course.
On
21 April
On
military history'.
their separate
19
refugees,
of the
on
monsoon made
further retreat
at
About 4000 of the 30,000
Burmese India.
missing,
British troops
Man) of
in the
impossible - but
who had begun
Aung
San's
call
to
Hills, just as
also, fortunately,
the
denied the
the campaign had perished; left
from one of the country's ethnic
the fugitives accepted
in nine weeks, the
Chin
itself.
most of them Burmese who had
battalion, largely recruited
liaison officer in
set off to lead his
'the longest retreat in British
Tamu,
Japanese the possibility of pushing their pursuit into India
some 9000 were
ways and
May, having traversed 600 miles of Burma
survivors of 'Burcorps' crossed the Indian frontier arrival
Burma Road, which
he agreed with Chiang Kai-shek's
two beaten armies should go accompanied by thousands of civilian
that their
troops,
along the
where he had no assurance of supply, or of across the roadless mountains of north-west Burma into India, he into China,
the ranks. Only one minorities, arrived in
arms and joined
his
Burma
National Army, which under Japanese colours briefly fought on Japan's side in 1944 and after the
war provided the nucleus of his successful independence movement. There were
other survivors of the rout. "Vinegar Joe' Stilwell trekked back into China, sallied into
Burma
again in 1944. General
he too returned to Burma rebuilt
in 1944, at the
from the debris of the
rout.
surviving element of the original
1st
Bill
whence he
Slim, Alexander's subordinate, reached India;
head of the victorious Fourteenth Army, which he
Among Burma
its
units
Division.
264
were the 4th Burma
Rifles,
the sole
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY
The
Burma almost completed
victor)' in
'Southern Area'.
It
had profited
the
from
brilliantly
first
stage of Japan's offensive into the
occupation of a central strategic position
its
- in Indo-China, Formosa, the Marianas, Marshalls and Carolines - to strike
west against the scattered colonial possessions of
and
forces
and
overwhelm them one by one. On 22
to
its
when Alexander
April,
out across the mountains into India, only one Allied stronghold
set
Japanese inside the 'Southern Area'.
The
It
fall
east,
chosen enemies and
was the American foothold
south and
their divided
accepted defeat still
resisted the
in the Philippines.
of the Philippines
America's presence in the Philippines, which were never an American colony and in 1941 not quite yet a sovereign 1898
extended
a protectorate
army -
raised a Filipino
state,
had come about through
American forces about
regiments,
submarines.
United
On
war of
over the islands, introduced a democratic form of government, in 1941
commanded
by the old Filipino hand, General Douglas
MacArthur - and put the archipelago under the 1941
victory over Spain in the
had been Spanish since the sixteenth century). America had
Philippines
(the
in the island
numbered
operational
150
16,000
combat troops, but only two formed
sixteen
aircraft,
December
shelter of the Pacific Fleet. In
surface
and
ships
twenty-nine
26 July 1941 the Filipino army had been taken into the service of the
under the terms of the 1934 Act of Congress granting provisional
States,
independence; but
its
embryo
ten
divisions
were
as yet unfit for operations.
The only
combat-ready Filipino force was the Philippine Scouts Division, American-trained but only 12,000 strong.
Against these troops, which MacArthur
had concentrated near the
capital, Manila, in
the northern island of Luzon, the Japanese intended to deploy the Fourteenth
Formosa (Taiwan).
It
fought in China, and was supported by the Third Fleet, which included
fourteen
and
Second
the
destroyers,
destroyers,
Army from
consisted of two very strong divisions, the 16th and 48th, which had
a force
of two
of two battleships,
Fleet
carriers, five cruisers
three
five cruisers
cruisers
and thirteen destroyers. The
and
and four air
groups
of the carriers were to be supplemented by the land-based Eleventh Air Fleet and the 5th Air Division.
The
first
disaster suffered
were provided with radar but were packed wing-to-wing the
machine
last
in the first
Indies,
air
failed to act
on the warning
as a protection against
Japanese
December Admiral Thomas compelled by lack of
by the Americans came from the
Hart,
air strike,
air.
at
As
at
Hawaii, they
Hawaii, their aircraft
sabotage and were destroyed almost to
which
commanding
it
gave; as
fell at
noon on
8
December.
On
the Asiatic Fleet in Filipino waters,
12
felt
cover to dispatch his surface ships for safety to the Dutch East
where, under ABDA's
command,
they were to be destroyed in the Battle of the Java
Sea.
By
that date the
Fourteenth Army's landings had already begun. Scorning an indirect
265
THE WAR
IK
THE PACIFIC
approach through any other of the 7000 Filipino his troops
1
islands,
General Masaharu
Homma
He had hoped, by landing at when the defenders declined
he put
to respond,
in
another large-scale landing close to the
on 22 December and forced MacArthur to fall back into a strong position on Bataan peninsula covering Manila Bay and its offshore island of Corregidor. capital
some
Bataan,
thirty miles
long and fifteen wide,
covered mountains. Properly defended,
it
is
dominated by two high
the
jungle-
should have resisted attack indefinitely, even
though the garrison was short of supplies. In forming position,
put
December and began an advance directly on the capital. separate points, to draw MacArthur's units away from Manila;
ashore on Luzon on 10
on the
their line
however, MacArthur's troops made the same mistake
as
first
mountain
the British
were
simultaneously making in Malaya. They failed to extend their flanks into the jungle on the
mountain's slopes;
consequence
in
infiltrators. Retiring to
their
were quickly turned by Japanese
flanks
the second mountain position, they avoided that error; but they had
surrendered half their territory and were
now crowded
into an area ten miles square. In
addition to the 83,000 soldiers within the lines, moreover, there were 26,000 civilian refugees,
many of whom had
even though
it
from Manila, which the Japanese had heavily bombed,
fled
had been declared an open
city. All
were placed on
rapidly dwindled, despite occasional blockade running by
March, 'I
when MacArthur
shall return'),
final
offensive,
half-rations, but these
American submarines. By 12
on Roosevelt's orders (with the famous promise, the garrison was on one-third rations. On 3 April, when Homma opened a most of the Americans and Filipinos within the Bataan pocket were left
for Australia
suffering
from beriberi or other deficiency diseases and
quarter.
Five
days
later
General
Edward
King,
rations
had been reduced
MacArthur's
successor,
surrender. About 9300 Americans and 45,000 Filipinos arrived in prison
notorious 'death march'. last
Some
Japanese shells
fell
on
island's capitulation the
offered
camp
his
after a
25,000 had died of wounds, disease or mistreatment. The
survivors of the Philippines garrison,
shelled into surrender
to one-
between
14 April
the tiny outpost,
who
occupied the island of Corregidor, were
and 6 May; on 4 May alone more than 16,000
making further
whole of the Philippines
fell
resistance impossible.
into Japanese hands.
With the
The population,
however, unlike those of the Dutch East Indies and Burma, were not disposed to regard the Japanese victory as cause for satisfaction.
promise
to
bring
them
to
full
They had
independence and
trusted,
rightly
also
occupation presaged oppression and exploitation. The Philippines
rightly,
in
America's
feared that Japanese
Commonwealth was
be the only component of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
in
to
which Japan
would encounter popular resistance to its rule. The prospect of Filipino resistance was, however, at best an irrelevance to the Japanese at the moment Corregidor fell on 6 May 1942. Their strategic horizon now ran around the whole western Pacific and deep into China and south-east Asia too. The historic European empires of the East - Burma, Malaya, the East Indies, the Philippines and effectively French Indo-China also - had been drawn into their sphere. To the Chinese
266
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO MIDWAY
dependencies
in
which they had established
rights
of occupation between 1895 and 1931 -
Formosa, Korea and Manchuria - they had added since 1937
swathes of conquered
vast
land in China proper. All the oceanic archipelagos north of the equator were theirs, and
made
they had
and the by
a
inroads into those to the south. Between the west coast of the United States
dominions of Australia and
British
few islands too remote or too
From
riposte.
were poised
to strike
British aircraft carrier), a
fleet
remained
and twenty United large
lay largely
empty ocean, dotted
provide their enemies with bases for a strategic
tiny to
deep into the Indian Ocean, towards the
March
in
1942),
perhaps even
towards Ceylon (raided
away
as far
Japanese submarine off Madagascar in
occupy the island -
Zealand
the perimeter of the 'Southern Area' the Japanese fleet and naval
Nicobar islands (captured
of
New
later in the year).
intact.
States Pacific
May would,
and
Asiatic Fleets
had
lost
prompt the
- or
lost the
British
in the
war thus
use of-
all its
that
remained
to
the Allies to
set
in
the
far;
British to
strategic
heavy
while the
battleships
and Dutch Far Eastern
been destroyed and the Royal Australian Navy had been driven back All
of a
better, triphibious
battleships, ten carriers or eighteen
and destroyers, the
forces
in April, at the cost
in fact,
had been even seriously damaged
cruisers
air
Andaman and
of East Africa (the appearance
amphibious -
their great
all,
Not one of their eleven
light cruisers
numbers of its
Above
as the coast
British
fleets
and had
to port.
balance against Japan's
astonishing triumph and overpowering strategic position was the surviving naval base of
Hawaii, with
of
its
remote dependency of Midway
carriers, three,
doubters
as
perhaps four
Yamamoto;
at
at
most.
the beginning of
prospect he had long warned hovered
one
Little
at
Island,
and the US
wonder
May
Pacific Fleet's
that hubris
1942, the
consummation of victory, a seemed to lie only
the very margin of possibility,
battle away.
267
handful
gripped even such
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
1941-194?
CARRIER BATTLE
MIDWAY the context of the Pacific war in
In
Harbor ensured
victory at Pearl
were not altogether
Row had
left
and
afloat,
it
May
must ten
Battleships,
even
way of using those
find a
and
carriers in
the
thirty-eight
numbers
in
command
depths of the
a battle
of the
Pacific,
air,
as
must meet and
carrier fleet
were excluded,
navy
its
was
between
Japanese navy's
inevitable, if the
United
The destruction
aircraft carriers
among
its
at
States
Battleship
capital ships
might of eleven Japanese
carriers to fight the
cruisers,
wherever they might next appear.
'Command of on
the
sea',
therefore,
now
rested
on
in the
the surface of the globe, the Japanese and
battle
it
out for a decision.
New
Order
If
the decision went in
in Asia
December
inferior imitation
1941 the
of
its
outnumbered the American by ten still
enjoyed
superiority of
a
more important -
Japanese carriers and - even Before
a battle
would be
safe for
come.
The Japanese carriers
meant
both navies had long recognised. Somewhere
the largest space
carrier fleets
its
favour of the Japanese, as probabilities implied, their years to
battle
a battle before; but the
which the Japanese deployed them, could not
challenge a well-handled carrier force.
American
such
that
one more
to abdicate control of the Pacific to Japan.
the American Pacific Fleet with only
battleships,
winning
1942,
There had never been such
aircraft carriers.
their air
Pearl
Harbor had revealed
that
their ships with
superb competence and that Japanese naval
dropping
ordnance, with deadly
embarked
lethal
fighter in
skill.
its
light
Moreover, the
groups were of the
Americans had dismissed the Japanese
own.
to three; if
six to three.
first
quality.
carrier force as an
Japanese admirals handled
pilots flew
The Zero had established
advanced itself as
aircraft,
the finest
any navy; the Kate and Val torpedo- and dive-bombers, though slower
than their American counterparts, carried heavy loads over long ranges.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had not to
its
battleship force.
On
the contrary,
built
its
and trained
carrier fleet
268
a carrier fleet as a
was
a national elite.
second best For that the
MIDWAY
Americans - and the
British -
had only themselves
number of capital
ships they
were allowed
Washington Naval
to blame. At the
Conference of 1921 they had forced the Japanese to accept to possess.
The
on the
severe restriction
a
ratio fixed
was three Japanese
The object was to limit the number of Imperial Japanese which was a secondary theatre for the two Western navies,
ships to five British or American.
Navy
who
battleships in the Pacific, at that
time were locked in unspoken conflict over which was to enjoy primacy in the
Atlantic. Aircraft carriers
was
were subject
to the restriction, but the
to guard against the danger that any
which might subsequently be converted
power could launch to battleships.
Already persuaded that the carrier was likely to be it
not only converted
a
number of
battleships
a
purpose of including them
ships in the guise of carriers
Japan went the other way about.
dominant naval weapon of the
and battlecruisers into
future,
carriers, as
was
it
allowed to do under the 1921 treaty (and Britain and America were doing likewise, to
would otherwise have had
preserve seaworthy hulls they
number of seaplane
carriers, a
object of converting
them
to scrap).
into aircraft carriers
aircraft,
which not only embarked the
The four
in a single striking force, the First Air Fleet.
The
a
six large carriers
1941 in creating the largest
of 500
largest naval air force,
but was also grouped - the analogy might be with the
peripheral operations.
launched
also
at a later date.
By conversion and new building they had succeeded by carrier fleet in the world,
It
category the Washington Treaty did not recognise, with the
German Panzer
light carriers
divisions -
could be detached for
— Akagi (Red Castle), Kaga (Increased Joy), Hiryu
(Flying Dragon), Soryu (Green Dragon), Shokaku (Soaring Crane)
and Zuikaku (Happy Crane)
- were kept together for strategic offensives. They formed the group which had devastated Pearl Harbor. In
May
1942 they stood ready to engage the American carrier group in battle
and consummate Japan's victory
The American second
carriers,
best. Lexington
and
in the Pacific.
though few
Saratoga,
in
number, equally did not represent
completed on
time the largest warships in the world and were a later
battlecruiser hulls in 1927,
still
formidable ships in 1942;
in their
was
Enterprise
but purpose-built carrier; Yorktown and Hornet, which were to join her in the Pacific
from the
Atlantic Fleet,
were
sister ships.
The
aircraft
they embarked were not the equal of
the Japanese. In particular, in 1942 the Americans lacked a
even by comparison with the
their aircrew,
America, for flying
after
all,
First
good shipborne
Air Fleet's
elite,
from the
start,
and the US Navy's
was extremely rigorous:
at
all
but the best.
take-off,
the ship and frequently crashed into the sea;
The technique of launching and at
a passion
were leaders of the breed.
carrier pilots
without catapult,
aircraft
'landing on'
dipped beneath the bows of
landing pilots were obliged to drive
ditching. Flight
there was
away from the ship was quite
no airborne
radar.
The gunner of a
as perilous as
'multi-seat'
269
full
at
hook missed contact and they were forced being a crash on the flight deck or a probably
into the arrester wires lest the
involuntary take-off, the alternatives
But
fighter.
were outstanding.
was the birthplace of the aeroplane, her youth had conceived
Carrier flying excluded
power
their navy's
were
launching and landing. In
into fatal
H2
L l
torpedo- or dive-bomber could
THE WAR
keep
a
THE PACIFIC
IN
1941-1943
rough check of bearings headed and distance flown, and so guide
the sea area in which they might
A
altitude in clear weather.
mother
ship,
was
hope
fighter pilot alone in
and found
lost in infinity
from 10,000
visual range in the Pacific,
to find the
feet
his
on
back to
his pilot
mother ship by eyesight - from high his aircraft, once out of sight of the
way home by guess or good luck. Extreme a cloudless day, was a hundred miles; but
missions might carry aircraft 200 miles from the carrier, to the limit of their endurance - and perhaps beyond. If the carrier reversed course, or a pilot was tempted by
strike
on beyond his point of no return, a homing aircraft could exhaust its fuel on the homeward leg and have to ditch into the sea, where its crew in their dinghy would become a dot in an ocean 25 million miles square. Only the bravest were embarked on a target to press
carriers as aircrew.
To bravery the
groups of the Japanese
air
they had not only devastated Pearl Harbor but
added experience. By May 1942
carriers
bombed Darwin
in
northern Australia and
operated against shore targets in the East Indies. In April they had crossed the Indian
Ocean
to find the British Eastern Fleet in Ceylon, attacked the naval bases at
Trincomalee and chased
American
carrier
attempted, but
its
failed, to relieve
(Kwajelein), the Gilberts, the
Japanese
They had on the Marshall Islands Guinea. A few of the aircrew had met
by contrast, were lacking in
crews,
Wake
Island.
Solomons and
New
experience.
battle
They had made
raids
from sinking a minesweeper, they had not which they had been trained and embarked - to carry bombs
fighters or anti-aircraft fire; but, apart
yet fulfilled the
purpose
for
or torpedoes against an
enemy
battle fleet.
The Suddenly,
during May,
the
Doolittle raid
opportunity came their way not once but twice. The
circumstances which provoked
this
outcome were unusual
in the extreme.
the American Chiefs of Staff had discussed with President Roosevelt a
back
at
To do
Japan for the outrage of Pearl Harbor and 'bringing the war so they
would have
to attack the Japanese
mission, since the islands lay
far
beyond
aircraft
home
islands,
in the
at fatal risk.
hope
The only solution was
that they
could be got into
Japanese national pride: practicable. Nevertheless
During March
means of
home
striking
to the Japanese'.
an apparently impossible
range of the United
while to send carriers close enough to launch their embarked
them
Colombo and
old battleships to refuge in the ports of East Africa. The
States' Pacific bases,
aircraft
would be
to put
embark long-range land bombers on a carrier, the air and deliver bombs on a target precious to to
Tokyo. The mission was theoretically possible but barely
Washington resolved
to try
it.
On
Francisco,
with sixteen B-25 medium-range bombers on
command
of the notable airman Colonel James Doolittle.
2 April its
USS
flight
Hornet
deck,
left
San
under the
The plan was that Hornet should approach to within 500 miles of Japan, launch its aircraft and then retire, while the aircraft bombed Tokyo and then flew on to land in China
270
MIDWAY
in areas
still
informed of the mission they were
Aleutian islands,
commanding at
when
On
flying.
from Tokyo, having approached on
would be
who was
controlled by Chiang Kai-shek -
a route
told to expect the B-25s but not
and
18 April Hornet
escorts
its
were 650 miles
which ran between Midway and the northern
Japanese naval picket was sighted. Admiral William Halsey,
a
the task force, decided to launch the B-25s instantly, even though they
the extreme limit of their endurance, and run for the security of the deep
Pacific. All Doolittle's
bombers lurched
and thirteen bombed
safely off the flight deck,
Tokyo and three other Japanese targets; four landed in China, one landed in the Soviet Union, and the remainder were abandoned by their crews, who took to parachutes over China.
Of the
eighty
who
fliers
departed on
this reckless venture,
seventy-one survived to
return to the United States.
The
Doolittle raid might nevertheless have
been judged
fiasco if
a
it
had not
command. The citizens of Tokyo, to whom no public was made by the government, did not associate the
registered with the Japanese high
acknowledgement of the
raid
scattering of explosions with an
American
but the generals and admirals, as servants
attack;
of the god-emperor, were horrified by the threat to his person the bombing represented. At that very
Combined
moment
a
debate was raging between the Naval General Staff and the
Fleet over the future
development of the
had committed themselves
officers
of capturing more of Caledonia,
New
from which
to an
Guinea and additional footholds attack
to
States.
Solomons and
ended the argument.
represented
however
strategically
a decisive battle
mounting an invasion of Hawaii's
Hornet
had reached
'keyhole' in Japan's defensive perimeter. As
its
for the
no senior
objection to the
emperor's well-being, the Naval General
Combined
Fleet's plan
with
outlier,
to fight.
launch point through the officer in
publicly countenance allowing the keyhole to remain open, since to
unconcern
New
Fleet,
which they were sure the Americans would be bound
Doolittle's raid
Midway
territory,
They believed they could provoke
the United States Navy's remaining carriers by Island, for
in the
The Combined
by Yamamoto, wanted not the acquisition of additional
Midway
staff
and menace her long seaward flank of
Australia
communication with the west coast of the United valuable, but a strategic victory.
The shore-based
Pacific war.
advance into the 'Southern Area', with the object
Staff at
Japan could
do so implied
once withdrew
their
and accepted Yamamoto's Midway proposal. An
operation already scheduled for early May, to extend the footholds in
New
Guinea
that
they had established between 8 and 10 March, was to go forward; by putting troops ashore at
Port Moresby,
and
Australia's
on the
great island's southern shore, Japan
Northern Territory. However,
landings had withdrawn, they against
soon
menace Darwin needed to cover the
further
as the carriers
in the central Pacific for
an offensive
Midway.
'Magic', for the aid.
as
would be concentrated
would
first
significant
time in the Pacific war, here came to the Americans'
Interception and decryption of careless Japanese signals - a
with the 'victory disease' with which they would
271
later
symptom of their
infection
reproach themselves - alerted the
THE WAR
impending Japanese
Pacific Fleet to the
THE PACIFIC
IK
strike
on
1941-1943
Port Moresby.
It
accordingly dispatched
the carriers Lexington and Yorktown to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet
was protected by three
was sunk by bombing
Zuikaku. Shoho
complex manoeuvres, the carriers
carriers, the
was
encounter on 7 May. Next day,
in a lucky
on
set
ships, separated
by 175 miles of
sea,
by
fire
from her aviation
a leak
and had
fuel lines
to
Japanese army's advance to positions offshore of Australia and confined
New
were
at
Guinea.
least the
It
also reassured the
American
experience. Yorktown's
damage was repaired for
Ma) she -
at
Pearl
and
air
It it
checked the thereafter to
group crews
that they
Harbor
in forty-five hours, after she
necessary 'ninety-day
a
refit'.
Hornet, as yet uninitiated in carrier-to-carrier
The
Americans concerned with the
minutes
fatal five battle
recognised that
the five American carriers in commission, Wasp
where she had helped
On
combat,
deliver aircraft
to
it
— must be
a
desperate
affair.
Of
was returning from the Mediterranean
Malta and Saratoga was working up after
The three remaining constituted the nucleus of two task forces, 17 (Enterprise and Hornet), and put to sea with an impressive escort of cruisers
repairs.
and 16
(Yorktown)
and
be abandoned.
Midway.
— completing
carrier
what her captain estimated was
sailed to join Enterprise
for battle off
All
and delivered
equals of their opponents, besides bringing York town valuable combat
had arrived on 27 May 30
after
Shokaku suffered heavy damage; Yorktown was only lightly damaged, but
This Battle of the Coral Sea had two salutary effects for the Americans.
northern
The Japanese
fleet.
but small Shoho and the large Shokaku and
of the two remaining Japanese and the two American
aircraft
found each other's mother
fierce attacks. Lexington
new
and destroyers. However, the admirals commanding, Frank John Fletcher (Task Force
and Raymond Spruance (Task Force
16),
knew
that
they
would
fight
at
a
17)
severe
The Japanese First Air Fleet had six large carriers (in the event four - Akagi, and Soryu - were to voyage to Midway), was supported by battleships and would
disadvantage. Kaga, Hiryu
have
a clear superiority in aircraft: for
American only
sixty.
On
Midway Japanese
the day, 272 Japanese
carriers
bombers and
embarked seventy each, would confront 180
fighters
American. These were extreme odds.
The odds were
to
be shortened, however,
of Magic. Japanese radio security for the itself was
to
as
before the Coral Sea, by the operation
Midway operation was
rigorous.
The operation
designated MI, which might have meant anything, despite the apparent reference
Midway
and
Island;
its
was designated AF.
target
Much
traffic
containing these
designations was intercepted by the American Magic cryptanalysts but the decrypts gave
no clue where the
First Air Fleet
was bound. One of the cryptanalysts on Hawaii had
nevertheless convinced himself that for the Japanese.
the garrison
at
On
a
Midway was
the target and he contrived to set a trap
secure telegraphic link between Hawaii and
Midway
to radio in clear that
272
it
Midway he
instructed
was running short of fresh water, an
The crew of the
carrier
was
Lexington abandon
US
the
ship at Coral Sea,
8
Navy's only major casualty of the
May
1942.
Lexington
battle.
innocuous administrative message which he believed would not arouse Japanese suspicions. His confidence
was
justified.
An
Australian antenna of the Magic
shortly intercepted a Japanese cipher transmission
which
AF had
signalled that
network
reported a
shortage of fresh water. The trick had therefore revealed the Japanese target; subsequent
decrypts established that the operation designated
MI would
on 4 Midway
take place
Forces 16 and 17 therefore sailed to position themselves north-east of
June. Task in
time for
the Japanese arrival.
Naval officers had originally conceived of the aeroplane as an adjunct to a battleship fleet
with the
joined.
scout for the
ability to
The Royal Navy, even
in 1942,
enemy and
spot for the
fall
of shot once action was
clung to that view of the naval
aircraft's role. In
the American and Japanese fleets, however, naval aviators had achieved an authority relegated the traditionalists' obsession with the battleship to second place.
judged
that the carrier
even the Coral
and
out their judgement.
Now
expanses of the central
The
First
its
Sea, fought in
air
in
2000 miles from
accompanied by the
273
No
rightly
battle,
not
support of landing forces, had yet borne
they were to put their judgement to the
Pacific,
Air Fleet,
groups had become queen of the oceans.
confined waters
They
both
which
a
test in
the landless
continent in any direction.
battleships
and
cruisers of the
Midway
THE WAR
THE PACIFIC
IK
on 4 June. Many other Japanese were in motion at the confuse the commanders of the American Pacific Fleet
Occupation Force, drew within range of the
some dispatched
naval forces,
same
as far
time, their mission being to
and compel them was so weak
order to concentrate
was no equivalent flying-boats
mid-1942
a strategic force.
in
that
to
keep
at
aircraft,
Midway
out of range
or,
a force
of which there
They could operate
of finding their landing
fear
worse, sunk. The land-based
Navy
the Catalina amphibious
atoll itself.
and escape homeward without
States
capital units together in
all its
however, dispose of
did,
It
was over-subtle. The United
had
it
and Flying Fortresses stationed
moved
as the Aleutians,
Yamamoto's armada: land-based
against the Japanese carriers
platform
tiny island
northward
to disperse their strength. This
in the Pacific in
1941-194?
aircraft
were
to exercise an
important influence on the unfolding of the Battle of Midway. Indeed, the
from Midway towards the
first
move
against the Japanese carriers
flying reconnaissance
island, thus
Flying Fortresses
it
3 June.
was made by
a Catalina flying-boat
spotted the invasion
It
heading
fleet
confirming that the Magic intelligence was correct. Next morning
bombed
the invasion ships;
on
but missed the
was only
a
carrier admiral, here as at Pearl
humble
fleet,
while four Catalinas actually sank one of
but the blow was sufficient to convince the
oiler,
Harbor the redoubtable Nagumo,
the island's defences before the landing began. At 4.30
am
all
bombs
nine squadrons of bombers, armed with fragmentation
that
he must overcome
four of his carriers launched for a
ground
attack
and
escorted by four squadrons of Zero fighters. Radar gave the Americans warning, but that
could not compensate for the inferiority of the old fighters based on the of the
American
installations,
fighters
and the Japanese bombers arrived back
The leader of the
atoll.
were destroyed, heavy damage was done at
to
Two-thirds
Midway's
the carriers without loss.
raiding force nevertheless reported to
Nagumo on
his return that
again - which was not in the admiral's plan. While he
Midway ought to be bombed cogitated, Midway struck back. One of its dawn patrols had identified the position of Nagumo's carriers, reported it and prompted Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet commander, to order Midway to launch its aircraft again; Fletcher, in overall command of the task forces, simultaneously ordered
Enterprise
positon and did likewise with Yorktown. The
manoeuvre into an attacking of Midway's second wave of land-based
and
arrival
Hornet to
bombers made Nagumo reach a decision. Though his carriers' decks were cluttered with torpedoes brought up from below to arm his returned aircraft for a strike against American surface ships - should they be identified in the area - he
now
cancelled that mission and
ordered them to be armed again with fragmentation bombs for
a
second
strike against
Midway. That would take time. While time was running out, Hornet and positions
from which they could launch
their
own
7 am. Yorktown launched
its
274
reached
torpedo- and dive-bombers, and did so
bombers an hour later. By 9 am the sky to Midway was filled with 150 American aircraft winging their way across ocean that separated the two fleets.
at
Enterprise
the north-east of the 175 miles of
MIDWAY
Nagumo aircraft
had reported
was not that
it
warned
that
countermanded
his
of enemy ships. Infuriatingly
tentatively signalled the
it
torpedo
now
danger threatened. At 7.28 one of
that
a sighting
until 8.20 that
Japanese admiral
error
knew
already
were
aircraft
did not identify what type.
presence of a
in the air
recognised that he had
carrier,
and not
It
until 8.55
and heading Nagumo's way. The
made
a serious
mistake and quickly
order to rearm with bombs; but, given his superiority of numbers, his
was not necessarily grievous.
In any case
Midway bombers Nimitz had ordered
First the
it
his reconnaissance
he was
occupied with other matters.
fully
into the air
were massacred by the guns of
Then, between 8.40 and 9 am, the bombers sent on his own second strike Midway returned and had to be landed on. As soon as they had been recovered, crews swarmed about them with refuelling hoses and ordnance trolleys loaded with
his Zeros.
against
torpedoes for their next mission, It
was with
from
arrivals
their
this
time against ships.
decks crowded with refuelling and rearming bombers that the
and
Enterprise
Hornet
found the four Japanese
formation and protected overhead by their combat
Nagumo had
recently
luck for the Americans.
It
lasted but briefly.
of Zeros,
air patrol
changed course, so the encounter By 9.36
before 9.30 am.
just
contained an element of
initially all
first
box
carriers, sailing in tight
Hornet's
and ten of
Enterprise's
torpedo-bombers had been shot down; their dive-bombers had been foxed by Nagumo's change of course and, landed
Midway
in
turned
failing to find a target, either
or simply ditched;
home
if
they had
enough
the fighters escorts ran out of fuel and
all
fell
fuel,
into the
sea.
Nagumo had had see
him through even
a lucky escape.
if
attacked
when
He had counted on
his superiority
of numbers to
disadvantage, and that, with his well-calculated
at a
change of course, had extricated him from danger. Two-thirds of his enemy's
had been repelled or destroyed. There was not even
would now be Yorktown's
less.
torpedo-bombers, navigating by hunch and then drawn towards the
However, forced
of twelve were shot
found
attack
carriers
to fly straight,
down by
his
mark. By ten o'clock
a
American
his ships
own
aircraft to find
was damaged and
his fighter force
at
the
wrong
and been guided it
to
its
target
left
was
his
altitude.
the sky
intact.
Drawn down
open
to
to any dive-
One of Enterprise's dive-bomber groups had overflown
175
mother ship's aircraft, taken a wrong course by luck and shrewd guesswork. At 10.25 on the morning of 4
miles of sea, lost contact with the rest of
June 1942
and destroy
Midway. His formation was somewhat
side of
Unfortunately the fighters were temporarily
force that might appear.
seven out
repelled what appeared to be the final
sea level to fight off Yorktown's torpedo-bombers, they had
bomber
found him none
and none of the torpedoes launched
to launch his far
16's aircraft,
level to deliver their torpedoes,
air patrol
Nagumo had
and was preparing
none of
and Task Force
low and
combat
disarmed antagonist somewhere on the scattered, but
strike aircraft
the remainder
able to find him.
smoke of combat between Nagumo's the
a probability that
was exactly placed
its
to deliver the
275
most stunning and decisive blow
in the
WAR
THE CARRIER Right: USS Yorktown, Admiral
flagship of
commander
Fletcher,
of
Task
Force 17, the only American aircraft carrier
at the Battle of
sunk
Midway,
4 June 1942. Opposite, above: The Dauntless dive-bomber
at
Midway.
Although obsolescent by 1942, the rugged Dauntless sank a greater
tonnage of Japanese shipping than any other Allied aircraft.
A US
carrier air
group usually comprised nvo sauadrons
(Grumman F4F
of fighters
F6F
later
Wildcats,
Hellcats), one of torpedo-
TBD Devastators, Grumman TBF Avengers) and Douglas SBD Dauntless squadrons
bombers (Douglas later
two
- one
for scouting
and one
bombing. The scouting
for
had been
role
envisaged before the carriers were fitted
with radar, which was operational at the beginning of the war. In practice there
was
little
distinction
made
between bombing and scouting squadrons, and scouting pilots
underwent the same training and preparation for dive-bombing missions as their colleagues in the
squadrons.
bombing
Opposite, below:
Yorktown
on
fire
at
Midway
after
sustaining a series of direct hits by a strike
group from the Japanese carrier
Hiryu,
flagship of
Yamaguchi.
Admiral
THE WAR
history of naval warfare.
and from 14,500
attack
plunge
at
All
leader,
Its
THE PACIFIC mi-1943
Lieutenant-Commander Wade McClusky, turned
to
led his thirty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers seaward in a
feet
the Japanese carriers' flight decks.
were cluttered with
running their engines for
was the
minutes raged so
A bomb its
rapidly. Soryu suffered three hits; left
refuelling
and rearming.
of discarded bombs, which stood beside
started a fire in a
fiercely that the admiral
four bombs, was set ablaze by
her engines and
piles
aircraft
they were ingredients of catastrophe. Akagi, Nagumo's
take-off;
to go.
first
and the paraphernalia of
aircraft
High-octane fuel hoses ran between
flagship,
IN
own
one
her victim to
a
had
torpedo store and within twenty
to shift his flag to a destroyer. Kaga, hit
aviation fuel
started a fire
and had
among
to
by
be abandoned even more
aircraft
parked on deck, stopped
shadowing American submarine which sank her
at
noon. Within exactly
minutes, between 10.25 and 10.30, the whole course of the war in
five
the Pacific had been reversed.
The
First Air Fleet, its
magnificent ships,
furiously
on
aircraft
and
pilots, had been devastated. And the disaster at an end. Hiryu had evaded and got away - but only temporarily. At five in the afternoon she was found racing
superb attack
modern
was not
fire
away from Midway by dive-bombers from
and
to
left
be scuttled by her crew
Thus the whole of Nagumo's
when
Enterprise,
was
hit
with four bombs, set
the flames took hold
from stem
to stern.
dream of empire perished. Yamamoto's prophecy of 'running wild' for six months had been fulfilled almost to the day. Not only did the balance in the Pacific between fleet carriers now stand equal (Yorktoun
was sunk by
never be
made good -
Six fleet carriers as well as
nine
defensive war
as
Yamamoto knew,
it
It
was
would
it,
the
having seen American industry
join the Japanese navy in 1942^4-;
light carriers
could not stand.
and, with
submarine on 6 June); the advantage the Japanese had
a
would
fleet
and
now
test
be condemned to the defensive, though
the courage
and resources of the United
the utmost.
278
could hand.
America would launch fourteen,
sixty-six escort carriers, creating a fleet against
to
lost
at first
States
which Japan in
and
waging
its allies
a
to
15
OCCUPATION
AND REPRESSION though catastrophic Midway, way altered the boundaries a
Midway
lay far in
defeat, lost
the future,
Japan not
a foot
of territory and in no
new empire. The true consequences of when the Americans penetrated the Japanese
of
its
defence perimeter in the southern and central
Pacific at the
end of 1943 and forced the
Japanese once again to wage mobile warfare - by which time Japan had in naval airpower. In the
meantime they retained
their
enormous
lost
area of conquest -
eastern China and Manchuria, the Philippines, French Indo-China, British
Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, together with their
superiority
its
Burma and
Thailand - and administered
ally
it
undisturbed by Western Allied interference.
Conquest brings problems itself.
not as acute, as those of organising victory
Order must be maintained, governments replaced, currencies supported, markets
revived,
not
as difficult, if
economies sustained and exploited
come
to
for the conqueror's profit.
empire unprepared, however. They had had ten
administering conquered territory in Manchuria.
More
empire which was by no means hostile to or unpopular with
in
which had taken root
Japan before the war was
clothed
a
genuine belief
at
in the
one
all
the peoples
The idea of a
army, navy and nationalist circles
another
it
first
Asian great power, to lead
in Asia
were enthused and inspired
mission of Japan, as the
Many
whose
'Greater East
level a cloak for imperial amibition; at
other Asians to independence from foreign rule. b) the Japanese
in the
experience of
important, they had a theory of
sovereignty they had wrested from the former colonial powers. Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'
The Japanese did
years'
triumph of 1942 and were ready, even eager,
to co-operate with
it.
The establishment of a 'New Order' in Asia had been adopted as an aim by the second Konoye cabinet in July 1940. In February 1942 the Tojo cabinet set up a Greater Asia Council and in policy
came
November a Ministry for Greater Asia. The high when the first - and only - Greater
a year later
279
point of Japan's pan-Asian East Asia
Conference was
THE WAR
convened
in
Tokyo
in
November
THE PACIFIC
IN
1943.
1941-1943
composition revealed the varied character of
Its
imposed within the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
administration that Japan had
The conference was attended by the Prime Ministers of Manchuria (Manchukuo),
Chang Chung-hui, and Japanese-controlled China, Wang Ching-wei,
Wan
Thai government, Prince
a representative
Jose Laurel, the head of state of occupied Burma, Ba
Maw, and Subhas Chandra
Bose, the
leader of the 'Free Indian Government'.
The Prime Ministers of Manchuria and
were Japanese puppets,
power and
nationalist,
entirely without
of their annexed
exploitation
of the
Waithayakon, the President of the occupied Philippines,
Subhas Chandra Bose,
territories.
had deliberately exiled himself from
of revolt and arrived in Japan in mid-1943 in official nationalist circles in India,
British India in
a
German
messianic Indian
a
order to
raise the
He had no
U-boat.
'China'
of Japanese
effectively instruments
standard
standing in
where he had broken with Gandhi and the Indian
National Congress, but had a considerable popular following and in the Indian National Army, raised from prisoners taken in Malaya, a sizeable military force under his influence -
though not under
his
command, which remained
genuine enthusiast for the Co-Prosperity Sphere;
in
as the
of independence had been sponsored by Japan on
Japanese hands. Ba
head of a
Army was
led by
young
nationalists
whose
was
a
declaration
August 1942, he had on the same day
1
declared war against Britain and the United States. The National)
state
Maw
who were
Burma Independence (later fight on Japan's side.
prepared to
The Thai prince represented an independent state which had allied itself with Japan (in circumstances which would have made any other policy difficult) and had been rewarded by grants of
territory
from neighbouring Burma and Laos. Jose Laurel was
associate of the legitimate but exiled President of the Philippines,
had charged him
to
a political
Manuel Quezon, who
pretend co-operation with the Japanese. However, Laurel had
subsequently been converted to pan-Asianism, and under his presidency the Philippines
had declared 14
October
its
independence - already conditionally conceded by the United
States -
on
1942.
The territories excluded from the conference were Indo-China, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Indo-China - Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia - though under Japanese occupation, remained under Vichy French colonial administration until March 1945, the Japanese rightly suspected large
Chinese
flourished,
population,
made
it
it
had turned
to the Free
among which
an unsuitable country
in
a
small
which
to
when
French and overthrew
it.
communist
movement
guerrilla
experiment with
self-rule
Malaya's
- though
a
Muslim Malay element was not hostile to the Japanese, who had promised them independence at a later stage. The Muslims of the Dutch East Indies had been given a similar promise; while fighting with the Americans and Australians continued in New Guinea it was not judged opportune to grant them independence, but numbers of sizeable
nationalist
leaders including the future president, Sukarno, agreed to join a Central
Consultative territories,
Committee,
including
or
quasi-government,
Hong Kong,
in
September
1943.
Certain
other
Singapore and Dutch, British or Australian Timor,
280
OCCUPATION AND REPRESSION
Borneo and occupied annexed
New
Although Filipinos,
at
the
Guinea, had such strategic importance that they were simply
empire and placed under
to the Japanese
outset Japan's
who had no
for
dislike
military
government.
devolution of power worked successfully,
were proud of
the Americans and
their
the
heavily
Westernised culture, accepted occupation grudgingly and sheltered the only large-scale
movement
popular anti-Japanese guerrilla parts of
Burma and Thailand
to flourish within the Co-Prosperity Sphere. In
was conscripted
local labour
to
work
harsh conditions
in
with Allied prisoners of war; of these, 12,000 out of 61,000 prisoners and 90,000 out of 270,000 Asian labourers died
on the construction of the Burma
however, the occupied population found administration.
The educated
classes
little
initially
to resent in the
welcomed were
alienated by the discovery that the Japanese
railway. In other areas,
it
change from colonial
and were only gradually
racially arrogant as their
as
former
European masters. Such was not the case
government before
1937,
An independent
China.
in
exploited for profit wherever the Japanese armies were strong control.
The educated
however
state,
ineffective
its
had been invaded without provocation and then systematically
it
classes,
enough
to
impose
their
deeply conscious of the antiquity and grandeur of their
vanished imperial system and consistently resentful of the West's commercial penetration
and diplomatic aggression all
in the
previous century, were as disdainful of the Japanese as of
other foreign cultures. However, the area
still
controlled by the
Kuomintang was
ravaged by inflation, which had reached 125,000 per cent by 1945, and by constant conscription drives; the
communist
to the national character;
and the
north-east was gripped by an austerity deeply inimical
rural areas within the
which contained about 40 per cent of China's 'rice offensives'. In
enemy.
In 1942 the Chinese
generals had
sprung
the prevailing chaos
gone over
were scourged by constant
many Chinese made an accommodation with
communists publicised the
to the Japanese;
Japanese sphere of occupation,
agricultural land,
more
fact that
the
twenty-seven Kuomintang
significantly a vast
system of local trade had
up between occupiers and occupied. Since the Japanese armies generally
controlled only the towns, and were driven to raise necessities from the surrounding
countryside by force - a wearisome and inefficient practice - landowners and merchants
commanders, and this accommodation prevailed
rapidly entered into trading arrangements with the local Japanese
market relationship proved more
satisfactory to
throughout most of western China
both
sides. This
until the institution
of the Ichi-Go offensive,
at
Tokyo's
decree, in the spring of 1944.
Hitler's
'New Order'
The ethos of Japan's 'New Order' was co-operative; in
yet
conception, and frequently harsh and extortionate
atrocities,
however, were
arbitrary
it
was self-deluding and insincere
in practice.
and sporadic. The pattern
281
Japanese excesses and of
its
German
ally's
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
occupation policies was exactly contrary.
1941-194?
'New Order' was designed to serve make it work
Hitler's
Greater Germany's interests exclusively; but the system of coercion used to
was calculated and methodic, while the recourse underlay
it
was governed by
to
punishment,
By the end of 1942 German troops occupied the sovereign
states:
reprisal
and terror which
and procedures implemented from the
rules
territory
France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg,
centre.
of fourteen European
Denmark, Norway,
Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania
and
Latvia. Austria
had since 1938 been amalgamated with the Reich
as
sovereign territory,
together with the Sudetenland province of Czechoslovakia and, since 1939, the former
German provinces of Poland. Luxembourg, and the Yugoslav provinces of southern
deemed
whose 'union with
the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine
St) ria
and
Carinthia,
occupied
in 1940-1,
were
impended and were under 'special civil administration' by the Ministry of the Interior. Denmark retained its elected government and monarch) under German Foreign Office supervision. Norway and Holland were territories
the Reich'
who answered
under the supervision of Reich commissioners
monarchs and governments had gone place.
was
directly to Hitler; their
remained
in
Belgium was placed under military government by the occupying Wehrmacht,
as
north-eastern
but
France;
into exile but their civil administrations
French
the
Vichy
government
remained
administrative authority throughout the country, even after the extension of
occupation into the 'Free Zone' in
November
There were no devolved arrangements Slovakia,
which had been detached
as a
the
civil
Wehrmacht
1942. in eastern
puppet
state.
or southern Europe except in
The troubled Serbian province of
Yugoslavia was under military government, as was Greece (though parts of Greece and Yugoslavia were Italian-occupied until September 1943, while certain Yugoslav border
provinces were annexed to their neighbours). Eastern Poland, White Russia and the Baltic
were designated 'Ostland' and, with the Ukraine, run by Reich commissioners
states
effectively as colonies.
The Czech
protectorate, as Bohemia-Moravia,
of Poland,
known
battlefront
were held under
Special
as the 'General
parts of Czechoslovakia
and were
had been denominated
directly ruled
by Germany,
as
a
Reich
was the rump
Government'. Areas of Russia immediately behind the
military
economic arrangements
government. prevailed, as they
had done during the
First
World
War, in Belgium and the French northern departments, whose coal and iron industries
were run
as a single unit,
its
output co-ordinated with that of the Ruhr and occupied
Lorraine (the success of this military 'iron, steel and coal community' was to plant the seed
of the European Economic Community of the post-war period). However, sense, the
whole of
Hitler's
European empire was administered
the industrialised West, delegates of the
for
Economic and Armaments
made
wider
return. In
Ministries established
working arrangements with the existing managements of individual enterprises to agree output quotas
in a
economic factories
and
larger
and purchasing arrangements. Similar agreements were
with agricultural marketing agencies and ministries. Western Europe's intensive
282
OCCUPATION AND REPRESSION
agriculture
was
magnet
a
economic planners
to
Germany, where 26 per cent of the
in
population in 1939 had been employed on the land without managing to meet the country's foodstuff needs. Underpopulated France, a major pre-war exporting country,
was expected
to provide an important part of the shortfall, particularly after mobilisation
had removed one was
efficient,
of Germany's male population. Danish farming, famously
in three
also considered a
and dairy products. Denmark,
German demands;
prime source of
partly
because
it
agricultural imports, particularly
was ruled on
the 4 million Danes provided rations for 8.2 million
of the war. France, though
it
German
fed the sixty occupying
surpluses for export, did so only
at
the expense of reducing
which
Purchases of
all
between the
the largest and
produced the
franc
a
shortage of
at
an
artificially
and the mark which favoured Germany by
most
industrialised of the
largest returns a certain
from 1940
occupied countries, to 1944
no
largely
an arbitrary annual levy on the
costs',
as
much
were imposed upon other occupied countries; but
income. To
treasury's
French
intake;
through
most
affected farming throughout the Nazi empire.
French revenue whose amount was dictated by Germany Similar arrangements
own
for
and found
commodities from France were financed throughout the war
through credits levied by the so-called 'occupation
rate
Germans
divisions
its
agricultural productivity actually declined during the war, largely artificial fertiliser
of pork
rem, responded well to
a light
that the)
as 63
was
bit
per cent.
in France,
hardest and
than 16 per cent of the Reich
less
extent 'occupation costs'
it
low exchange
were
by direct German
offset
as Krupp and IG mere priming of the pump to
investment in French war industry, often by private enterprises such Farben; but such investment was entirely self-serving, a
enable French industrialists to maintain or increase their supply of goods to
market for
sale at a price ultimately fixed
a
single
by the German buyers.
German purchase of French, Dutch and
Belgian industrial products -
which included
items for military use such as aero-engines and radio equipment, as well as finished steel
and unprocessed raw materials - were acquired the
less,
and the German purchasing
authorities,
in a rigged
such
Armistice Commission, were careful to preserve the
market;
as the officials
it
was
a
market none
of the Franco-German
autonomy of their opposite numbers.
Such was not the case with German intrusions into the western European labour market. During the war German industry and agriculture developed an insatiable appetite for foreign labour. Since military requirements reduced the size of the domestic labour force
by one-third, and Nazi policy precluded the the shortfall had to be
supplied
made good from
large-scale
employment of German women,
outside the borders of the Reich. Prisoners of war
some of the numbers, over a million Frenchmen being employed on German in German mines and factories between 1940 and 1945; but even military
farms and
captivity failed as a
was offered
to
source of labour supply. As early as mid-1940 economic inducement
tempt
skilled
workers were employed
in
workers from
home and
Germany. However,
as local
by December 220,000 Western
economies recovered
after the
catastrophe of 1940, others resisted the lure; by October 1941 the Western foreign labour
283
THE WAR
German) had not
force in
risen
IN
THE PACIFIC
above 300,000, of
The Germans therefore resorted
1941-1943
whom
272,000 were from allied
Italy.
to conscription. Fritz Sauckel, Reich Plenipotentiary-
General for Labour, required the administrations of the occupied countries of the West to stated numbers of workers and thereby raised the number of foreign workers in Germany between January and October 1942 by 2.6 million. (In France the Obligatory-
produce
Labour Service eventually proved
prime impetus
a
for the defection
Maquis.) The rate of increase was sustained into 1943, largely as
from the Axis
in
and
at
there,
young men.
a half
Nevertheless recruitment
West, whether by incentive or compulsion, could
in the
German requirements. Western workers had to be paid, fed and western European standards, and the consequent charge on the German war
not ultimately
housed
of Italy's defection
September which allowed the imposition of labour conscription
yielding another million
still
of the young to the
a result
economy grew
satisfy
The
burdensome.
progressively
introduced
Sauckel
solution
was
An immediate source of Eastern labour had been found in 1942 in of Red Arm) men made prisoner in the encirclement battles at Minsk,
conscription in the East. the millions
Smolensk and
Kiev.
Out of the eventual
were recorded Russian
as 'working'.
civilians,
total
murder
the war, 3,300,000 died by neglect or
Most worked
of 5,160,000 Soviet soldiers captured during at
whom
mostly Ukrainians,
German hands;
news of
resort to labour conscription to
make up The
the Polish 'General-Government'.
the Czechs
from hunger, otherwise
it
the Reich
summer
of 1944.
found themselves treated so badly
the numbers.
SS
became
A
similar policy
that
fare.
interests
does not
.
'It is
a
was imposed
the instrument of enslavement.
Himmler, outlined the principles by which
Posen address of October 1943:
how
in the
enslavement deterred others from following, and Sauckel had
their virtual
leader, Heinrich
recruits
first
1944 only 875,000
too did the 2.8 million
Germans brought within
the
between March 1942 and the Wehrmacht's expulsion from Russia Originally invited to 'volunteer', the
May
in
in slave conditions; so
it
worked
matter of total indifference to
in his
me how
to in Its
infamous
the Russians,
Whether the other peoples live in plenty, whether they croak me only to the extent that we need them as slaves for our culture; .
.
interest me.'
The exploitation of the East The Reich commissioners of Poland adopted
for the
Ukraine and the Ostland and the Government-General
a similar attitude to the exploitation
control. In Poland private enterprises
subjected to
German managerial
control; in the Soviet Union,
been state-owned before the invasion, the contingent or
more
three out of four of
usually deliberate, all
of the economies under their
were either taken over by German managers or
first
which had,
priority for
284
where
all
production had
to restore
example, resulted
electricity-generating stations in the
had been repaired, the operation of the whole
was
conquered
war damage,
in the
area.
wrecking of
Once damage
industrial structure, including mines, oil-
OCCUPATION AND REPRESSION
and
wells, mills
Company
Hiittenwerk
Company
wool
for
industry. Later,
plant
captured,
farm. Inefficient though
in particular the
Oel company
Berg-und
and the Ostfaser
for oil
corporations proved unequal to the task of managing
state
been
-
- which operated as extensions of Germany's nationalised
fibre
it
companies,
private
Mannesmann, were allocated enterprises one Soviet economic system with which
Himmler
to state corporations
for mining, the Kontinentale
when
had
that
was consigned
factories,
to oversee as part
the
Krupp,
including
the
all
Flick
and
of their existing empires. The
Germans did not tamper was
the collective
was, and despite long-term plans favoured particularly by
to settle the 'black earth' region with
both native and ethnic German
settlers for the
German
soldier-peasants, the supply of
occupied area was too small to permit
a
wholesale transformation to private agriculture. In western Poland and other areas on the
of the Greater Reich, native cultivators were expropriated and replaced with
fringes
Teutons; throughout the Ostland and the Ukraine there was an effort
at
reprivatisation, but
the collective system was generally judged too well established to unravel.
Such changes
as the
Germans imposed were cosmetic. The
of February 1942 reconstituted collectives
Edict)
as
agricultural
Agrarerlass (Agricultural
communes,
allegedly-
equivalent to the village societies which had existed before the Revolution, in which cultivators
were granted
assumed the practice,
of property over private
whom
and
in exacting tribute,
lots
and the German occupiers
owed
proportion of the crop was
a
Germans were
the cultivators quickly discovered, the
as
commissars
rights
role of landlords to
failure to deliver
it
as
as rent. In
exigent as the
entailed loss of the private holding,
expropriation and exposure to recruitment for forced labour.
German
upon the principle of coercion, Germany was not interested in winning the goodwill or even the co-operation of peoples it deemed by ideological edict to be inferior Untermenschen. What was true in the East, moreover, was true throughout Hitler's empire. In short,
as did
its
whole
agricultural policy in the East rested
Ostpolitik.
Nazi
Coercion, repression, punishment, reprisal, terror, extermination - the chain of measures
by which Nazi Germany exercised
more circumspection west of the
common
writ of
civil
its
power over occupied Europe - were
and
with
the Rhine than east of the Oder. The) were, nevertheless,
instruments of control wherever the swastika
law,
inflicted
pitiless in effect
whenever the
will
flag flew,
unrestrained by the
of the Fiihrer gave their agents
licence.
That had been true the chancellorship of
first
of all
Germany
in
in
Germany
itself.
Immediately
after his
appointment
January 1933, Hitler had broadened the existing legal
provision of Schutzhaft - protective custody of the person concerned, to protect for
example, from
mob
violence - to embrace 'police detention' for political
hold 'police detainees' detention centres were established
Oranienburg
in
to
at
in the 1890s
and
later
a
To
term borrowed
adopted by the
the Boer War, had been established in other parts of Germany. Their
285
her,
activity.
Dachau near Munich and
March 1933 and soon other such 'concentration camps',
from the Spanish pacification of Cuba
him or
first
British
during
inmates were
THE WAR
IK
THE PACIFIC
communists, held for terms determined by the
1941-1943
and
Fiihrer's pleasure; later other political
conscientious opponents of the regime, active or merely suspect, were detained, and by 1937
'anti-socials',
including homosexuals, beggars and gypsies, were sent there. At the
number of concentration camp detainees was about 25,000. camp was yet an extermination camp; all were merely places of
beginning of the war the
No
concentration
imprisonment. However, the) were administered by
arbitrary
branch of the
whose
SS,
chief,
police. This particular stroke of Gleichschaltung official
the political (Gestapo)
ordinary
civil
Thereafter a
a special 'Death's
Heinrich Himmler, was since 1936 also chief of the
Head'
German
brought under the unified control of a Nazi
and criminal police forces of the Reich, together with the
police, but also the security organs (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) of the Nazi Party.
German
detention' by an
citizen
official
was
liable to arrest
by the Gestapo, consignment to
'police
of the SD and imprisonment by SS 'Death's Head' guards, without
an) intervention by the judicial authorities whatsoever.
The
great conquests of
1939^1 brought the extension of SS/Gestapo power,
allied
with that of the military police (the
effect
was
first felt
in Poland,
where
acts
immediately
after
and
were arrested under the
priests
Feldgendarmerie), into the
occupied
now
territories.
The
of aggression against the leaders of society began
occupation: professionals such as doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers detention'
'police
provisions and confined in
Few were ever to emerge. Forced labour was a founding principle of camp system: the Nazi slogan Arbeit macht frei, 'Labour wins freedom',
concentration camps. the concentration
was the precept by which territory
and
disease proliferated, first
the) operated. As concentration
their populations increased, rations
to die in large
and forced labour thus became
who
numbers, and those
camps multiplied
in
occupied
dwindled, the pace of work accelerated, a
death sentence. The Poles were the
did not survive Schutzhaft represented
significant
proportion of the nation's loss of
thereafter
few peoples were spared. The penalty
a quarter
of
its
a
population during the war;
for resistance,
even dissidence,
for
Czechs, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Belgians, Netherlanders and French was not arrest
and imprisonment but deportation without of
all
the memorials
often ending in death.
trial,
on the great medieval battlefield of Agincourt
over the mass graves of the French knights gates of Agincourt chateau,
who
fell
is
modest
in 1415 but the
which commemorates the squire and
The most poignant not the
his
two
monument
cal voire at
sons, 'morts
the
en
transportation a Natzweiler en 1944'.
Natzweiler, to which the three
Frenchmen were transported
to death,
was one of
eighteen main concentration camps run by the SS in and outside Germany. Tens of
thousands died
in those
west of the Oder, worked or starved to death, killed by diseases of
privation or, in individual cases, executed by decree.
were
not.
The western concentration camps
however, extermination camps; the appalling spectacle of death on which the
Hitler's
'New
Order': a
mass grave dug
at the
Bergen-Belsen concentration
liberation by British troops
286
on 15 April 1945.
camp
after its
THE WAR
British
army stumbled
at
THE PACIFIC
IN
mi -H43
Belsen in April 1945 was the result of
a
sudden epidemic among
the chronically underfed inmates, not of massacre. Massacre, however, was the ultimate
horror which underlay the concentration the
Oder including
been
Massacre
is
Chelmno,
particularly
and run exclusively
built
endemic
to
camp
system, and those
camps which
Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor
lay east
of
and Majdanek, had
for that purpose.
campaigns of conquest;
it
had been the hallmark of the
Mongols and had been practised in their time by the Romans in Gaul and the Spaniards in South America. It was an index, however, of the degree to which Western civilisation had advanced
that
massacre had effectively been outlawed from warfare in Europe since the
seventeenth century; it
made massacre
its
it
of massacre
revival
was
consonant index of Nazi Germany's return
a
of its imperialism
a principle
in
its
conquered
lands.
an instrument of oppression, however, were not those
as
opposed German power by
offering resistance - resistance
was what had
the cruel excesses of conquerors in the past - but a people, the Jews,
Nazi ideology
deemed
barbarism that
to
The chief victims of
to
be
a challenge, threat
The
and obstacle
fate of the
Jews had been legally disadvantaged
in
to
its
chiefly
whose
who
invoked
very existence
triumph.
jews
German) immediately
after the
Nazi seizure of
after 15 September 1935, under the so-called Nuremberg Laws, Jews were deprived German citizenship. By November 1938 some 150,000 of Germany's half-million Jews had managed to emigrate; but many did not reach countries which lay outside the
power;
of
full
Wehrmacht's impending reach, while the unmotivated to
flight,
lived within
it.
great concentration of Europe's Jews, as yet
That included the Jews of the historic area of
settlement in eastern Poland and western Russia, great Jewish populations
centre of Jewish religious scholarship.
many of
some
9 million in number, as well as the
of Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Salonica and Lithuanian Vilna, the
The diplomatic and
military victories of 1938-9 put
these East European Jews under Nazi control; Barbarossa engulfed the rest of
them. Himmler, though he persisted massacre them
at
(Sonderkommandos)
had already
in trying to establish his legal right to
do
so,
once. Four 'task groups' (Einsatzgruppen), divided into 'special
composed of German
killed
one million Jews
November
1941.
regarded as
inefficient. In
SS
and securitymen and
in the
new
locally enlisted militias,
area of conquest
between June and
Most, however, had been killed by mass shooting, a January 1942,
at a
meeting held
at
method Himmler
the headquarters of Interpol, of
which Himmler was president,
in the Berlin
proposed and received authority
to institutionalise the massacre of the Jews, a
known
began to
commands'
suburb of Wannsee,
his
deputy Heydrich
measure
to
denned ghettos in Poland since the moment of occupation, and the order had subsequently been extended to other occupied areas. It was therefore not difficult to round up and 'transport' be
as the 'Final Solution'
Jews for 'resettlement' in the
east.
(Endlosung).
Those sent
Jews had been obliged
to
288
camps
to live in
associated with an industrial plant
OCCUPATION AND REPRESSION
run by the SS economic branch were usually worked to a
state
of enfeeblement before
being sent to the gas chambers, though the old, the weak and the young might be gassed immediately; Auschwitz, the large
camp
southern Poland, served both purposes. Those
in
sent to the extermination camps, like Treblinka
and Sobibor, were gassed on
arrival. In this
some
way, by the end of 1943, about 40 per cent of the world's Jewish population, million people, had
been put
survive, the 800,000 in
1944 and gassed
By there
to death; of the last large
European Jewish community
Hungary, 450,000 were delivered to the SS between March and June
Auschwitz.
at
that time, the
head of the SS economic branch reported
to
Himmler on
were twenty concentration camps and 165 subsidiary labour camps;
the population was 524,286, of risen to 714,211, of
whom
whom
202,674 were
in
however,
normally their
that
were women. In January 1945 the total had women. There were few Jews among them, for the
145,119
Jews never formed
fate to die
on or soon
lay a chilling
dimension of Nazi
Europe's Jews was a 1945.
fact
known
a majority
may
racial
It
of the camp populations, since
non-Jewish forced labourers,
after arrival;
kept alive as long as they could work,
5 April,
August 1944
simple and ghastly reason that the Final Solution was effectively complete. possible,
6 to
seems it
was
who were
always have outnumbered them. In that irony
policy.
For the removal and transportation of
to every inhabitant
of the continent between 1942 and
Their disappearance defined the barbaric ruthlessness of Nazi rule, offered an
unspoken menace to every individual who defied or transgressed Nazi authority and warned that what had been done to one people might be done to another. In a profound sense, the
machinery of the Final Solution and of the Nazi empire were one and the same:
because systematic massacre underlay the exercise of Nazi authority
needed
to rule his
camp system was five years
of
conquered subjects
in itself enough to
scarcely
hold
all
at all.
but
terror.
289
a
at
every turn, Hitler
The knowledge of the concentration
handful of heroic resisters abject during
THE WAR IK THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
16
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS The
victory of
Midway transformed the climate of war in the Pacific not only From now on, the reheartened American chiefs of staff
objectively but subjectively.
recognised, they could go over to the offensive.
The ultimate
objective was the
home
The question was: along which
islands of Japan, unless
Tojo and
axis?
government
his
could be brought to concede defeat before invasion became necessary. However, the
home
islands
Australia,
lay
2000 miles from America's remaining
between each of which
a
Pacific
bases in Hawaii and
formidable chain of Japanese island fortresses
interposed to block an American amphibious advance. The ground which had been lost so quickly by unprepared garrisons - or through the absence of any garrison
at all
- between
December 1941 and May 1942 would now have to be recovered step by step at painful cost. Was it better to proceed along the pathway of the great islands of the East Indies or to leap across the stepping-stones of the tiny, isolated atolls of the north Pacific?
Choice of route implied choice of commander and of service. Joint Chiefs of
Staff,
strategic responsibilities in the Pacific.
Nimitz,
commander of
30 March 1942 the
The new arrangement abolished
the Pacific Fleet with headquarters
Ocean Area and MacArthur, commander of army
Pacific
On
General Marshall and Admiral King, had agreed on
at
a division
ABDA
of
and put
Hawaii, in charge of the
forces in the region with
headquarters in Australia, in charge of the South-West Pacific Area. To choose the northern route
would be
to
make Nimitz and
had always been the navy's arm, and as yet
it
interest.
the navy
The army, by
camps
to Australia in
contrast,
had the men,
a logical step, since
offensive
force
required,
its
being shipped from the training Pacific
Area route, which
large islands that yielded at least
demanded
290
the Pacific
only military
to stride across the atolls towards
growing numbers; while the South-West
began close to Australia and proceeded along an
men who were
lacked the shipping, warships and
Japan.
resources
paramount -
However, the small Marine Corps was
proportionately
some of the
smaller shipping
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS
To choose it, however, was to make paramount not only the army but its commander too. Although MacArthur had become a hero to the American people for his defence of Bataan, he was not popular with the nation's admirals. A prima donna among resources.
man who brooked no
subordinates and a
equals,
direction of strategy by subordinating naval to
Area was
made
he would, they feared, usurp the
army operations
if
the South- West Pacific
the primary zone of the counter-offensive.
Through stormy inter-service negotiations a compromise was reached. The services would take the southern route; but the area would be subdivided to allot part of the theatre to Nimitz
limited
call
and the navy,
on the
part to
MacArthur and the army, which would have and bombardment
navy's transports, carriers
strictly
The compromise,
fleet.
agreed on 2 July 1942, consigned Task One, the capture of the island of Guadalcanal, east of
New New
Guinea, to the navy. Task Two, an advance into
New
Guinea and
its
where Japan had a major base at Rabaul, would go eventually would Task Three, a final assault on Rabaul. Britain,
offshore island of
to MacArthur; so
Guadalcanal, in the Solomons, committed both the United States Navy and the
United
States
Marine Corps to
a
desperate struggle.
Zealand, the departure point of the operation,
it
Though
safely
approachable from
New
was surrounded on three sides by other
Solomons group, which together formed a confined channel that was to to the American sailors as 'the Slot'. Once troops were ashore, the navy was committed to resupplying them through these confined waters and so to risking battle with the Japanese in circumstances where manoeuvre was difficult and surprise all too easy islands in the
become known
for the
enemy
The
Marine Division,
1st
on
difficulty
to achieve.
7 August
and
also
a regular
formation of high quality, was landed without
took the offshore islands of Tulagi, Gavutu and Tanambogo.
The Japanese garrison numbered only 2200 and was swiftly overcome. However, the appearance of the Marines on Guadalcanal provoked the Japanese high command to frenzy; 'success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal', a document later captured read, 'is the fork in the road that a
which leads
them or
to victory for
breach in their defensive perimeter
at
us.'
Since the Japanese recognised
Guadalcanal would put
the
whole of
their
on extreme efforts to retake it. On the night of 8/9 August off Savo Island they surprised the American fleet supporting the Guadalcanal landings, sank four cruisers and damaged one cruiser and two destroyers. From 18 August Southern Area
at risk,
they resolved
they poured reinforcements into the island, supported by naval guns and aircraft which
continuously attacked killed at
Midway).
On
its
airfield
24 August
(renamed Henderson Field a fleet carrying
was intercepted by the American navy fought in
though about
its
east
in
honour of a Marine
pilot
the largest reinforcement yet dispatched
of Guadalcanal and the second of
five battles
waters ensued. This Battle of the Eastern Solomons was an American victory;
Enterprise
was damaged, the Japanese
sixty aircraft to the
Though
repelled
lost a carrier, a cruiser
and
a
destroyer and
Americans' twenty.
at sea,
the Japanese were fighting furiously
291
on
land.
The Marines,
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
troops though they were, learned on Guadalcanal both the professional respect and
elite
ethnic hatred they
were
Henderson
became
Field
A
to feel for the Japanese throughout the Pacific war.
feature near
focus of particularly fierce fighting; the Marines called
a
it
'Bloody Ridge'. The navy meanwhile christened the nightly convoys of Japanese destroyers
which ran reinforcements
'Tokyo Express'.
to the island the
darkness. In this Battle of Cape Esperance the Americans
much
October two
met
larger fleets
made
It
and on the night of 11/12 October caught and surprised
intercept
a
came
regular efforts to
Japanese cruiser force in
off best.
However, on 26
again in the Battle of Santa Cruz, south-east of
Guadalcanal, and the decision went the other way. The Japanese had four carriers present,
and 100 of their at risk,
aircraft
were shot down. Yet though the Americans had only two
and suffered half the
total
of Japanese
aircraft losses, Enterprise
heroine of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, went down.
Hornet, the
The
epic struggle for
Guadalcanal
Before the Battle of Santa Cruz the Japanese had launched
a violent offensive against
American defenders of Guadalcanal between 23 and 26 October, days of
which grounded the American Japanese
carriers
was damaged and
aircraft
aircraft
the
torrential rain
operating from Henderson Field but allowed
based elsewhere to deliver
a
succession of attacks. The Marines held out,
counter-attacked and even received reinforcements, though in the teeth of Japanese efforts to close Guadalcanal's waters to
American
three days of heavy fighting in 'the Slot' battleships clashed with battleships in the
but
on
this
occasion action was joined
the night of 12
morning she
November Dakota
November
fell
at
first
classic
night
was brand-new and
as
Enterprise
bottom with nine 16-inch
and
IS
November,
in
duel of capital ships since Jutland -
Hiei
was so badly damaged
and was sunk.
on the
Kirishima old. South Dakota survived,
fortnight later, in the Battle of Tassafaronga
12
the Battle of Guadalcanal,
and radar proved the decisive
the Japanese flagship
victim to aircraft from
Between
now known
the battleship Kirishima inflicted forty-two hits
Kirishima to the
came
transports.
On
On
that next
the night of 14/15
South Dakota; but South
while the Washington sent
shell strikes delivered in
seven minutes.
on 30 November, an American
off less well, but there, as in the fighting in 'the Slot' (also
factor.
known
as
Sound' from the number of ships sunk there), the Japanese covering force
A
cruiser force
'Ironbottomed failed to
run
its
troop transports to land. Thousands of Japanese soldiers had drowned in the course of the
win command of Guadalcanal's waters.
battles to
Starved of reinforcements and supplies, the Japanese garrison of Guadalcanal
began to
falter.
The
island
was plagued by leeches,
tropical
now
wasps and malarial mosquitoes,
as rations dwindled the Japanese troops fell prey to disease. The Americans too became ill - pilots at Henderson Field lasted only thirty days before losing the quickness of hand and eye necessary to do battle - but the tide of battle was now running their way. In January 1943 the Japanese commander on Guadalcanal withdrew his headquarters to the
and
292
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS
neighbouring island of Bougainville. In early February the 'Tokyo Express' began to
New
operate in reverse, evacuating the sickly and exhausted defenders to
Guinea. By 9
February Japanese resistance on Guadalcanal had formally ceased.
For the Marines Guadalcanal was remembered
as
campaign acquired. In terms of casualties
The Japanese had
victory.
had nevertheless been
it
22,000 killed or missing, the
lost
vvhich bore the brunt of the fighting, only a
over
little
a
Men who had
an epic struggle.
no other
fought there bore an aura of endurance which veterans of almost
1st
a
Pacific
comparatively cheap
and 7th Marine
On
thousand dead.
Divisions,
Guadalcanal
method they would employ across the subjection. It entailed the commitment of
the American forces had established the tactical
width of the elite
Pacific to beat the
Japanese into
landing troops, heavily supported by ground-attack
and hold key
home
towards the
As conceived and executed,
islands.
morale and material. Both sides were
resistance, the It
to display
were ultimately dependent upon
soldiers
aircraft
and naval
gunfire, to take
islands at the perimeter of Japan's area of conquest, as stepping-stones
Americans could
call
was an unequal contest which
They were about
to
it
supreme
brought about
concept of honour
their
long run the
in the
Pacific
between
in sustaining their
them in thousands. Americans were bound to win.
up overwhelming firepower
win another
a contest
bravery; but, while the emperor's
victory far
to
kill
from the steamy shores of
Guadalcanal. In June 1942, in the only successful subsidiary of the
Midway
offensive, a
Japanese force had landed on the two westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain, the
American
archipelago
which
preoccupied elsewhere, had landed
it
on Attu and confronted
since the Japanese
had fought
occupiers were few in
from
runs
let
them
Alaska
bide; but in
the occupiers.
He
towards
May
The
Japan.
Americans,
1943 Nimitz gathered a force,
also sent three battleships in support,
March. The
a spirited heavy-cruiser action off the islands in
number
(2500) but inflicted 1000 dead
on
their
American
attackers
befor running out of ammunition and launching a suicidal bayonet charge. In August an
even larger force recaptured Kiska, from which the Japanese prudently withdrew before they were attacked.
On New terrain
New
Guinea, in the equatorial
the Japanese had by contrast
belt,
which strongly favoured the defence. They had landed
Guinea
'bird'
had deflected
on 22 July
1942, after the
their effort to pass
round
American victory
in the
dug
in to stay, in
Papuan
in the Battle
'tail'
of the
of the Coral Sea
by sea to Port Moresby from north to south.
it
Their attempts to take Port Moresby by an overland advance through the passes of the
Owen on
Stanley range
were checked by Australian troops and they were forced
their landing places at
went over
Overleaf: The
US
carrier
however, the
Enterprise under attack
1942, an engagement vvhich
feft
fall
back
When the Australians, with American support, Owen Stanley became a barrier to the Allies'
Buna and Gona.
to the offensive,
to
the carrier
at
Hornet
by the Japanese.
293
the Battle of Santa Cruz, a burning hulk
which was
26 October later
sunk
m
1 :t"
%>
h}
^^F
JBl*^
Jfct
M
,
^^Kjb-.
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
COMMAND
AREAS ALASKA^
RUSSIA
North Pacific
Area (Nimitz)
ELLICE
TOKELAY
ISLANDS ISLANDS
SAMOA
;
.ISLANDS South FIJI
Pacific
ISLANDS
Area (Halsey)
%/j/^%
^—
—
Territory occupied by Japanese forces 1937-1942 Pacific
Command
Subdivision of Pacific
Areas Ocean Areas
South- West Pacific Area July 1942
The
Pacific drive: as
soon as the Japanese shifted their attention
swiftly acquired empire, the Allies concentrated their
own
to the consolidation of their
attentions on the recapture of the
Pacific Islands.
advance, since the only route through the mountains was the tortuous
with the greatest
difficulty that
an attacking force was established
Kokoda
Trail.
in position outside
It
was
Gona
and Buna, where the Japanese were deeply entrenched. Fierce and painful fighting ensued throughout November and December 1942. Though the Japanese were starving, the Australians
had
and Americans were disheartened by the appalling conditions in which they On 2 December, however, a new general, the American Robert Eichelberger,
to fight.
296
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS
arrived
and
revitalised the offensive.
US 32nd
7th and
were again grossly
casualties
By 2 January 1943 Buna had been taken; the Australian
meanwhile captured Gona, which
Divisions had
to the disadvantage
on 9 December. The
fell
of the Japanese: they
lost 12,000
dead
in
the campaign, the Allies 2850, mostly Australians.
Operation Cartwheel though
Victor)' in Papua,
ended the
and cleared the way
threat to Australia
on breaking back along
the Japanese with footholds in the rest of
left
it
strategic concept,
'island-hopping' - an essential by-product of
overlapping zones of
garrisons to 'wither
men, ships and
on
MacArthur
air
however, even though
which was
control - which
the vine', included so
many
much
from which
to
bypassed Japanese
leave
landing operations that
its
demands
for
particularly aircraft threatened to exhaust the resources available. His
ultimate objective was Rabaul, Japan's strong place d'armes in
New
Britain, the largest island
of the Bismarck group; but his programme of advance would require
and
Solomon
entailed
it
to seize airstrips
would
Guinea,
to concentrate his efforts
the southern route towards the Philippines through the
and Bismarck archipelagos. His establish
for
New
forty-five additional air groups,
or about 1800
Casablanca conference of January 1943,
at that
five extra divisions
As was pointed out
aircraft.
at
the
time there were already 460,000 American
troops in the Pacific but only 380,000 in the European theatre, where preparations for the
Second Front had already begun with the invasion of North provoked
a
While the Japanese were locked Marines
Guadalcanal and
in
Africa.
MacArthur's demands
severe inter-service dispute in Washington which lasted until in
New
combat with the American and
Guinea, army and
air
March
1943.
Australian soldiers
and admirals
force generals
and
pitted
the interests of their rival services over a decision about the development of the Pacific war. At the
though
it
end of
April 1943 a plan finally emerged.
preserved the
modification. Nimitz was
MacArthur was
left in
It
now made
theatre
commander
the north.
flank. In short,
New
for the
it
included
whole
a significant
Pacific,
and, while
charge of the South-West Pacific Area, Admiral William Halsey was
entrusted with operations in the South Pacific which
MacArthur's
was codenamed Cartwheel and,
of the agreement of 2 July 1942,
spirit
MacArthur was
to
would include an advance on
envelop Rabaul from the south, Halsey from
Guinea and the southern Bismarcks were to be the former's
responsibility,
Once MacArthur had taken the north shore of New Guinea and the hinterland of New Britain, on which Rabaul stood, and Halsey had advanced along the Solomons chain to Bougainville, they would descend on Rabaul by pincer movement. the
Solomons the
latter's.
While the Joint Chiefs of Pacific Military
forced
on
Conference
in
Staff
and
their service subordinates
to the strategic defensive in the southern Pacific,
reorganising
their
garrisons
commander was General
were conducting
Washington, the Japanese, acutely aware
there
to
withstand
Hitoshi Imamura,
the
this
had been
were busy reinforcing and
expected
assault.
whose headquarters were
297
that they
at
The
overall
Rabaul; under his
THE WAR
During the operations crew of a
75-mm
gun
to isolate
as
it
IN
Rabaul
fires
THE PACIFIC
December 1943 a
in
on Japanese positions in
Cape
command was
the Seventeenth
decided to add to
this a
General Hatazo Adachi,
new
Army
tropical
New
downpour drenches
commanding
Gloucester.
in the
Solomons. Imperial headquarters
the Eighteenth Army, brought first at
Adachi's headquarters, then took ship for aircraft,
the
Britain in the fight to secure
army, the Eighteenth, to defend northern
from Korea and north China. Landing
was intercepted by American
1941-1943
its
which
New
two new
Rabaul, one of the divisions, the
new
station at Lae in
inflicted
on
it
the
first
New
Guinea.
now
Guinea. divisions
51st,
with
En route
of two spectacular
it
aerial
successes achieved that spring. In
Kenney,
army
August 1942, MacArthur had been given
who had wrought
pilots
a revolution in the
a
new
USAAF's
had reported numerous successes
298
air
commander, General George
anti-ship tactics. Previously,
though
against the Japanese navy, after-action
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS
had revealed
analysis
that the
altitude lay at the root
of the
low
at
level
failure,
he trained
was
it
first
all
A
air
it
at
pilots to attack
When
left
the 51st Division
Rabaul for
it
again,
a
hundred medium-range
skimmed
in at sea level,
escaped
high altitude to deal with the expected Fortresses
of the Bismarck Sea was
a
material victory. Next
significant
month
strength was the long-range, twin-engined Lightning fighter, the
its
was no match
for strategic strikes against a
medium-range bomber
force achieved a psychological victory of perhaps even greater importance.
recent addition to
P-38. Since
their
the transports and four of the eight destroyer escorts.
Battle
MacArthur's
his
Next day, however,
ship.
and Australian Beaufighters found
the attention of the Zeros patrolling
The
Kenney transformed
at all.
intercepted by Flying Fortresses employing the old high-
which sank only one
level technique,
and sank
very few targets
hit
USAAF's chosen method of precision bombing from high
with guns and fragmentation bombs.
Lae on 2 March 1943
B-25s, A-20s
had
that they
methods. Recognising
Zero
for the
in dogfighting, the
major formations of Japanese
Lightning was chiefly reserved
aircraft,
diving against
them from
high altitude. The P-38 became an object of terror and loathing, and the sound of
engines soon
became
familiar to Japanese
airmen
in the
South
Pacific.
Yamamoto assembled
reverse the success that the Lightnings and B-25s were achieving, the largest available force of his its
own
aircraft
and committed them
its
In an effort to
and
against Guadalcanal
offshore island of Tulagi in early April 1943. This 'I-Go' operation, flown in early April,
failed in
its
object,
which was
differently. Like the
sunk ships which had
Yamamoto was
to sink as
much
shipping
American Flying Fortress
as possible,
but the pilots reported
pilots previously, they believed they
had
not been touched except by the waterspouts of their bombs.
in fact
nevertheless convinced and decided to
visit his
men
to
encourage them to
further efforts.
Imprudently, notice of his intended
arrival
was circulated
from Rabaul by cipher, which the American cryptographers Nimitz decided to
'try
drop-tanks, to give
them
morning of aircraft
to get him'.
18 April, as
A squadron of
was destroyed with
of 20
a burst
Yamamoto's ashes were buried great dual drive
up the Solomons and
in
Army
Harbor quickly broke.
ambush
flight
required, and
on the
the airfield of Kahili in Bougainville, his
mm cannon
fire
and
Tokyo on 5 June.
New
to the Eighth Area
Pearl
Lightnings was hastily equipped with
the extra range a successful
Yamamoto approached
at
fell
burning into the jungle.
Later in the
month began
Guinea towards Rabaul which
it
the
had been one
of the purposes of the T-Go' operation to check. At the end of June, Woodlark and the other Trobriand islands - the primitive inhabitants -
the
New
northern
Guinea
New
'bird'. In
Guinea
latter
the focus of a famous ethnographic enquiry
were captured, thus securing the seaward approaches
'tail'
its
of
June also an amphibious hook was made towards Lae on the
coast;
it
fell
on
16
September and the Americans then moved on
on 26 December 1943; a subsidiary landing was on 15 December.
closer to Rabaul,
299
via
New Britain, which they made on New Britain at Arawe,
Finschhafen to seize Saidor, opposite Cape Gloucester on assaulted
among
to the
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
CLOSING THE TRAP
1941-1943
ON RABAUL
Key Allied advance
Operation Cartwheel
^
^^
Kavieng
SOLOMON ISLANDS
NEW G^tWEl
Rabaul
Japanese
^L
Seventeenth SHyakutake)
^Japanese
yM
papua
Army
Eighteenth
(Ada< *<*+
/
Port Morseby
New Hanover
NEW, IRELAND
Isolate*! Japanese air
and'naval
tilt
endtof
b.
Guadalcanal
(
SOUTH-WEST PACIFIC AREA
.
Army
SOUTH
I.
PACIFIC
(MacArthur)
AREA
war
(Halsey)
AUSTRALIA
-o
Buka
Japanese Eighth
SJ>Bonis
PACIFIC
Bougainville
OCEAN
•
# Tenekau
SOLOMON ISLANDS -Treasury
ls^}r-£^>o
Cb
'
.„
X^V Santa
_—
Isabe
^^^ Mid-1943 Port Moresby
nstobX^
End 1942
Allied attacks
Allied forces in the Pacific South
major Japanese base
in the
and South-West command areas pinch out Rabaul, the
Solomons. Rabaul was successfully the vine', by the end of
isolated,
and
left
'to
wither on
March 1944.
Meanwhile Halsey had been keeping pace with MacArthur in his own advance along Solomons chain. The Russell islands next to Guadalcanal had been taken in February, the New Georgia group in June and July and Vella Lavella in August. The Japanese attempted both land and sea counter-offensives at New Georgia and Vella Lavella but were the
unsuccessful. By October 1943 Halsey was ready to assault Bougainville, the westernmost
and
largest
of the islands
in the
Solomons, and only 200 miles from Rabaul
narrowest sea crossing. The landings were preceded by to
a fierce
but unsuccessful
at
the
air battle
check the American advance; the plan, codenamed 'RO' by the Japanese, was devised
by Admiral Mineichi Koga,
Combined
Fleet.
As soon
who had
as the battle
succeeded Yamamoto
as
commander of
was over, Halsey launched an amphibious
300
assault
the
on
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS
the small Treasury Islands off Bougainville's southern coast
Empress Augusta Bay on
assault at
two
1 November. Koga sent oppose the landings - hoping, as off Savo
light cruisers to
Guadalcanal, to
unsupported in aircraft
pincers
now
The
carriers
21
Bougainville;
Island in the Battle of
damage on the American fleet - and twice forced Halsey against them. However, the gamble paid off; the Japanese lost
to risk
inflict
to the Americans' twelve)
(fifty-five
By
cruisers.
on 27 October and then a main a strong force of two heavy and
and suffered damage
November, the 3rd Marine and 37th Divisions were
from
to three of their
firmly established
advance up
there, in conjunction with MacArthur's
heavily
New
threatened to close about Rabaul.
opened up
threat to Rabaul
New
northern shore of
the prospect of a seaborne advance along the
Guinea from which MacArthur's and Halsey's forces might leap
towards the East Indian islands of the Moluccas and so towards the Philippines. Even the trap began to close about Rabaul, however, the character of the
was taking another
war
American navy's cherished
to the
proposed by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral King,
plan,
an advance towards the
for
Philippines through the central Pacific to assault the Caroline and Marshall Islands.
decision of 2 Jul)
which had
1942,
towards Rabaul, had been taken
allotted naval support to
when
resources after the losses suffered
the United States
at
still
for his drive
battleships.
of the Coral Sea
By the beginning
new
of 1943 American shipyards had begun to make good the gaps; by mid-1943 battleships - essential for ship-to-shore bombardment
carriers,
of both the
fleet
to provide
and
heavy
anti-aircraft
light classes,
Anglo-American Washington conference forthcoming invasion of Europe was the
in
preparation and support of
support for the carriers - and
had arrived or were promised
May
in
first
The
painfully rebuilding
in the victories
and no
carriers
MacArthur
Navy was
Harbor and
Pearl
and Midway. Then there had been few
amphibious landings and
as
in the Pacific
conference in January 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill
turn. At the Casablanca
and the Combined Chiefs of Staff had given assent
its
on
Guinea, the
in plenty.
new The
1943 had agreed that, as long as the
now
charge on the
rapidly expanding output
of Allied war material, the offensive against Japan could be extended.
On
20 July, therefore,
enlarging
on the
prepare
landing operation against Japanese conquests in the Gilberts and to plan for
a
spirit
subsequent landings
of
that decision, the Joint Chiefs
of
Staff authorised
in the Marshalls.
These were dramatic prospects. MacArthur's and Halsey's campaign Pacific,
though amphibious
Navy supported army, and
in character,
was
in
essence
far
by contrast, were of
main
island
a different order.
New
were
south
number over
great platforms
The
Georgia. Distances in the central
Between Tarawa
of the Philippines, stretched 2000 miles of sea.
the atolls of the central Pacific Halsey's islands
in the
land-sea advance.
taken was 150 miles between Buna and Salamua, the
longest by Halsey 100 miles from Guadalcanal to
the
a traditional
vice versa, in a series of leaps comparatively short in span.
longest leap that MacArthur had so
Pacific,
Nimitz to
a
in the Gilberts It
was not
and Luzon,
entirely
empty:
thousand. However, while MacArthur's and
of dry land,
301
New
Guinea being almost
as large as
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
1941-1943
Alaska and twice the size of France, the Pacific atolls were
and bearing
coral surrounding a lagoon
high-water mark. There had been
a
many campaigns
as
Nimitz
would
separated that they
What made the Pacific Fleet
was no longer
now
contemplated -
Pearl
of sand and shelves of
spits
MacArthur's in previous centuries,
inland sea. There had never been a
between stepping-stones so
a giant's leap
Navy
stretch the United States
to breaking-point.
the central Pacific offensive a feasible undertaking was the transformation
had undergone
in the
two
years since the catastrophe
were new,
faster
enemy
and stronger by
Pearl Harbor.
at
in battering duels at 20,000 yards.
far
than those which
now formed
on
of ship:
the
the
were
converted
its
which a
new
of the
carriers
light
class,
Even
bottom of
Its carriers,
it.
cutting edge,
its
Independence
lay
still
Harbor or those which had been raised and refurbished from breed
It
of slow, old, heavy-gun platforms
a 'battle-wagon' navy, a Jutland-style train
dedicated to finding and fighting the battleships
like
own
notably in the Mediterranean and in Japan's
campaign such
mere
few palm groves which barely found roots above
from
fast
embarked fifty aircraft and could manoeuvre at over 30 knots; the new Essexcarriers were equally fast, class fleet embarked a hundred aircraft and were cruisers,
heavily
armed with
20-mm
anti-aircraft
were
there
and 40- and
5-inch
guns. By October 1943
Essex-class carriers at Pearl
six
Harbor, ready to lead Nimitz's Pacific Fleet into battle; they
were
to
form
'fast
carrier task
which would protect the newly built 'attack transports' and their destroyer,
forces', fast
cruiser
and battleship escorts
landings
on
First
attack
of the
were
in nine atoll
the approach to the Philippines. atolls
Makin
to
and
be taken under
Tarawa
Gilberts, British islands lying at the
in
the
extreme
edge of Japan's defensive perimeter. Makin, lightly
A
laden transport in the Pacific, a tiny fraction of
the massive logistical effort required the Allied drive.
It
war economy, with
was a its
to
sustain
task for which the
US
almost limitless potential,
was superbly equipped.
quickly
garrisoned
by
when Admiral
the
Japanese,
Charles
fell
Pownall's
Task Force 30 landed Marines and army units
November 1943. Tarawa was matter. More heavily garrisoned on
21
Japanese),
it
was
also
reef over which the
armoured
302
a different
(by 5000
surrounded by
a
high
new Marine amphibious
vehicles (amphtracs) passed easily
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS
but on which the landing
craft in
The Marines suffered very heavy
which most of the
assault force
casualties getting ashore
on
21
themselves pinned beneath beach obstacles which offered the landed; by nightfall 500 were dead and 1000
guns
failed to destroy the
when
killed.
It
was not
were embarked
wounded. Even
direct hits
when
until the following day,
rear, that
a
second force landed with tanks on
headway was made - but
how
circumstances. Tarawa was the battle which taught the Marine Corps
even
for the
from battleship
Japanese strongpoints, whose defenders ceased resistance only
an undefended beach and attacked from the
struggle
stuck.
November and then found only cover. Some 5000 men
in barbaric
ferocious the
smallest Japanese-held island could be. Robert Sherrod, a
war
correspondent, recorded:
TNT into a Two more Marines scaled the seawall [with a flamethrower]. As of TNT boomed inside the pillbox, causing smoke and dust to billow
A Marine jumped
over the seawall and began throwing blocks of
coconut-log pillbox.
another charge
out, a khaki-clad figure ran out for
him, caught him in
its
the Jap flared
up
cartridge belt
exploded
from the side entrance. The flame thrower, waiting
withering flame of intense
like a piece
of celluloid.
for a full sixty
fire.
He was dead
seconds
after
As soon
as
it
touched him
instantly but the bullets in his
he had been charred almost
to
nothingness.
Despite such evidence of the Marines' material superiority - or perhaps, in desper-
because of it - during the night the Japanese
made a 'death charge', as they had done on to the American guns; next morning the bodies of 325 were found in an area a few hundred yards square. At noon the battle was over: 1000 Marines were dead and 2000 wounded; almost all the Japanese had perished. To spare their men such horrors in the next fight, commanders initiated a crash building programme of amphation,
on
the Aleutians, and ran
earmarked naval vessels to
tracs,
bombardment and
co-ordinate
it
act as specialised
command
ships to control air
and sea
with the landings, and had exact copies of the Tarawa
defences built so that instructors could practise against them and train Marines in the best
methods of overcoming them. Tarawa had another immediate and positive Pacific
campaign. Because the Japanese
fleet
effect
on the development of the
had not intervened or even shown
its
central face in
the area, and because Japanese land-based aircraft from other islands had also not interfered,
Nimitz concluded that
to 'wither
on the
vine'
it
would be
and press forward
to the
westernmost
Eniwetok. Kwajalein was so heavily pounded by ships and
Overleaf:
enemy
US Marines
resistance,
race for cover at
of the other Marshalls
safe to leave the garrisons in the
group, Kwajalein and
aircraft
before the Marines
Tarawa, November 1943. The almost
and the heavy casualties incurred
in taking the atoll,
prompted
rethink of the Marine Corps' amphibious equipment and tactics.
303
suicidal a
major
3
*£-**
m
\*
\K i
Kb
*
^ m£*m :
«_
^^^Bp^fc
WJ£L
»
~
^PSJ^^^^B
1
Hk;
Sfll^i
9P
9
L
b
|9
flk
*Jks* ?*^
*
>
-rS
feufe
^^^H
THE WAR
landed on
IN
THE PACIFIC
February 1944 that they secured
1
1941-1943
northern
its
islets in
two
days,
7th Division took the southern atoll in four days, neither incurring heavy
and the army's loss.
As
a pre-
liminary to the invasion of Eniwetok and to complete the neutralisation of Japanese
power
in the region,
ofTruk,
up
forward anchorage of the Japanese Combined
a
400
to
Nimitz decided to launch Task Force 58 against the more remote
Task Force 58 was
aircraft.
Fleet,
room
with
to
accommodate
each with three
really four separate task forces,
air-
atoll
which between them embarked 650
car-
aircraft. In a high-speed assault on Truk on commander, Vice-Admiral Marc Mitscher, mounted thirty raids, each more powerful than either of the Japanese strikes on Pearl Harbor, destroyed 275 aircraft and left 39 merchantmen and warships sinking. The raid established Mitscher's reputation as the
riers
February,
its
master of fast carrier operations. it
took
fall
ensured
and
New
Guam were
by
fell
21 February,
among which
in
was too slow,
and
neutralised by air attack,
Guinea by
August 1943
that
was agreed
it
that the projected
MacArthur should advance along the northern coast of
of amphibious hooks. The Cairo conference in November, which
a series
approved Nimitz's offensive into the Marshalls, appeared
downgrade
his
campaign.
When
to the rear
left far
which appeared
by
a
his staff
when
at
the chance.
were secured and MacArthur
surprised
on 22
at
Between 29 February and
once decided
New
tegic
was not
programme
Guinea
and,
'bird', as a
Wadke and
The
until the following
on 30
to
month
July, seize the
make
Thence MacArthur
New
Biak off the north-west coast of
that
18
his longest
Guinea's north coast. There the
Guinea. The Japanese fought so hard for Biak that the battle was it
to
April, uncharacteristically fled in panic.
drove forward throughout May, to
of June and
MacArthur
descent north of New Guinea on the Admiralty Islands,
leap yet - 580 miles - to Hollandia, halfway along
Japanese,
to
reported in February that they believed Rabaul
undefended, he leapt
largely
the islands
pace of pro-
Rabaul was not to be attacked but to be
that
specifically
March 1944
the large
Guinea, MacArthur was accelerating the pace of his advance. At the Anglo-
gress towards the Philippines
could be
though
obvious landing places. Nimitz was in a hurry. Far to the
American Quebec conference
New
Eniwetok
that
of the Marshalls opened the way to the Marianas,
islands of Saipan
south, in
also
It
days of fighting to overcome the suicidal Japanese defence.
five
The
17-18
in progress at the
still
MacArthur could complete
Vogelkop peninsula,
in the 'head'
end
his stra-
of the
New
departure-point for his return to the Philippines.
of MacArthur's offensive
intensification
in the
south had an unintended, indirect
but crucial effect on the conduct of the central Pacific campaign. So alarmed were the
Japanese by the landing
Combined
including the
dence
that
at
Biak that they determined to
new
giant battleships Yamato
and
it
Musashi,
were already
by concentrating the
end of May at sea.
Then
its
ships,
clear evi-
Nimitz was preparing to spring forward from the Marshalls to the Marianas and
approach the Philippines obliged the Japanese Fl
call a halt to
Fleet in East Indies waters to recapture the island; at the
prepared to Before
it
move
could
to cancel the operation,
and the Combined
to the central Pacific to fight a decisive battle in great waters.
arrive, Nimitz's
Marines and the army's 27th Division had debarked
306
at
THE WAR FOR THE ISLANDS
Saipan in the Marianas. Saipan was a large island with a garrison of 32,000 men; the
American operation
against
older battleships kept up the craft.
fired
2400 eight
large also.
bombardment during
in 1943 in the
while the
on
first
air-
day, by far the largest force
amphibious operation, and equivalent
in size to those
debarked
Mediterranean. However, the Japanese defenders resisted fiercely and mean-
First
ing to deliver
Seven battleships
the landing, strongly supported by
Over 20,000 American troops were put ashore on the
yet delivered in a Pacific
Fish,
was proportionately
zone before the troops touched down on 15 June, and
it
16-inch shells into the landing
Mobile Fleet - the strike against
its
patrol off the Philippines,
Mitscher warning.
He
at
prepared to mount an
element of the Combined Fleet - was approach-
carrier
Task Force
saw
once turned
58. Fortunately the
it
American submarine
clearing the San Bernardino strait
Flying
and gave
to the attack, with fifteen carriers against nine,
and
event the Japanese established Mitscher's
aerial offensive. In the
position before he did theirs; but because of the superiority of his radar, fighter control
now
and
aircraft
- the
new
Hellcat
Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's attacks the guns of the ships. 19 June, 243 out
and
in the
kaku
When
was
this 'Great
of 373 Japanese
faster
Taiho,
This was not the
four of
Marianas Turkey Shoot' was over on the evening of
aircraft
had been shot down,
Ozawa's flagship and the
end of the
for the loss
of 29 American;
The
Battle
bombs and damaged two
of the Philippine Sea,
(the Japanese
named
it
largest carrier in the
Japanese navy.
Next day Task Force 58 found the
affair.
Fleet refuelling, sank the carrier Hiyo with
Americans
all
dogfighting above the carriers or against
course of the action American submarines torpedoed and sank the veteran Sho-
and the new
cruisers.
and better armed than the Zero -
failed, either in
as the
First
others and
two days of action were
Mobile
two heavy
called
by the
the 'A-Go' offensive), therefore halved the operational
strength of the Japanese carrier force, reduced
its
aircraft strength
by two-thirds - perhaps
an even more damaging blow, since pilots emerged very slowly from the Japanese training
system - and
left
Task Force 58 almost
Disaster at sea for the Japanese
on
intact.
was followed by
Saipan, the defenders began to run out of
surrender;
among
the Japanese
on the
island
disaster
on
land. After a bitter fight
ammunition and chose
were 22,000
civilians,
suicide rather than
of whom
ber are alleged to have joined the survivors of the 30,000 combatants in
was declared secured on 9
a large
killing
num-
themselves
The neighbouring island of Tinian, where resistance was much lighter, fell on 1 August and Guam, whose garrison was battered into defeat despite its desperate resistance by an overwhelming American bombardment, on 11 August. All the territory that the Americans then coveted in the Marianas was theirs. From it their new bomber, the B-29 Superfortress, would be able to reach out to attack the home islands directly. Even more important, from the Marianas the Pacific rather than capitulate. Saipan
Fleet could begin preparing the assault
on the northern
July.
islands of the Philippines,
whose
southern islands were also threatened by MacArthur's advance on the East Indies.
307
— PART — IV
THE WAR IN THE WEST 1943-1945
^
1
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1943-1945
CHURCHILL'S STRATEGIC
DILEMMA The coming
of the
had Dunkirk; invasion,
won
after
after the
when,
of France;
seventeen
after
news of
the
at
we
after the horrible
Pearl Harbor. 'Yes, after
episode of Oran;
after the threat
from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people;
the deadly struggle of the U-boat war - the
breadth;
Churchill's
of defeat had been replaced by the certainty of victory. 'So
he recalled reflecting
all!'
fall
apart
war had changed the dimensions of Winston
Pacific
strategy. Intimations
first
months of lonely
responsibility in dire stress.
We
The news of the Japanese
had
won
attack
on
Battle
of the
fighting
Atlantic,
of
after
gained by a hand's
and nineteen months of
my
the war.'
Pearl Harbor, like that of the victory of Alamein,
May 1943 and the safe landing of on D-Day, was one of the high points of Churchill's war. Many low
the withdrawal of Donitz's U-boats from the Atlantic in the liberation armies
points awaited, including the loss of the 'In all fall
the war
I
never received
a
more
Prince of
and Repulse off the coast of Malaya - the surrender of Singapore and the
Wales
direct shock'
of Tobruk. After Pearl Harbor, however, Churchill never doubted that the Western
Alliance
would
defeat
Hitler
and subsequently Japan. Perhaps the sentences of
magnificent victory broadcast of 8
evening of 7 December
May
1945 were already framing themselves
on
his
the
1941.
The conduct of no war
Previous page: B-17 bombers
is
of the
ever simple, however, and the conduct of any coalition war
US
the escorting
Eighth Air Force over Germany. Note the vapour
P-47 Thunderbolt
310
fighters.
trails of
CHURCHILL'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
is
always unusually
The
difficult.
anti-Axis coalition of the
Second World War,
as Hitler
constantly consoled himself and his entourage by emphasising, was almost unmanageably
Two
disparate.
of international
preached the
common
bound by
freely
a pact
also the aims
difficult, in
December
common
strategy involving not
Winston Churchill could not
1941,
crisis
direct military help that either
essential
equipment
had only
Russian
convoys began
friend', Churchill
that Britain
just
begun
to Russia
on generous terms
opening of
repeat and heighten that
chance of
a
offer,
Atlantic Charter
and
as a result
in September. Stalin,
Second Front.
a
Britain
survival while they calculated
campaign of conquest
assured Stalin that every
demand first made demand throughout the
Second Front,
a
simplified
emerge from two decades of
to
1941, acting
During the meeting
Newfoundland, which produced the and Roosevelt reinforced the
itself
on the
principle that
weapon and item of
could spare would be sent to Russia, and the north
once.
at
How
the gates of Moscow, there was
at
disarmament. At the instant of the German attack in June
my
merely the
difficult.
of the Western powers could lend to Russia. Britain was
scarcely armed; the United States
is
until
foresee.
which gripped the Soviet Union
With the German army
strategic choice.
'my enemy's enemy
system but
capitalist
of making war was therefore destined to be
At the outset the gravity of the
Anglo-American
which not only
a Marxist state
of non-aggression and economic co-operation
enemy. The co-ordination of a
means but
still
had been driven by the force of events
and desirable downfall of the
inevitable, necessary
June 1941 had been
no
relations,
unexpected and unsought co-belligerency with
into an
to the
democracies, united by language but divided by profoundly
capitalist
different philosophies
in the east
United
at
Placentia
States
Bay,
Lend-Lease was extended
however, wanted nothing to Churchill
on
19 July,
less
than the
and he was to
next three years. In 1941 there was
and the United
how
August
in
on democratic freedoms, Churchill
States
no
could only hope for Russia's
best they could together distract Hitler
and weaken the Wehrmacht
at
from
his
the periphery of the
German empire. Calculating the location and intensity of thrusts
was
preoccupy Churchill during the next two
to
campaign,
in
the
at
years.
Western Desert, had triumphed
the periphery of Hitler's empire
He was
already running
one such
in another - the destruction of
Mussolini's empire in East Africa - and, though he had failed in a third, the intervention in
Greece, he retained the
mind;
open less
after
a
power
America's entry
it
Norway was
to strike again.
could be only
a
a
sector he kept constantly in
matter of time before they did indeed jointly
Second Front. Had Germany been America's only enemy, there might have been
delay in opening a Second Front directly against the Atlantic Wall that Hitler was
building on the north coast of France. However, for most Americans, Japan was the
which deserved the more rapid
retribution.
The United
States Navy,
enemy
which had been
granted primacy of command in the conduct of the Pacific war, was deeply committed to
making
its main effort in those opponent of equal calibre and
waters. In the Japanese navy, moreover, thirsted for victory over
311
it
it
recognised an
in a great fleet action;
many
THE WAR
American
THE WEST
IK
soldiers, including the celebrated
1943-1945
MacArthur, shared the navy's desire to
with the Japanese, to take revenge for the defeats
and
at
Wake,
Guam and
settle
in the Philippines,
on Tokyo.
to drive
Throughout the
year of the Pacific war, therefore, Churchill found himself in an
first
Though no longer oppressed by
unfamiliar situation.
the fear of defeat, he was equally
no
longer overlord of his country's strategy. Because Britain could win only in concert with
bend
the United States, he had to
House and
wishes of strategy-makers
his will to the
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Roosevelt was
Churchill's lead. General Marshall
and Admiral King were
not.
in the
King was interested
believed the Second Front should be
mounted on
the shortest route into
Germany and
and therefore was deeply suspicious of all attempts
the earliest possible date,
or divert effort away from
to
commitment. 'Remember
on my
that
breast there are
Anthony
the medals of the Dardanelles, Antwerp, Dakar and Greece,' he exclaimed to 5 July 1941, in a reference to four disastrous
and Second World Wars which he had directed.
commit
the Americans to
fighting in the Pacific
home
base.
and
was
very well, as 1942
all
army
contemplate wider amphibious leaps
to
First
drew on,
for
divisions to island
in 1943. Their
campaign
by thousands of miles of ocean from
their
Front would commit the whole of the British and American
expeditionary forces, not easily to be replaced
of
It
amphibious operations of the
the Marine Corps and a handful of
against tiny garrisons separated
A Second
at
postpone
this.
Churchill shrank from such a
was fought
in the
exclusion of all other theatres. Marshall remained committed to Europe but
Pacific to the
Eden on
White
inclined to follow
still
to an assault
if lost,
on the
fortified frontier
continent within which stood an army of 300 divisions and a war-making machine
a
without equivalent in the world. Throughout the course of 1942, therefore, Churchill
found himself treading an increasingly narrow and slippery path. dared not play
conclude
down
Britain's
that their strength
American troops sent overseas
commitment,
lest
commitment
to the
be better deployed
on the
in 1942);
he found himself swept up
in
Second Front,
in the Pacific
other,
(as
the
one hand, he the Americans
lest
were
a
majority of
he dared not play up
Britain's
an American rush to invade the continent
He had
before the chance of success had ripened.
On
agreed with Roosevelt
at their
meeting
months before Pearl Harbor, that if the United States entered the war democracies' joint strategy would be 'Germany First'; in the eighteen months after
in Placentia Bay, four
the
Pearl
and
Harbor he dedicated
his fellow
quite
American
his efforts to
persuading Roosevelt, but particularly Marshall
generals, that Allied strategy should be
'Germany
First
- but not
yet.'
Temporising with military
men was
for Churchill a
dealt with generals and admirals - indeed with
commanders with
a readiness
which even
attention of his senior officers as an Fiihrer than Churchill
was
as
all
in
new
government -
Hitler thought
example of
experience. Thitherto he had
how much more
Prime Minister. 'Between 1939 and
312
as
an autocrat, sacking
extreme and brought to the reasonable he was as
1943,' the official historian
CHURCHILL'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
of the Royal Navy observed, 'there was not one admiral in an important sea
whom
Churchill
.
.
.
command
in
Middle
East;
.
fourteen months later he dismissed his replacement, Auchinleck, both
peremptory fashion; he
endorsed the dismissals of three commanders of the Eighth
also
Army, Cunningham, Leese and
He was
Ritchie.
and demanding with those he
difficult
Alan Brooke, his chief of
in office, particularly
staff,
with
whom
throughout the war, but also with Montgomery, though rebuking
Only General
he was that
prima donna was to
Harold Alexander could do no wrong
repayment
his
famous courage and chivalrous manner excused him from reproach even
in kind.
conduct of the campaign
Sir
in Italy in 1944, for
left
in daily contact
risk
dilatory
.
command
His dismissals of generals are notorious. In June 1941 he dismissed Wavell from in the
.
did not attempt to have relieved - and in several cases he succeeded.
in his eyes:
which the blame attached
to
for the
no one
else.
Churchill could not treat the Americans thus, least of all King or Marshall. King was as
tough
as leather;
Roosevelt
(as
Marshall
seemed
impassive as a marble statue and intimidated even
as
he intended - Marshall had made
President's jokes). As a guest
was not merely
a resolution
never to laugh
at
any of the
at
the table of American Lend-Lease largesse, moreover,
it
had to dissimulate, reason and on his own ground, he would have demanded and dictated. The product of American war industry would have gone elsewhere - as landing ships and craft, which belonged to Admiral King's empire, did during 1942-3 - if he had not succeeded in for diplomatic reasons that Churchill
prevaricate where,
falsely
persuading Marshall during 1942 that the British
American Joint Chiefs of
launch
Staff to
Churchill's exercise in inter-allied
approach from Staff
own
his
that
Committee
which he used
in England.
staff officers
By
in
schemes or dissuade him from
drown
Second Front
at
when
moment.
the earliest possible
be based on an
entirely different
his cabinet
stroke of perception, he found
it
and Chiefs of
in the
methods
they wished to delay one of his favoured
plan they judged impracticable - to agree in principle
a
it
would succeed only
if
it
was launched
such overwhelming force, under such devastating bombardment from the sea and
that the Atlantic
Wall and
its
at
the idea in a sea of reasoned objection.
Churchill feared the Second Front because in
to
Cabinet was as eager as the
managing and manipulating
a brilliant
used against him
the outset and then to
a
diplomacy had
War
defenders would be crushed by the impact; and he
knew
air,
that
would be available in 1942. In December 1941 he visited the Arcadia conference, where for the first time the British and Americans
neither the force nor the support
Washington
for
met
combatants to agree
strategic aims.
was
own
as joint
judged
that Marshall
the Mediterranean (the
hostile to his
one sector
disposed towards maintaining
ABDA)
for
which he
outcome of Chiefs of
actually
a
in
which the
composed of
the tone of the meeting Churchill
British
on Germany
in
had found success) but favourably
strong Allied military presence in the Pacific (the
proposed
ill-fated
commander. The best establishment of a Combined
a British general, Wavell, as
the Arcadia conference was that
Staff,
From
inclination to sustain pressure
it
led to the
the British Chiefs of Staff and the American Joint Chiefs of
313
NORWAY
Key Strategic &':'!& '
§5S^$$$:
BHM "i
in
Germany
Primary
Secondary General
«^™»
Bombing Targets
limits of daylight
bomber operations
June 1943
Feb 1944
«" June 1944
GREAT BRITAIN
SPAIN
ALLIED OPTIONS IN
EUROPE, SUMMER
SOUTHERN
1944,
AND THE
COMBINED BOMBEROFFENSIVE Key 1
Operation Overlord agreed as the main Allied
effort
2 Operation Anvil, principally favoured by the Americans to
complement
the
'hammer' of Overlord
3 Operation Diadem, an offensive against the German
Winter Line, decoying Axis
forces before Overlord
4 The 'Vienna Option', favoured by thrust in Italy
and a
5 Russian front
line,
drive for
Churchill, a renewed
Vienna
22 June 1944
THE WAR
Staff;
THE WEST
IK
the worst, in a paradoxical sense, was that
of Churchill and Roosevelt's private 'German)'
London German
it
1943-1945
ensured American military endorsement
First'
agreement and so brought Marshall
in April 1942 ardent to agree a timetable. Churchill
to
and Alan Brooke, depressed by
successes in the desert and pessimistic about Russia's ability to survive the
fall
of
the Crimea and the Donetz basin, temporised to the best of their ability. By reasoned
argument they talked
down
Marshall's support for Operation
of France in 1942; by more devious means they
American build-up of forces insistence, eloquent flow
in Britain.
won
Sledgehammer, an invasion
support for Bolero, the continuing
Despite 'winning charm, cold persuasion, rude
of language, flashes of anger and sentiment close to
Churchill failed to engage Marshall's enthusiasm for the operation later to be
tears',
known
as
Torch, an invasion of North Africa. Marshall's 'reiteration, pressure and determination'
commited both
sides to
Roundup,
a
Second Front
in 1943.
Churchill and the Americans Churchill had
when he
conceded much ground
visited
and Allied
Washington
in June.
to Marshall in April, but
he
won some
of
it
back
Because of the prevailing disparity between German
strengths, a cross-Channel invasion in 1942
catastrophe, and he rightly
—
remained opposed
to
would
certainly have
ended
in
any such undertaking. By reasoned
argument he made Sledgehammer look naively reckless and so engaged Roosevelt's interest in
Torch
(at
that
time
codenamed Gymnast).
brought large numbers of American troops to
Churchill argued that,
Britain, Roosevelt's electors
if
Bolero
would expect
them to be employed. Since they could not take part in a Second Front in 1942, why not use them in an interim operation in North Africa before the moment for Roundup came about in 1943? Roosevelt was half persuaded and in July sent Marshall to London again to thrash the matter out. Marshall was
now
in a
headstrong mood. British resistance to an
Second Front had so incensed him that he had considered throwing his weight behind King's and MacArthur's commitment to the Pacific. Although that was only a early
bargaining
Marshall to
manoeuvre on Marshall's part, King meant business and as he accompanied London on 16 July Churchill found the next four days were devoted to perhaps
the hardest-fought strategic debate in the war. It
produced deadlock, with the American Joint Chiefs of Staff demanding the Second War Cabinet refusing to relent. The two
Front that year and the British Chiefs of Staff and
sides agreed to lay their cases before Roosevelt, thus confronting the President with a
requirement for
a decision
of
a sort
he did not usually
take; in straightforward military
matters he normally allowed himself to be guided by Marshall. Marshall ought therefore to
have carried the day. Churchill, however, had got round
much doubt
in
the President's
subsequently reinforced
it
mind during
his flank.
his visit to
Not only had he planted in June. He had
Washington
through the unofficial channel of communication provided by
the comings-and-goings of Roosevelt's private emissary, Harry Hopkins. Hopkins had
316
CHURCHILL'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
had reservations about
originally
won
he had been
Marshall's;
by Churchill, cabinet and Chiefs of
now
Roosevelt
excluded
were almost
that
this
Lobbied by Churchill and Hopkins,
Staff together.
decided to present his Joint Chiefs of Staff with
North African landing, Roosevelt
then and there
range of choices which
a
endorsed
the event
(in
When
attractive.
enthusiastically
30 October
set the target date for
as severe as
concerted diplomatic offensive waged
a
Second Front and among which Torch was the most
a
serled for
wholeheartedness
British
round, however, by
Marshall
and
his choice
was launched on 8
it
November).
—
—
The Casablanca Conference
Churchill had therefore got his way. As he realised
only an intermediate one.
He was
still
committed
too well, however, his victory was
all
Second Front
to a
in 1943 and, unless
German strength declined or Allied strength increased by an improbable degree, he also knew that he would have to find a way of extricating Britain from that commitment in the coming year. For the moment the heat was off; but he knew the temperature of debate would shortly rise again, all the more so because for the first time since 1940 operations had begun to run the Allies' way. Though the Wehrmacht was driving deep into southern Russia, the Japanese
had nevertheless been checked and,
'Happy Time' off the American
Rommel on
held
against
Germany. This run of success was
and
Churchill's
first
in the
same month
to continue.
choice for
command
their chiefs
of staff met again
at
made at
army had
gathering weight
October General Bernard
In
of the Eighth
Army was surrounded
Paulus's Sixth
and
to an end, the desert
bombing campaign was
of Alamein, in November the Anglo-American army
Churchill, Roosevelt
Midway, defeated, the U-boats'
at
had been brought
the border of Egypt and the
Montgomery - not Battle
east coast
its
Army
-
won
the
landing in North Africa
Stalingrad.
Casablanca,
By the time
on ground
just
that
won
by Eisenhower, the weakening of Germany which Churchill had conceded would be
grounds
for launching the
Moreover, since
last
Second Front
in 1943
August and there had also given hostages to in
was
a fact.
meeting Roosevelt and Marshall, he had been Stalin,
not exactly
1943 but a strong indication that an Anglo-American
London
the previous July.
school' were to be defeated - and despite
MacArthur's
Europe,
at
command now
about 350,000
in
equalled the
He
as
difficult
realised that
'Germany
First'
to
Moscow
the
if
meeting for
a
King and the
number of
Britain held
in
good
number under Eisenhower's command
each theatre - he would have to enthuse Marshall for
convincing him that to
its
'Pacific
troops under
'follow-on' "operation to Torch, preferably the invasion of Sicily; yet he could
he succeeded
during
promise to invade France
army would. Casablanca, the
conference codenamed Symbol, therefore proved almost Churchill as that in
a
Sicily
would not obstruct
promise of the previous
year.
problem, since Churchill could not frankly reveal to
317
It
a
do so only
Second Front and
in
a if
that
was an almost insoluble diplomatic
his allies his fears that a
cross-Channel
THE WAR
invasion might
still fail,
even
in 1943.
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
The
fact that
the
problem was solved,
of disagreement, was due almost exclusively to superior British party
centre,
a
had come prepared. They had brought equipped
fully
government machine taught
agreed
them
the
signals
so that
ship,
floating
operated
as
the cleverest service leader
The
communications
an extension of the
and service
of empire had
chiefs
on
Sir
who
have not
as
they went along. Finally, they were
Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff and probably
and the Americans were
home
armies to proceed to
still
muddled
satisfied
Sicily as
which
either side, eventually devised a verbal formula
concede what everyone wanted. Since he knew what was
formula and went
days
position in anticipation of events; unlike the Americans, they did not
masters of words. Air Chief Marshall
to
own
in the administration
politicians, officials
have to thrash out their internal disagreements
seemed
their
the)-
London. Long experience
which await
pitfalls
common
a
in
after five
British diplomatic technique.
in theirs, the
- to repent
soon
in Churchill's
mind
Americans grasped too eagerly
at his
at leisure.
The statement permitted
the Torch
North African campaign was terminated. That
as the
was almost the only provision about which Churchill cared, since he understood
that
an
would preclude the launching of the Second Front in 1943. The Americans regarded the Sicily commitment as only one among many and persisted in the delusion that a Mediterranean strategy need not detract from the attack on the Atlantic Wall. It would take them nearly a year to discover that even their enormous and expanding war machine could not yield enough resources to sustain both commitments. involvement in
Sicily
Casablanca yielded other decisions of importance, including the proclamation,
at
would accept from Germany, Japan The Sicily decision, however, was the Americans would find it increasingly
Roosevelt's insistence, that the only terms the Allies
and
Italy
were those of 'unconditional surrender'.
crucial provision difficult to
ingenuity, 1943, the
modify was
and one, moreover, which the as 1943
unfolded. The course of events, rather than British diplomatic
to be the cause of that. At the Trident conference in
Americans arrived 'armed
to anticipate
Washington
in
May
and counter every imaginable argument
of the British and backed by ranks of experts whose briefcases bulged with studies and according to General Albert Wedemeyer of the US Army War Plans Division. Wedemeyer, who had been at Casablanca, summarised the American experience there: we came, we listened and we were conquered.' They were 'We lost our shirts determined not to lose again and would in future outdo the British at the game of preordination. Their detailed preparations ought to have won them the match at Trident, statistics',
.
.
.
but during the course of the conference Alexander signalled from Tunis that the Anglo-
American army was victorious and
that
its
soldiers
were 'masters of North
Africa's shores'.
This euphoric signal, and Churchill's skilful over-bargaining for an extension of the
Mediterranean campaign into the Balkans, persuaded the Americans to endorse the Sicilian
expedition as
determined
that they
a safer alternative.
The
Sicily
campaign began
in July,
and events there
should then give their agreement to the invasion of mainland
Marshall and his colleagues approached the Quadrant conference, held
318
at
Italy.
Quebec
in
CHURCHILL'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
down
August, in what he had laid
should be
'a
spirit
of winning': no further diversion
from the Second Front whatsoever. However, during the course of Quadrant news arrived from
Sicily
of
Italy's
impending
offer
Axis partners, and the prospect
mainland close to the purity
to
but
it
of surrender. This
first
outright defeat of
one of the
on
the Italian
offered of being able to establish a front
one of Germany's
frontiers,
undermined the Americans' commitment
of a Second Front strategy yet again. Eisenhower was authorised to launch the
operation, sketched in Italy;
it
was
to
at
Trident in Washington, to put an Anglo-American army ashore in
be limited to the south and
from the sector chosen
Second Front,
for the
The Quadrant decision was not
quite the
its
purpose was to divert German strength
now codenamed
end of Churchill's protracted
back the landing on the north coast of France until such time
succeed without grievous
loss.
Eisenhower's advance up the
than Marshall intended, before troops were
of France
via the
finally
Churchill could propose any diversion of force
at
all
own
difficulties in
felt
effort to
sure
on the
Italian
peninsula went further
occasion on which
last
from the Second Front. The
campaigning against Tito should have even
set
campaign, which ultimately came to serve Germany's purpose
better than that of the Allies. After Quadrant, they did quash diversify the
put
would
to take part in the invasion
dissuaded him from such notions. Nevertheless the Americans ought to have stricter limits
it
Balkan adventures, since not only
rightly set their face against
geography but the Wehrmacht's
he
as
Italian
withdrawn
southern route. Quadrant was, however, the
Americans had absolutely
Overlord.
Mediterranean
strategy. Thereafter
and Churchill could wriggle away from
it
no
it
was
to be
Churchill's efforts to
all
Overlord and only Overlord,
further. At Trident
he had agreed to the
appointment of a chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, charged to prepare the Overlord plan. At Quebec he had conceded that the Supreme Allied
be American. The irony was, however,
that as events
Commander
ever closer to biting the bullet Britain's teeth grew blunter. 'The problem
minuted
to his Chiefs of Staff
on
1
November
1943, 'no longer
between supply and requirements. Our manpower effort.
this
We
cannot add to the
total;
on the contrary
sense of decline, Churchill could
still
it
should
and American insistence drove him
is is
now
fully
is',
Churchill
one of closing
a
gap
mobilised for the war
already dwindling.' Oppressed by
not bring himself to
name
the date for an event
he accepted could no longer be postponed. Neither Roosevelt nor even the stony-faced Marshall as yet pressed Stalin,
whom
all
him
to face the inevitable. That
three were to
meet
at
Tehran
319
in
would be
November.
left
to the implacable
THE WAR
IN"
THE WEST
mM
18
THREE WARS
IN
AFRICA TheGerman World War came First
to Africa three days after the
outbreak in Europe
when
the
west coast colony of Togoland was invaded and swiftly occupied by British
and French forces from the Gold Coast and Senegal; the colonies, with the exception of
Vorbeck sustained
German
East Africa in
delay.
For
were brought under
a guerrilla resistance to the end,
soon afterwards. The Second World War, by that there
contrast,
was good reason: one
Kaiser's three other
which the redoubtable von Lettow-
result
came of
Allied control
to Africa piecemeal
Versailles
had been
and with
to transfer
sovereignty over Germany's former African colonies to Britain, France and South Africa by Italy, which had extensive African possessions on Red Sea coasts, was allied to Germany, nevertheless it did not enter the war against Britain and France, both also major colonial powers within the continent, until June 1940. Although Hitler retained a colonial governor-in-waiting on his ministerial staff, he had made no move in the meantime to extend his war-making southward across the Mediterranean. Indeed, until Italy declared for him, he had no means with which to
League of Nations mandate; and while the Mediterranean and
mount offensive operations no cause.
into Africa, and, unless Mussolini tried but failed there, he
Germany's defeat of France, lately part,
forces,
empire - the
Italy
played an ignominious and Johnny-come-
left
Vichy in control of the French empire
as well as the
and Lebanon and the
fringes
French
fleet at its
sailors in the process, after
Petain's hands, the resulting bitterness
ensured
320
moorings
its
at
great Armee d'Afrique in British into
Mers-el-Kebir
admirals had refused to
that the
French navy
of Mussolini's
and Morocco. Further, when the armistice provoked the
and crippling the French main
1940, killing 1300
for laurels in Africa. Petain's
and therefore neutralised the French forces on the
Troupes speciales du Levant in Syria
Tunisia, Algeria
attacking
which
provided Mussolini with the stimulus to reach
armistice with Hitler
and armed
in
had
on
sail
it
3 July
out of
French forces would lend no
THREE WARS
support
to their
at all
former
the Italian forces in Africa Italian garrison in
allies.
IK AFRICA
In July, therefore, Mussolini struck at the British
were strongest and
theirs weakest.
On
where
4 July units from the
Ethiopia occupied frontier towns in the Anglo-Egyptian
condominium
of the Sudan, on 15 July they penetrated the British colony of Kenya, and between 5 and 19
August they occupied the whole of Italy's ability to still
move
power was determined by
of strength prevailing between the two
recent conquest of Ethiopia, its
still
in that
the otherwise uncharacteristic
corner of the continent. After the
only superficially pacified,
Italy
maintained there and in
older colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland an army of 92,000 Italians and 250,000 native
troops supported by 323
most of them units
local,
The
aircraft.
and 100
British,
by contrast, deployed only 40,000 troops,
aircraft. Britain's local
forces included the soldierly
and
loyal
of the Somaliland Camel Corps, the Sudan Defence Force and the Kenya battalions of
the King's African Rifles, but they in
Somaliland on the Gulf of Aden.
so audaciously against the East African territories of what was
the world's greatest imperial
disparity
British
were wholly outnumbered by the enemy and outclassed
equipment. The 10,000 troops
in the
French enclave of Djibouti were
(and would remain so until they were persuaded to landings in
November
Britain
where
it
come
over
Vichy
loyal to
North African
after the
1942).
was limited
in
its
ability to reinforce its East African
had maintained an army since
its
garrison from Egypt,
annexation of that semi-autonomous
of the
fief
Ottoman Empire in 1882, because of the need to defend Egypt's western frontier against the army of 200,000 men, mostly Italians, that Italy maintained in Libya (which it had ruled since also annexing
Douglas Newbold,
it
from Turkey
Civil Secretary in the
outcome of
anticipated the
in 1912). Britain's strategic difficulty cast a
Sudan, writing
Sudan probably, Khartoum perhaps. Bang goes 40
abandon the
trusting
Newbold's
Sudanese to
a totalitarian
fears for the security
of
Britain's
army suffered from disabling weaknesses. resupply and
it
was
a
man
It
years' patient
work
hold on
all
May
1940,
gloomily
the asking. Port
in the
Sudan and we
East African territories
on the ground,
Italy's
were
Ethiopian
was timidly led - though the Duke of Aosta,
of personal courage and distinction -
could not be reinforced. The
their forces in the region
19
Italy's for
is
conqueror.'
fortunately to prove over-pessimistic. Although strong
the Italian viceroy,
home on
the approaching war: 'Kassala
long shadow.
British,
by contrast, were
it
was isolated from
at liberty
to build
up
by the transfer of troops from India and South Africa through the
chain of ports they controlled along the
littoral
of the Indian Ocean.
In April 1940, General
Archibald Wavell, commander-in-chief in the Middle East, had visited Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa - whose parliament had narrowly voted to enter the war
Sir
the previous
September - and brought back the guarantee
brigade and three squadrons of aircraft for service in
commanded by Dan Pienaar, like him, now also a devoted
like
Smuts
a
that the
dominion would
raist' a
Kenya. The force was to be
veteran of the Boer
War
against the British but,
supporter of the imperial cause. In September Wavell risked
transferring the 5th Indian Division
from Egypt
321
to the Sudan, to join a British brigade there.
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
During the autumn two extra South African brigades arrived African Division. In
Egypt
against
the
in
Kenya
to
form the
1st
South
December, following the success of Wavell's counter-offensive Libyan
Italian
Wavell
army,
sent
to
Sudan
the
the
in
additional
reinforcement of the 4th Indian Division. By the beginning of January 1941, therefore, the
new British commander in East Africa, General Alan Cunningham, commanding the Mediterranean fleet, disposed of sufficient on
expelling the Italians from their footholds
British territory
brother of the admiral force
to
contemplate
and carrying the war into
their Ethiopian empire.
The Ethiopian campaign The
British
Theodore
had been
wisely persuaded
on
to Ethiopia before,
in 1867-8; the difficulties
them not
to stay.
a punitive
The
Italians,
campaign
among
of campaigning
its
against the
Emperor
towering mountains had
by the deployment of aircraft, tanks and
overwhelming numbers, in 1936-7 had broken the primitive army of the Emperor Haile Selassie
and thereby
Menelek
at
Adowa
also
avenged themselves for
during their
first
their defeat at the
coming Ethiopian campaign, though fought between of the
spirit
of those preceding
it. It
hands of the Emperor
attempt to establish an Ethiopian empire in 1896. The
was
to
be
the
European powers, was
essentially colonial in character;
to partake
many of the
troops engaged were non-European; and the mountainous terrain and the absence of railways and all the rest of the infrastructure upon which European armies depended for movement and supply imposed a colonial rhythm on its course. The British plan for their counter-offensive against the Duke of Aosta's command had been fixed at Khartoum at the end of October 1940. Anthony Eden, the British war minister, had arrived there on 28 October to join Haile Selassie, returned from exile in England in expectation of reinheriting his kingdom, Wavell, Cunningham, who was to take command on 1 November, and Smuts, who had flown from South Africa. Smuts and Eden had strong political motives for urging an offensive. Smuts needed a victory to overcome roads,
opposition by his anti-British nationalists to South Africa's participation in the war; that opposition, though not as strong as in 1914
arms
in revolt,
was
still
when
unreconciled Boers had actually taken up
a challenge to his leadership.
British success at this point
Islamic world, because he
Eden, for his
part,
was anxious
for the
of juncture between the African and Arabian corners of the
needed
leaders as the Mufti of Jerusalem
to offset
growing German influence over such Muslim
and Rashid
Ali in Iraq,
who saw
in Britain's
time of
adversity an opportunity to repay her for such grievances as the maintenance of an
imperial garrison
at
Haile Selassie,
Baghdad and the sponsorship of Zionist settlement in Palestine. a diplomatist of subtlety, persuaded Eden at Khartoum that despite
Foreign Office representations to the contrary his return to Ethiopia, where resistance to the Italian occupation was beginning to revive, offered the best prospect of undermining their
common
enemy's grip on the country. Ethiopian
322
'patriot' units,
armed by
the British,
THREE WARS
were already
in existence
IN AFRICA
On
on the Sudanese border.
6
November
Orde
a British officer,
Wingate, representative of a tradition of irregular soldiering which reached back to the
of Indian conquest and was most recently embodied by
early days in
Khartoum with
pounds
a million
to
spend and
Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, to his throne.
under command, flew into Ethiopia his return,
On
to
make
He immediately took
Haile Selassie
on
frontier.
imperial propagandist, 'His Majesty the
official
accompanied by the Crown Prince
I
he could restore the 'patriot' units
contact with the internal resistance and,
began preparations to escort the emperor across the
20 January 1941, in the words of an
Emperor
Lawrence, arrived
T. E.
a fervent belief that
.
.
and two powerful
.
Ethiopian and English armies crossed the frontier of the Sudan and Ethiopia and entered into his own.'
The exigencies of long
exile
excused the exaggeration; Wingate's column
was almost comically weak, camel-mounted and bereft of modern equipment. However, was
least
at
motion towards the
in
capital
of Addis Ababa; and so too,
after
it
some
inconclusive border skirmishes, were the main British forces which constituted the real threat to Italy's Abyssinian empire.
On
19 January the 4th
and 5th Indian Divisions crossed
the frontier north of the Blue Nile, heading for the fabled city of Gondar; they resistance,
by an
though
at
Italian officer
machine-guns.
On
one point
on
a
a force
little
of local horsemen, the Amharic Cavalry Band, led
white horse, attempted
a death-or-glory
charge against their
20 January the Sudan Defence Force, whose officers included the
famous anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard Thesiger,
met
was on the
staff
equally famous
(the
Arabist,
Wilfred
of Wingate's 'Gideon Force' accompanying the emperor),
crossed into Ethiopia south of the Blue Nile. Finally, on
of South Africans, the King's African
11
February, Cunningham's army
and the Royal West African Frontier Force
Rifles
marched out of Kenya into southern Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. The Duke of Aosta correctly estimated that the most dangerous of these incursions was
that
of the 4th and 5th Indian Divisions in the north and accordingly concentrated the
town
defended by high peaks and The approachable only along a deep and narrow gorge. Indian divisions attacked it on 10 February and were driven off, attacked again on 15 March and were counter-attacked; but, best of his troops
when
around Keren,
their engineers
undertook
a small
a systematic
dismantling of the obstacles with which the
approaches to Keren had been surrounded, the retreated into the hinterland. Italian
The whole of
in Eritrea
decided
Italians
Eritrea
that they
was occupied by 2
were beaten and
April.
By then the
position in the south had also collapsed. General Cunningham's army, advancing
from Kenya into
were the
Italian
Somaliland, found
it
difficult to
local troops to desert their Italian officers
and ammunition,
rich prizes in that territory
keep up with the enemy, so keen
and make
for
home
of endemic banditry. In
with their
late
rifles
March, having
swung north-west from Somaliland towards central Ethiopia, he was forced to fight a battle to open the road to the ancient walled city of Harar, which was won by the black Nigerians of the Royal West African Frontier Force - soldiers in whom Cunningham had previously but wrongly reposed
little trust.
Thereafter the
Italians'
323
hold over their local units began to
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1943-1945
collapse irretrievably; by early April only a thin screen of Savoy Grenadiers stood
Cunningham and Addis Ababa. They were brushed
aside,
and on 5 April the
made
the British. Haile Selassie, escorted by Wingate's 'Gideon Force',
on
5 May.
Meanwhile the Duke of Aosta had retreated
where he surrendered
Alagi,
in late
May.
He was
to the
of tuberculosis
to die
a
mountain
between
capital fell to
triumphal entry
fastness of
Amba
in British captivity
the following year.
The war
now
was
Ethiopia
in
over.
effectively
recaptured by an amphibious landing launched from
commander of handful of
Italian
comforted him with the thought
locals,
3 July. In
the Western Desert, the
win
A
A
victors
some
were
at
289,000 troops,
once dispersed
to
more urgently needed - the Indians and South Africans to
West and
in 1944 to fight the
legendary reputation.
a
East Africans to their
war
home
against the Japanese in
stations,
Burma,
in
whence they would
which Wingate would
come from the Middle East to commander of the Sudan Defence
Free French force which had
returned there. General
fight
his revolver to a
can be very embarrassing'.
the course of the campaign Italy lost
and the majority being taken prisoner. The
other fronts where they were
be shipped
that 'war
diehards escaped westward to surrender to a Belgian force advancing
from the Congo on mostly
16 March; the Italian
on surrendering
Berbera, the capital, burst into tears
who
British officer,
Somaliland had been
British
Aden on
Sir
William
Piatt,
the
would go on to capture Madagascar from its Vichy garrison - which Churchill feared it could or would not hold against the Japanese - in November 1942. Cunningham, the conqueror of Ethiopia, departed for Egypt, where he would lose his reputation as a successful soldier in the struggle against Rommel. The Ethiopian campaign was an oddity among those of the Second World War, Force,
strategically a
footnote to the nineteenth-century 'scramble for
Africa', tactically a
Beau
Geste episode of long camel treks and short bitter conflicts for mountain strongpoints and desert forts.
had taken Banda
It
was appropriate
among
that
the colourful variety of colonial units which
part - Mahratta Light Infantry, Rajputana Rifles,
Frontiere
insistence of General
de Gaulle,
who
at that
effectively in the Battle
Battle
reality,
of Keren before returning
of Bir Hacheim, with
its
to the
Middle East
West
Africa.
on which de Gaulle
of France, to establish an alternative to the Vichy regime.
During September 1940 he had led
in
to take part in the
great reputation yet further enhanced.
fall
units of the Royal Navy, against
a
Dakar
His aim, which was to
Free French force, embarked together with British in Senegal, the cornerstone rally
of the French presence
the garrison to the Free French cause, failed; so
too did the Royal Navy's, which was to immobilise units of the French
this
fleet
which had
However, though on 25 September de Gaulle was forced to Free French effort at penetrating West Africa was not without
arrived to defend the harbour.
withdraw discomfited,
the personal
the Legion had fought vigorously
Ethiopia was not the only front south of the Mediterranean sought, in the aftermath of the
at
time was urgently seeking means to turn his
declared revolt against Petain and Vichy into a
and
Gold Coast Regiment, Gruppo
- the Foreign Legion should have been one. Committed
324
THREE WARS
On
results.
IN
AFRICA
27 August the resolute follower of de Gaulle Philippe Leclerc, had succeeded in
colony of Cameroon; on hearing that news the black governor of Chad also came over and the French Congo rallied shortly afterwards. With Cameroon, Chad, Congolese and some rallied Senegalese troops, Leclerc invaded Gabon on 12 October and with his confrere, Pierre Koenig, led columns against the capital Libreville, which surrendered on 12 November. It was evidence of how bitterly ideological this fratricidal war between Frenchmen had become that the governor, Masson, hanged himself rather than surrender; his successor capitulated the same day. rallying the
The Syrian war De
now
wedge of territory in the great West African bight and also disposed of four independent military forces on the continent; a brigade in Egypt and a 'division' in East Africa (the two soon to be united as part of the British Western Desert Gaulle
controlled a solid
Force); a garrison in far
the
West
Africa and, in Chad, Leclerc's Groupe Nomade de
most dynamic of de
made
Libya in the spring of 1941,
1
by
Leclerc,
Italian
Long Range Desert Group and It was the first single-handed
contact with the British
then independently captured the oasis of Kufra on
Tibesti.
command northward into
Gaulle's followers, led his tiny
March.
Free French success against the Axis. Conscious of the significance of his victory, Leclerc
once prompted ('Le
his
little
band of white and black French
serment de Kufra') not to
over the German-annexed Cyr,
lay
cities
belonged to the graduating
have seemed
bold gesture to
a
down arms
soldiers to take a
French
until the
class
cast
of 'Metz
down
a challenge.
down
the Champs-Elysees to a
Paris for the liberation
of the
would indeed be present
or that by
it
Deum
November
watch the tricolour
to
In the spring of 1941,
vision of liberation
city,
solemn Te
rise
a
should once more
former cadet
strategic ambit;
would be leading French
of gratitude in Notre-Dame de
1944 his 2nd
fratricidal
Armoured
British in Egypt,
December; in Iraq
it
Morocco, Algeria and
but General Henri Dentz's
also
where
their desert
provided
a
Army of the
by Axis agents.
Its
sides over the issue
war with the
Levant in Syria and Lebanon was a
Italians
had broken out
Britain's
was bound to neutrality by the terms of the armistice; but because of the the Axis power-base in Italy
its
isolation
in
like
relative
from France and
its
Ali
Weygand, weakness
proximity to
and the Balkans he could be put under pressure
325
earnest in
Arab enemies, Rashid
could be supported. Dentz,
in Palestine,
of his force (38,000 to Weygand's 100,000),
Maxime
Tunisia, lay as yet outside the
bases outflanked from the east those of the
bridgehead through which
and the Mufti of Jerusalem
Division
wars rather than any
which exercised those Frenchmen who had taken
natural target for subversion
must
over Metz and Strasbourg.
was the spectre of further
d'Afrique in
it
Not even the indomitable
of the armistice. The largest concentration of Vichy French troops, General
Weygand's great Armee
fly
at Saint-
the spring of 1941
et Strasbourg'. In
such
Leclerc might have dared to foresee that three years later he soldiers
flag
of Metz and Strasbourg; Leclerc,
at
solemn oath
to
which
THE WAR
Weygand was impervious. Germans and Italians were regent
on
April.
By
were entering
Iraq
that general
and basing area from
a staging
had overthrown the pro-British
decrypts revealed that
German
and next day they began bombing the
Syria,
down
put
to
where
new
Ma)"
13
1943-1945
planning to use Syria as
to supply Rashid Ali in Iraq, 3
THE WEST
Early in April British intelligence decrypts revealed that the jointly
which
markings had arrived in
IN
Rashid
Ali's
Rashid
coup.
aircraft
with Iraqi
British forces
which
had been
action
All's
intemperate and premature. His arm)
was not strong or resolute enough either
overcome the
treaty
which by
British garrison,
occupied the large
air
to
base of Habbaniya
outside Baghdad, or to prevent British troops also exercising their treaty right to enter and transit Iraq
May. Reinforced by the
5
made
a trans-desert
in Iraq
entered the
was
who
chased the investing force away from the aerodrome organised 'Habforce' of units from Palestine, which
march, and by the 10th Indian Division landed city
April,
hastily
broken by the besieged,
actually
on
through the port of Basra. His siege of Habbaniya, begun on 30
and restored the regent on
31
at
Basra, British forces
May.
Evidence of Dentz's complicity, however unwilling,
in the Iraq
episode clinched the
Army of the
British decision (for
which de Gaulle had been
Levant; the danger
offered to the rear of the Western Desert Force operating in Libya was
it
not too great to be tolerated.
On
pressing) to turn against the
moved
23 June, therefore, four British columns
against
it
- the 10th Indian Division and Habforce from Iraq against Palmyra and Aleppo, the British 6th Division from northern Palestine against Damascus and the 7th Australian Division
from Haifa
against Beirut.
The short war which ensued was not
pleasant;
on the border of
northern Palestine the involvement of the Free French division resulted
Frenchmen,
fighting
in the bitterest yet
of Petain and de Gaulle.
On
all
in
Frenchmen
of the internecine struggles between the followers
fronts the fighting
was imbued with resentment: the
believed they were spilling blood better saved for the Germans; the Vichy French
war had been fight
that
unfairly forced
only the
7th
upon them. The French Army of the Levant
Australian
encountered, and then because Beirut.
Once
it
it
succeeded
Division
in
broke through, however,
who
the
good
defences
a it
benefited from heavy naval gunfire support south of as
it
did on 9 July, Dentz accepted that his
position was untenable and sued for terms. They were granted
Vichy troops
put up so
breaking the
British felt
on
11 July,
and allowed
all
rejected de Gaulle's offer of a place in the Free French forces to return
home; only 5700 of Dentz's defeated 38,000 Foreign Legionnaires
who had
rallied to
de Gaulle. The majority, including
fought Foreign Legionnaires in an almost sacrilegious
outturn of events, were transhipped to North Africa, where Allied troops would meet
them
again in the Torch landings of
November
Sour, costly and regrettable though the soldiers in Africa
were
killed or
wounded
in
its
1942.
little
course - the
Syrian
effect
war had been - 3500
was wholly beneficent. Following on the heels of Italy's defeat
crushing of the pro-Axis party in Iraq,
it
ensured the security of
Egypt from the landward side and liberated the
326
Allied
of its outcome on British strategy in Ethiopia
and the
Britain's place d'armes in
commander of the Western
Desert Force
THREE WARS
from
IN
AFRICA
other preoccupations but that of beating the Axis in Libya.
all
The Libyan-Egyptian war had begun
in earnest in
September
1940.
It
was the second
of the three wars fought on African territory between 1939 and 1945, since slightly
years. At the
time
Tactically,
however,
during
its
by six
it
was
large in British eyes,
being the only focus of engagement
army and the enemy anywhere
a British
were considerable, offset
bulked very
it
on land between
was
outbreak
its
postdated the Ethiopian campaign and antedated the Tunisian war by over two
in the theatre
very small war indeed, and, though
a
its
dimension could not be developed while
that
Italian military
of
hostilities.
strategic implications
weakness
local British
incompetence, and those conditions determined
its
character
opening months.
Victory in Libya The
Italian arm)- in Libya,
commanded by
200,000, organised in twelve divisions
route from Alexandria,
Sicily.
Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, numbered some
and based on
Tripoli, at the
end of the short sea
General Archibald Wavell, with 63,000 troops, had his main base
which was
also that of the
Mediterranean
fleet,
since Malta had
been
relegated to the status of an air base in June, immediately after the collapse of France Italy's
declaration of war. Thitherto
at
effectively
and
Libyan army had been held in check by the
Italy's
French Arm)' of Africa beyond the Tunisian border; the combination of the French Toulon fleet
with the British Malta
battleships suddenly
fleet
had
became
the largest capital force in the Mediterranean, held
the Royal Navy's five only because
army four times outnumbered Apparently parity
also sufficed to nullify Italy's considerable maritime
however, when Petain signed terms with Mussolini,
strength. After 24 June,
at
sea
it
also
deployed two
aircraft carriers,
Italy's six at risk
by
while Graziani's
Wavell's.
and incontestable numerical superiority on land prompted
Mussolini unwisely to order an offensive into Egypt on 13 September 1940. Three days later
and
sixty miles into Egypt, Graziani halted his forces to construct a firm base.
remain there, building camps and
had
certainly misread the signs,
Navy not
On
and
forts, for
his
They were
to
the next three months. However, Mussolini
assumption of the offensive had abashed the Royal
H
(based on Gibraltar) and the Mediterranean fleet on Alexandria) had engaged the Italian battle fleet in its entirety between Sardinia and Calabria, inflicted damage on it and forced it to retire. Four months later, on 11 November, the air group of HM Carrier Illustrious, operating with Admiral Sir Andrew at all.
8-9 July
its
Force
(based
Cunningham's Alexandria the heel of Italy
fleet,
caught the
Italian battleships in
and seriously damaged four of them
superiority over the Italian surface fleet
be reinforced by (Tainaron) on 28
its
at
their
the harbour of Taranto in
moorings. The Royal Navy's
was established by these engagements and was
to
destruction of three heavy cruisers in the night battle of Cape Matapan
March
1941 at the outset
of the campaign
in
Greece. Thereafter, though
the Italian navy intermittently succeeded in running convoys across the narrows
327
between
THE WAR
Sicily
and
Tripoli,
some
achieved
and
its
THE WEST
IN
1943-1945
of motor torpedo-boats and midget submarines
light forces
daring successes against the Mediterranean
kept to port. The British Admiralty's fear in June 1940 that
Mediterranean,
as
did
it
at
the nadir of
might have to abandon the
fortunes in 1796, thereafter receded. Axis
its
deployed against the emergency convoys run
punishingly
airpower,
Mussolini's battleships
fleet,
it
Alexandria during 1941, denied
could not break
free use but
it
its
command
and
Malta
to
of the inner
sea.
The
army, which ought to have operated as an amphibious extension of the
Italian
Italian fleet in Libya,
was thereby reduced,
like the British
army
supplied and reinforced from
Sicily,
through
Egypt in September 1940 had overextended
December
line
its
Tripoli.
Its
far as
was
it
advance into
of communications and
when on
9
the Western Desert Force, under General Richard O'Connor, launched a
counter-offensive against
surprise
main base of
its
of an
in Egypt, to the status
expeditionary force capable of mounting offensive operations only in so
defences crumbled and
it
it
in
its
outposts
ill-constructed
Sidi
at
was sent tumbling backward along the coast towards
retreat that did not stop until
Fomm,
reached Beda
it
Barrani
its
Tripoli in a
400 miles to the west,
in early
February.
was
'Wavell's offensive', as the counter-thrust that
was
war
to typify the
the haul of prisoners
between
Graziani's
it
called, set the pattern for the fighting
two
years.
yielded - over 130,000, a total which went
far to
army
in the
Western Desert
(200,000)
and Wavell's
for the next
(63,000).
It
was
It
was unusual
in
equalise the odds
characteristic in that
it
took
the form of a pell-mell retreat along the single coast road by the defeated party, hotly-
pursued by the
mam
bod) of the
who meanwhile mounted
victor,
inland through the desert, designed to unseat the
one port
after
enemy from
his
a series
of 'hooks'
defended positions
at
another (from east to west, Solium, Bardia, Tobruk, Gazala, Derna, Benghazi,
El Agheila, Tripoli) and, if possible, to
him between
pincer
the desert 'hook' and the
coastal thrust.
Beda
At
Armoured
Fomm
on
7
February the Western Desert Force achieved that
Division had got ahead of the Italians by a breakneck
neck of the bulge of Cyrenaica,
to block the retreat
of the
rearguards were being pressed by the 6th Australian Division
recognised that
it
was caught between two
fires
it
march
Italian
on
result. Its
7th
across the desert
Tenth Army, whose
the coast road.
surrendered - an outcome
that
When
it
crowned
the daring of 'Wavell's offensive' with a crushing success. It
was, however, to be short-lived, for two reasons.
to intervene in as Tripoli; the
that Churchill's decision
Greece robbed Wavell of the strength necessary to sustain
second was
that Hitler sent a
rescue Graziani's army from
its
Rommel and
were leaving
5th Light
and 15th Panzer Divisions, were
Rommel and
for Athens,
his troops
German
general and a small
misfortunes. While British,
divisions
warfare,
One was
328
to
advance
as far
to
Zealand and Australian
the Afrikakorps, consisting
initially
of the
Though wholly new to desert embark on an offensive by 24 March,
arriving in Tripoli.
were prepared
New
his
armoured force
THREE WARS
Rommel
in the desert.
Having made
1940, Rommel arrived
at Tripoli
his
IN AFRICA
name commanding
7th Panzer Division in France in
on 12 February 1941, and soon demonstrated
his
mastery
of mobile operations against his British opponents.
only forty days after the advance guard arrived British
out of their weakly defended positions
captured Benghazi and by
11
April
earlier;
Tobruk, held
Beda
he was near the
been captured during the course of the
months
at Tripoli. Its at
fighting)
as a fortress
line
opening
Fomm, by
stages tossed the
3 April
Rommel had
from which O'Connor (who had
had launched 'WavelTs
offensive' four
by the 9th Australian Division, was surrounded
inside the German-Italian rear.
On
this
improve. For
sudden and all
his
of advantages, however,
brilliant reversal
dynamism, he was
a
Rommel
could not
prisoner of the geographical and territorial
determinants of the desert campaign: the desert yielded nothing, and over long stretches the landward edge of the coastal plain effectively confining the that strip, east,
was bounded by high ground or
movement of the
which extended
for 1200 miles
the chain of small ports
armies to a
between
were the
resupply to the next, in the destruction
hope
that
its
when he was
a steep depression,
or fewer miles wide. In
Tripoli in the west
and Alexandria
in the
only, but essential, points of military value.
Campaigning necessarily took the form, therefore, of allow his
strip forty
a
dash from one point of maritime
impetus would topple the enemy off balance and bereft
of water,
fuel,
reinforcements - the essentials, in that order, of desert warfare.
329
ammunition, food and
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1943-1945
Rommel's advance had dangerously attenuated his line of supply from Tripoli; that port's connections with Sicily were themselves harried by British surface, submarine and air attack.
During April he
tried but failed to capture
meanwhile the Royal Navy had vital
successfully run a
Tobruk, to shorten his resupply route;
convoy (codenamed
reinforcement of tanks to the Western Desert Force. With
went over
and
to the counter-offensive
Rommel from
unseat
was
Battleaxe
in
German
over the long clear
its
strong
of strength, Wavell
an operation codenamed Battleaxe tried to
because the British threw tanks against carefully
anti-tank guns - the superlative
of
fields
fire
which desert
formations were sufficiently weakened for the failure
this accretion
a
advanced position.
his
a costly failure, largely
positioned screens of
own
Tiger) past Malta,
mid-Mediterranean stronghold, from Gibraltar to Alexandria, bringing
of Battleaxe undermined
Wa veil's
88-mm gun came
terrain offered - until their
German Panzer
position; he
units to counter-attack.
was dispatched
by the Indian army's leading soldier, Claude Auchinleck, on
into
to India
its
armoured
The
and replaced
5 July.
Auchinleck launches Crusader A period of
now descended on
stalemate
the desert war.
Britain,
not yet the
full
means to reinforce its desert army to a decisively battle-winning level; Germany, committed since June to the conquest of Russia, could spare nothing to the Afnkakorps. The only clear-cut shift of advantage in the African war during the summer of 1941 occurred far away from the focus of the fighting, in Iran, where Germany's attempts to repeat the success it had nearly achieved in Iraq in April were checked by an Anglo-Russian ultimatum to the Shah's government, issued on 17 beneficiary of American Lend-Lease, could not find the
August;
demanded
it
including
vital
the granting of rights to
When
Russia and the Middle East. that arrived
on 25 August
the Shah's
17
September,
by the two governments
army showed
to lend force to the ultimatum,
exiled to South Africa; Soviet troops,
Tehran on
move men
Lend-Lease shipments, into and through
after
who had
but particularly supplies,
Iran's
Gulf ports to southern
resistance to the British troops it
was overcome and he was
entered northern
which the country was
Iran,
effectively divided
met the
British in
and administered
until 1946.
While Iran was being firmly incorporated within the anti-Axis sphere of influence, Auchinleck had been preparing his
own
offensive riposte to
Egypt. Tobruk, garrisoned by the 9th Australian Division,
unrelenting Axis
air attacks,
Rommel on
still
the borders of
held out; so too, despite
did Malta, which was resupplied by offensive convoy action
three times during 1941 - Excess in January, Substance in July and Halberd in September.
Auchinleck's aim was preliminary to driving
troops
if
now to relieve Tobruk and recapture the bulge of Cyrenaica, as a Rommel and his Italian satellites - who supplied the bulk of his
not fighting power - out of Libya. Crusader,
codenamed, began on
18
November with
as
his
winter offensive was
nearly 700 tanks against 400 German-Italian.
330
A
THREE WARS
IN AFRICA
attempt to raise the siege of Tobruk
failed, but on 10 December, after Auchinleck had Cunningham of his command of the Eighth Army (as Western Desert Force had been retitled on 18 September), the Eighth Army linked arms with the first
relieved General Alan
which had replaced the Australian
British-Polish force
garrison;
among
the Australians'
triumphs during the eight months of siege was their repayment in kind to the Germans'
down
technique of drawing attacking tanks Their defeat
Rommel had commenced which had
need
left
him
to retire as far as El Agheila,
so exposed in
to transfer troops to the Far
from which
March; but the factors of 'overstretch'
his offensive the previous
November now worked against the British - as did their East - and when he counter-attacked on 21 January 1942
they in their turn were obliged to surrender retire
into a destructive anti-tank screen.
Tobruk forced the Germans
at
much
of the coastal
strip so recently
won and
halfway back along the Cyrenaica bulge to the Gazala-Bir Hacheim position, which
on 28 January 1942 and then fortified. Both sides were now tired and paused to recuperate; during Crusader the British had lost some 18,000 men killed and wounded and 440 tanks, the German-Italian army 38,000 men and 340 tanks; aircraft losses were about equal, some 300 on each side. During the they reached
were gradually made good and by May Auchinleck came under
spring these losses
pressure from Churchill to resume the offensive; while he prepared to anticipated
among
him and
attacked
on 27 May. The
which followed,
battle
do
known
the most reckless and costly fought during the desert war. At
one
so,
Rommel
as Gazala,
stage
was
Rommel own
personally led a strong tank raid into the British lines, trusting to the enemy's
minefields to secure his flanks and rear. While he repelling
all
assaults
Italian Ariete
made upon him
Divisions
at
heavy tank
were overcoming the
sat defiantly
gallant resistance
Auchinleck had entrusted the security of his desert Bir
Hacheim.
On
turned north to to
inside the British position,
loss to the British, his 90th Light
flank, Koenig's
Free French Brigade
June Koenig's survivors were forced to surrender,
10
assist
Rommel
withdraw from Gazala
in his 'cauldron' battle,
and on
14
to a stronger position further east, at
where the impassable Qattara Depression most
to
it
hold out
at
their attackers
June Auchinleck decided
Alam
Haifa, near Alamein,
closely approaches the sea.
garrisoned in his rear as a fortress, and he expected
and the
of the force to which
as a
Tobruk was
thorn
in
left
the enemy's
side.
On
21 June,
however,
after
only
week of
a
siege, the
surrendered Tobruk to the enemy; the capitulation came as Churchill, then in
Washington
to confer with Roosevelt
not attempt to hide from the President the shock
moment. Defeat
is
one
thing;
disgrace
Churchill's
doubt of the fighting
collapse
Singapore four months
at
spirit
is
war
that
on plans
received,'
for a
earlier,
blow above
Second Front.
he wrote.
'It
was
another.' Although the surrender
of his soldiers which was
generous offer to divert supplies of their Allies in the
I
2nd South African Division a grievous
it
331
in
to
did
a bitter
reawoke
aroused by the
drew from the Americans the first produced by the gunpower) from their own armoured
instantly
new Sherman
matched the Panzer Mark IV
first
all 'I
tank (the
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST 1943-mS
then in process of formation, to the Western Desert. Accordingly, 300 Shermans
divisions,
and 100 self-propelled guns were shipped by sea around the Cape and arrived September. The strength of the Axis
Mediterranean
as
air
forces in Sicily
supply route to the desert army -
a
in
Egypt in
precluded the use of the
still
was demonstrated by the
as
devastation of the Pedestal convoy running supplies to Malta in August. In order to bring
bare necessities of fuel and food to the island's garrison and population (who had been collectively
awarded the George Cross
Royal Navy lost one
convoyed merchant
aircraft carrier
ships.
for their stoicism
and two
under
By way of reaction, however, the
currently interrupting three out of four convoys sailing
from
relentless air attack), the
and eleven out of sixteen
cruisers sunk,
British Desert Air Italy to Tripoli,
Force was
and
inflicting
losses which threatened almost totally to deprive Rommel of tank and aviation fuel. The desert war would not, however, be decided by balance of logistic advantage.
After the humiliation of Tobruk, Churchill
was
now
was determined on
a victory in the field,
urgently required to boost Britain's standing as an
flushed with the triumph of
Midway - and
the Soviet
the Wehrmacht's advance into southern Russia.
Union -
Between 4 and
ally still
10
of the United
which
States
-
tenaciously contesting
August Churchill
visited
the British Middle East headquarters in Cairo to confer with Smuts, the South African
premier, Wavell, the commander-in-chief India, Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial
-
...
"
The crew of a of the
British 3.7-in
German 88-mm,
heavy anti-aircraft gun race into action. Although the equivalent
the 3.7-in
was never used
in
an anti-tank
role.
dive-bombers over the desert, November 1941.
332
Right: Junkers 87
V
'
r
•&
&^
THREE WARS
General
Staff,
15 August
Middle
IN AFRICA
and Auchinleck. The Prime Minister had decided
was time
it
he replaced Auchinleck with General Harold Alexander
East;
as
for a purge.
On
commander-in-chief
command
General Bernard Montgomery was simultaneously appointed to
the Eighth Army.
Dismissing Auchinleck, Churchill reflected, was
like 'shooting a
noble
stag'.
With
magnificent physical presence, Auchinleck had every soldierly quality except the instinct. Churchill,
war;
on
1
Commons and undermine
his
however, was currently
he had
July
he feared
desperation as he reached during the
as close to
defend himself against
to
motion of censure
a
any protraction of stalemate
that
domestic and international leadership
name
on him
to pit his
undoubted
in the
in the desert
further.
still
lacked Auchinleck's stature and reputation, had a Churchill counted
a
killer
House of
war would
Montgomery, though he
for ruthless
efficiency,
and
killer instinct against
Rommel's
in a
decisive contest for victory in the desert.
Numbers - of men, Britain's favour. In
tanks and aircraft - were for the
August
Rommel
still
first
had an advantage
in
on
31
seven, and with these he launched a local offensive
time turning conclusively in
numbers of divisions, ten
to
August against the position
Montgomery had inherited from Auchinleck at Alam Haifa. In his first weeks of command, however, Montgomery had done much to strengthen it and had also fiercely impressed upon his subordinate commanders that he would tolerate no retreat. Nor was there any in this bitter but brief battle of Alam Haifa. By 2 September Rommel accepted that he could not break through and, having
withdrew
lost fifty tanks,
to his original position.
A
many
in the
now descended
lull
retrained his veteran divisions for offensive action
dense
British minefields,
during which
and integrated
Montgomery
new
his
divisions,
including the 51st Highland, into the Eighth Army's structure. By October he deployed 1st, 7th, 8th and 10th, which between them operated 1030 tanks (including 250 Shermans) supported by 900 guns and 530 aircraft. Panzer Army Africa was supported by 500 guns and 350 aircraft but of its ten divisions only four (two armoured) were German. The Italian divisions, of which two also were armoured, did not command Rommel's confidence. They were dispirited by heavy losses and earlier defeats, shaken in their commitment to the Axis cause by America's
eleven altogether, with four armoured divisions, the
entry into the war, badly equipped, intermittently supplied
mechanised transport condemned them
and conscious
that their lack
of
Rommel's cannon fodder. Their readiness to stand in the fore of what Rommel now recognised would be a major British offensive was so questionable that he decided to 'corset' them with German units, so that no long section of his line was held by Italians alone.
Rommel was end of his
line
Above: A
much
troubled by
else
to the role of
-
militarily
by
his over-extension at the
extreme
of communications, 1200 miles from Tripoli, personally by his health. For
Panzer
Mark
Below: The
III
superb
during Rommel's successful offensive,
German 88-mm gun
335
27 May-30 June 1942.
operating in an anti-tank role.
THE WAR
all
of character,
his force
Rommel was
ailment, perhaps psychosomatic,
replaced by
not robust.
in the
suffered from a recurrent stomach
Germany. He was
to
Do you
arrived
the headquarters of the Panzer
enough
feel well
battle furiously raging at
to
when
bad news from
is
go back?" He was
Army
Africa.
not, but
The
situation looks very
the following day and
left
Africa that evening, 25 October, to find a
Alamein and the German-Italian front already creaking under the
of the Eighth Army's
assault.
The Montgomery had conceived
'dogfight'
from
his offensive in a style altogether different
who had been
that
Montgomery
a Panzer-style Blitzkrieg.
of his
tempted by the freedom of manoeuvre the
consistently
desert terrain offered into using their tanks as the principal tactical instrument, in the
of achieving
he
fit
Ukraine; but on 24 October he was telephoned in
black. ...
predecessors,
He
and on 22 September was invalided
hospital by Hitler with the words: 'There
strain
1943-194S
Panzer general from Russia, Georg Stumme, and was told that
a
would be given an army group
at
THE WEST
IK
rightly
judged that the
British
hope
armoured
flair to out-German the Germans, and in any case he was not prepared mere advantage of manoeuvre. Rather than chase the Panzer Army out of its
divisions lacked the to settle for a
position back towards Tripoli, as had it
a
happened three times
crushing defeat in a set-piece battle so
Accordingly he had artillery assault,
laid his
destroy
as to
its
offensive
plan for the Battle of Alamein as
power
for
good.
a deliberate infantry-
supported by some heavy tanks, which would destroy the enemy's fixed
defences and their garrisons. Only
after
what he grimly
forecast
would be
a 'dogfight' did
he intend to launch the main body of his armour into and through the position. The began
at
midnight on 23 October with
support an infantry drive the desert further south.
the crucial sector and
down
bombardment by 456
a
The diversionary
thrust failed to
on 26 October, Rommel's
tank strength to
thirty-five,
first
committed the
last
prepared to
guns, concentrated to
retreat but
draw enemy
forces
away from
day back in command, Montgomery
week of
he succeeded
Panzer Army's coastal position and on 2
Rommel was now
battle
the coast road but supported by a diversionary thrust in
reinforced the main assault with armour. In a
German
on
before, he wished to inflict
bitter fighting,
in carving
two
which reduced
'corridors'
November stood poised
was refused permission
through the
to break through.
do so by Hitler and two corridors on the
to
of his strength to hold the northernmost of the
Montgomery, who was being kept informed by Enigma of the fluctuations in German intentions, accordingly decided on 4 November to commit the bulk of his armour into the southern corridor. By mid-afternoon the 7th and 10th Armoured Divisions had
coast.
destroyed the unfortunate
implement
Italian Ariete Division,
whose obsolete
and were streaming into the Panzer Army's
outclassed,
Hitler's 'stand fast'
and directed
all
order even had he so wished,
the units that could
still
move
rear.
knew
tanks were completely
Rommel, unable that the battle
was
to lost
to retreat post-haste along the coast road to
336
THREE WARS
the west.
It
was the
Montgomery Panzer Army Africa
start
of
a
IN AFRICA
harrowing 2000-mile
has been reproved by post-war to
its
November,
5
retreating
the
New
2nd
an alleged
a pursuit
none
the
less,
Zealand Division nearly succeeded
failure to harry It is
true that his
and
at
Fuka, late
in outflanking the
enemy and establishing a roadblock in his rear. Thereafter, however, heavy rain movement difficult and Rommel's beaten army succeeded in keeping ahead
made
off-road
of
pursuers. In any case,
its
critics for
destruction in the days and weeks after Alamein.
immediate pursuit was cautious; but he attempted
on
retreat.
it
is
doubtful whether an attempt
annihilation
at
would have
been possible or even wise. Certainly none of Montgomery's predecessors, with the exception of O'Connor in February 1941, had ever succeeded in getting ahead of an retreating along the single coast road. against only a least
enemy
O'Connor's success, moreover, had been
won
portion of the thoroughly demoralised army - and Rommel's Afrikakorps
was not demoralised. More important, the
at
Montgomery had
rationale of the battle
fought precluded a sudden transformation of effort from dogged assault to headlong chase. 'This battle',
he had warned
in his orders before
inception,
its
'will
involve hard and
Our troops must not think that, because we have a good tank and very powerful artillery support, the enemy will all surrender. The enemy will NOT surrender and there will be bitter fighting. The infantry must be prepared to fight and kill, and to prolonged
fighting.
continue doing so over killing:
the
number of
exactly predicted
war thus infantry.
mounted
far;
it
a
prolonged period.' There had been
by Montgomery), by
amounted
to 5 per cent
Such losses could be a
far
confused and costly
justified
battle
the highest
of the Eighth
only by
of pursuit,
13,500
(a
figure almost
suffered by a British
toll
Army
and much
bitter fighting
wounded was
British soldiers killed or
but about
a clear-cut victory. If
a
army
in the
quarter of
its
Montgomery had
Rommel and the Afrikakorps might have muddy the outcome of Alamein, and
profited by their cunning in mobile operations to
Montgomery would have incurred
criticism
far
more
severe
than he has suffered
retrospectively at the pens of literary strategists.
His strategy after Alamein - correctly,
may be judged
it
- was the eighteenth-century
his beaten enemy 'a golden bridge', the coast road to Tripoli. Along Rommel beat a passage, under constant attack by the Desert Air Force, to reach Benghazi on 20 November and Tripoli on 23 January 1943, having made a stand at Wadi Zem Zem from 26 December to 16 January. He received no reinforcements and few supplies en route, had left 40,000 of his 100,000 men (mostly Italians) as prisoners in British hands and had only eighty tanks still running. The Panzer Army Africa, by every token of military-
one of leaving
failure
it
or success, had been beaten
been one of the most
at
Alamein. Montgomery's debut on the battlefield had
brilliant in the history
What now saved
the
Panzer
Army
development which should have ensured
its
of generalship. Africa
from
destruction.
immediate extinction was
The appearance
Anglo-American army committed to the Torch landings was to in Africa.
Torch had been agreed upon by the Americans and
337
initiate
British in
in
its
a
rear of the
the Allies' third war
London
in July as a
'
NORTH 1.
During Wavell's
AFRICA: 1940-43
first
MEDITERRANEAN SEA offensive against Italian-held
Libya, his Western Force defeated Graziani's larger
border,
Graziani's
much
(13
army on
the Egyptian
which
had crossed
it
in
September 1940, driving
it
back out of eastern Libya
-
16
Advance
September
1940)
(Cyrenaica).
EGYPT /
Wavell's Offensive •El Agheila
(9
December
1940 - 7 February 1941) Qattara Depression (Impassable)
L_ 2.
Rommel, who
Tripoli with the
arrived in
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
vanguard of
the Afrika Korps in February
1941, recaptured territory taken
all
the Benghaz
by Wavell
between March and June.
14
He
April-
IS
June
also besieged Tobruk, held by
an Australian garrison.
EGYPT
^gedabia
Rommel's i
3. Auchinleck's counteroffensive of
March
(24
First Offensive
March -30 May
1941)
Qattara Depression (Impassable)
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
November 1941.
Operation Crusader, relieved
Tobruk and drove Rommel,
whose
GazaJa
lines of
Benghazi
'="rr>Tpbruk
communication were overextended, out of Cyrenaica
"
Rommel/^ 'M December
- 7
but failed to cut off his retreating columns.
16
November
-
I
December \
El
LIBYA /
Auchinleck's Offensive 18
Alamein*
Concentration area and railhead
November -31 December
1941
EGYPT
\
^
£"** m
Qaitara Depression (Impassable)
J_ 4. In January
1942 Rommel
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
took the offensive and drove the British back into central
Cyrenaica, where in June he zala
Benghazi
fought a bitter battle on the
29 January
Gazala-Bir Hacheim line
Tobruk fll une
,
Sidi
which forced Auchinleck retire to the
O'
to
Alamein position
inside the Egyptian border.
4
GULFOFSIRTE
February
-
3
21 its
South
,^Mersa
P
Matruh
I7*K^ ^
»
1
EGYPT
January
Rommel's Second Offensive
African garrison on 21 June.
El
Agheila
21
January
-7 July
I
338
1942
El
Alamein
^^*^\*-» ^-s^0 June r
UBYA
Tobruk was surrounded and surrendered by
June
Barrani
,
fi
*r
Qattara Depression (Impassable) \
5. 20 Miles i
^NN^ VJf
of
Alamein:
Montgomery, who replaced
Axis armour
Auchinleck on
ZW///, Axis infantry
^ ^i
The Battle
Key
Axis minefields
defensive battle
Main Axis movements
at the
Eighth
Army
1
5 August
1942, fought a successful
attacks
Western edge of Eighth Army's minefields
Alamein
(Alam Haifa) 31
position,
August-7 September. By mid-October he was ready
to
take the offensive and
attacked on
23
October.
Aften ten days of heavy fighting, his Eighth
Army
broke through and forced
Rommel
towards
to retreat
Tunisia. 6.
On
8 November 1942 an
Anglo-American army began to
land in French North
Africa. Operation Torch largely
was
unopposed by the
Vichy French garrison, but the arrival of reinforcements
from Germany and of
Rommel's army, which joined hands in Tunisia, precipitated a fierce
campaign
in
the Atlas
Mountains. Tunis to the Allies
1943.
-i it* "'/lit
Qattara Depression
Centre Task Force
Western Task Force
~\
(Fredendail) from Britain
(Patton) from United States
339
finally
on 13
May
fell
THE WAR
second best in
IX
THE WEST
to the cross-Channel invasion they
Second Front was launched
1942. Until a
1943-1945
were then persuaded could not be risked Americans hoped, Torch
in 1943, as the
provided employment for the American army which had begun to gather
Kingdom
that spring.
need
surplus to strategic the
It
also
provided employment for part of
now
that the
United
in the
home
reserve,
danger of a German invasion had receded, and for
of the ninety divisions which were being mobilised
first
Britain's
in the
United
When
States.
complete, the Torch arm) consisted of three task forces, Western, Central and Eastern, destined to land respectively
Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of
at
Morocco and
Oran
at
and Algiers inside the Mediterranean. Western Task Force, commanded by General
George Patton, consisted of the 2nd Armoured, 3rd and 9th Divisions, transported
from the United and
part
Task Force comprised the American
States; Central
of the future 82nd Airborne Division from
composed of the
British 78th
direct
Division
and Western Task Force was
and American 34th Divisions. The whole was embarked
armada of American and
inter- Allied
Britain;
Armoured
1st
British ships. Sailing at high
in
an
speed under strong
air
cover, the convoys reached their pre-assault positions without interception by U-boats.
and Eastern Task Forces passed the
Until Central
German
assembling to rush to Malta; then at Tripoli.
until
On
then the
7
November to
misapprehension.
was
It
of Gibraltar during 5-6 November,
regarded by in
switched to the view that the
fresh indications suggested that
many of
it
convoy would land troops
would land
certainly true that the
Americans accepted the
had persuaded themselves nevertheless
Petain's supporters in a different light.
master of Europe;
in
North
at
the) held themselves read)- to
Africa,
because Hitler clung to the belief that the Americans
double
a
reality
of Vichy's
that
they were
was equally the case
It
Vichy France clung to the terms of the armistice only
clearly the
fleet
Vichy more deeply into his arms. Here was
drive
but the)
to Britain,
hostility
it
least likely destination
would do nothing
man)
Straits
naval intelligence assured Hitler that the fleet was another Pedestal-style
the merest appearance of any diminution of his
defend the long-term
interests
that
long as Hitler remained
as
of France by
a
power
change of
allegiance.
The North African landings forced such
a
change of
allegiance.
arranged contact with local anti-Petainists through General Mark Clark,
The Americans had who landed from a
on 21 October. However, American over-caution in preserving the security of their plans prompted their supporters to premature action, which resulted in Vichy adherents resecuring control of Algiers and Casablanca, where the task forces began to land on 8 November (at Oran a British naval British
submarine
assault
was botched). A fortuitous event then worked
at
Cherchell, ninety miles from Algiers,
to reverse the Allied setback.
Admiral Darlan, Petain's commander-in-chief, happened to be
when
it
became
clear that the
Frenchman chosen by
in Algiers
change
sides,
who was
a private visit;
the Americans to assume local
control, General Henri Giraud, lacked the authority to establish direct negotiation with Darlan,
on
it,
the Americans
opened
persuaded by the evidence of Allied strength
to
and declared an armistice on the evening of 8 November. This enabled the
340
THREE WARS
and Americans
British
AFRICA
IN
of coastal Morocco and Algeria. Petain
swiftly to take possession
immediately disowned Darlan. The Vichy Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, visited Hitler headquarters on 10
November and
his protestations availed the
assured
Vichy regime not
proceeded
to Tunisia for his forces,
him
at all.
to take
it
was acting
that Darlan
Hitler
of his
demanded
own
at his
illegitimately,
but
of free access
rights
accord and simultaneously
ordered his troops to enter the French metropolitan 'unoccupied' zone the next morning (Operation
Attila).
By the evening of 11 November, the whole of France was under German
military occupation
and
Petain's
government
at
Vichy had been reduced to
a cipher.
The
marshal would linger on in the office of head of state until driven into exile in Germany in
September
1944; but after
autonomy stood revealed
November as a
1942 his two-year pretence of sustaining French
sham.
The German counter-stroke The balance of military advantage between the Axis and the
now
to
have swung decisively
most of the Algeria as a
coastline,
Montgomery's Eighth Army
and Morocco; the Armee
week
Two
in the latter's favour.
only Axis force
Africa
ought
Eisenhower's
Army
in Libya,
still
North
dominated
was meanwhile veering
d'Afrique
after the landing, the
Allies in
large Allied armies
First
to the Allied side.
operational in Africa was
As
in
late
Rommel's
battered Panzer Army, hastening northward from Alamein and as yet a thousand miles
now
from the Tunisian border. Hitler advantage.
On
obliging the
occupied by the Western first
German
10th Panzer,
Allies, to
forces began to arrive
open on
Hermann Goering Panzer
the Fifth Panzer Atlas
acted with dispatch to deprive the Allies of their
November Petain formally denounced the North African armistice, thus French commanders in Tunisia, the only sector of French North Africa not yet 12
Army, and were
at
16
its
ports and airfields to Vichy's Axis
November from
allies.
The
France; they consisted of the
Parachute and 334th Divisions, together constituting
once deployed westward
to hold the line of the eastern
mountains against Eisenhower's advancing troops.
The Atlas mountains in Tunisia form a doubly strong military position, since, a little way south of Tunis, the chain divides into the Western and Eastern Dorsals; seen on the
map the Dorsals resemble an inverted Y with the tail at Tunis. The Fifth Panzer Army (commanded by Walther Nehring until 9 December, Jiirgen von Arnim thereafter) at first lacked the force to hold the Western Dorsal, and British and American troops had
advanced there
determined push by the their ports
of entry. The
to fix their line larger
by
in patrol strength
British First arrival
November.
on the Eastern Dorsal
Casablanca conference in January
It
also
had
to fight hard to hold off a
Army, with French support, on Tunis and
of the American at
the
II
Bizerta,
Corps, with armour, allowed the Allies
end of January
1943.
They were
also
drawing
now under the command of Giraud; at the he had made an uneasy accommodation with de Gaulle
reinforcements from the Armee
which was
17
d'Afrique,
to last until April 1944.
341
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1943-1^4 5
However, the Germans had meanwhile been improving
more troops and
had been transferred from
aircraft
the Mareth Line via Tripoli.
The Mareth Line was
their position in Tunisia:
and Rommel was approaching
Sicily,
a fortification
system on the Libya-
Tunisia border built by the French against the Italian arm}' in Libya before 1939;
occupation by Rommel's troops
Montgomery, while
holding of the Eastern Dorsal protected them from frontal attack
their
by Eisenhower. Indeed,
in the short
term
the strategic situation in North Africa had
at least,
been reversed. Rommel, instead of finding himself caught between the pincers of the and Eighth Armies, had both
its
enemies from
The
Fifth
retired to join an arm)-
which could
a strong central position.
Panzer Arm) had used
its
It
now
was about
strike at either
do
to
January and
at
Faid
Corps
II
-
on 30 January. These unequipped
colonial force quite
in turn
First
or even
so.
mobility and armoured strength to keep the
Allied forces off balance along the Eastern Dorsal, striking at the
inexperienced American
its
February secured the Germans' back against
in early
at
Fondouk on
weak French XIX and at Bou Arada on 18
2 January,
attacks disorganised the French, essentially a
modern tanks, and forced the Rommel, decided in early was ripe for a counter-stroke. A
to contest the issue with
dispersion of the American armour. Arnim, in colloquy with
February that the enemy's situation in southern Tunisia
them over how it was to be launched was settled by their superior, Supreme Commander South, and in February one each of their Panzer
dispute between Kesselring,
divisions, 10th
and
21st (refitted since
Alamein), drove into the American
II
Corps
the
at
Faid pass through the Eastern Dorsal and further south, panicked the defenders, and by 19
February were pressing
the Kasserine pass through the Western Dorsal.
at
The
Allied
position in Tunisia was threatened by a 'roll-up' operation from south to north and the threat
was only averted by the intervention of the
supported by the
of the American 9th Division. The
artillery
German tanks to narrow on 22 January, when Rommel met
defence, confining the forward;
misjudged the
situation,
advantage and must
6th
return to Mareth to
he confessed
meet Montgomery's
both mounted spoiling attacks against the
brought, moreover, under the British
First
initial
which was
Africa
on 23 February) respectively, but
armies were battle-hardened at
wisdom
of Patton,
Army Group
and drove the remnants of the old Panzer Army
Africa
it
at
Kasserine and been
not tolerate amateurism; the
experienced generals.
Africa's rear,
breaching assault on the Mareth Line, found a way round
31
offensive
way
he had
and Eighth Armies
who did and commanded by
command
March, while Patton was probing
by
that
rear.
with limited success. The Americans had learned battle
two
Division,
valleys as they tried to force their
Kesselring,
Arnim and Rommel (appointed commander of Army Group
now
Armoured
terrain also favoured the
could not widen the attack swiftly enough to exploit his
now
being prepared in his
British
On
20
Montgomery launched
when
back to the
his direct attack tail
a
was held
of the Eastern Dorsal
March. After this setback the
Germans and
Italians
342
still
fielded a considerable force in
THREE WARS
Tunisia,
amounting
IN AFRICA
when
to over eleven divisions
reinforcements were included with the
However,
survivors of the old Panzer Arm}' Africa.
was
their supply situation
twenty-two out of fifty-one ships had been sunk during January, and the
airlift
critical:
mounted
to
supplement the sea convoys had delivered only 25,000 of the necessary 80,000 tons during February, despite the
employment of
Not even
to Tunisian airfields.
Many of
the
first
preponderance
secret
Gigant motorised gliders;
weapons
sufficed to offset the
German
lost in
hoped
so soon after Stalingrad, a fortress position he had also vainly
seemed
to
him doomed
'Army Group Africa might
as early as
as well
just
Rommel home on
ordered
6 March,
4 March: 'This
fuel
for their engines
bases altogether. the northern
Army Group
tail
from
by an Allied
Africa,
combat
day. Rearguards kept Africa, short
up
Army between
resistance during the next
May no
13
Arnim and Messe, passed
territory
front
Its
week
remained
into Allied captivity.
by an Allied force upon the Axis,
who had committed
a
Each of
who had
participated in
his three
last.
abandoned
8
May
its
Tunisian
the
7
and
was then
13 April,
had been broken
as the
for
It
it
next
remnants of Army Group
to defend,
German and
was the
in a setfell
final
and
sanctuary of
elements
its last
Italian
commanders, imposed
largest capitulation yet
grave humiliation for Hitler and a disaster for Mussolini,
his destiny to the creation
in Africa.
On
spirits.
opposite Tunis on 6 May. Both Tunis and Bizerta
surrendered; 275,000 Axis soldiers including both the
enough
aircraft,
of ammunition and bereft of fuel, tried to withdraw into the
Cape Bon. However, on
out to the
it
running and was trying to
which had been hustled from the Eastern Dorsal into
of the Dorsals by the Eighth
Army
still
produced wines and
force of 4500
confined to a small pocket covering Tunis and Bizerta. piece assault by the First
airlift.
the end," he forecast then;
is
be brought back.' Characteristically, though he
locally
air
coming
by
he could not bring himself to liquidate the front
By the end of April Arnim had only seventy-six tanks
Luftwaffe, confronted
penetrated
this battle,
to sustain
while something might yet be saved but charged Arnim with fighting
distil
April
disadvantage.
swampy ground and some were even
by Allied anti-tank weapons. Moreover, Hitler did not have his heart in
Tunisia
on 22
sixteen out of twenty-one Gigants flying petrol
formidable Tiger tanks, rushed to Tunisia to oppose the Allied
armour, were
in
MC323
the
down
and shot
Allied fighters intercepted
and maintenance of a great
wars on the continent had
now ended
Italian
empire
in catastrophe. Hitler,
two of them, could survive the aftermath; he had risked only
force to demonstrate loyalty to his fellow dictator
and
profit
by the
strategic
diversion which his intervention achieved. Mussolini could contemplate the aftermath in
no such sanguine his reputation.
spirit. In
Africa
Whether he and
he had
his
lost
both the greater part of the
regime could survive
343
at all
Italian
army and
now depended upon
Hitler,
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1943-
ms
AND THE
ITALY
BALKANS Austria.' the
seventeenth-century tag went. 'Others wage war, you wage
Happy weddings.' The Habsburgs Europe.
Italy,
antithesis -
the
at
in the
at
Its
proper marriage;
most
Adowa
in 1896
inglorious.
The
its
was
in
Austria's
in 1866
under
wars for independence from the
itself
Italian
monarchy
until 1918,
north and south, unified only
mid-nineteenth century, and to win
best unvictorious, at
Ethiopians
a
Habsburg possession
in
both love and war.
House of Savoy, never achieved
Habsburgs out
in
the greatest landholdings of any
which remained
parts of
unlucky
did indeed have a habit of marrying into property, and
them
eventually brought
this
colonies in Africa
later,
turned
expeditionary force which met the
was one of the few European armies
to suffer defeat at the
hands of indigenous forces throughout the course of the imperial conquest of the continent; while
its
avenging of
Haile Selassie in 1936 brought
No
war cost
and
1918.
ground but
allow
difficult
Italians
late 1918 to
Italians Italy
in the years that followed.
fought with tenacity and courage
its
lot
with
Britain,
the spoils
it
had
won
it
France and Russia,
winning
November
little
1917 by a
into the plain of Venice but recovered
its
place
among
its
self-esteem restored.
the victors; but, although 600,000
their lives to the Allied cause, neither Britain felt
between 1914
young Rommel was one of the most enterprising
army was thrown back
Italy
Allies
into the Julian Alps,
go over to the attack and end the war with
had given
Emperor
experience of which explains
suffering heavy casualties. Surprised in a twelfth battle in
intervention force, in which the
against the
of all fronts contested by the
May 1915, when Italy threw in mounted eleven successive offensives
There was the rub.
young
its
domestic and international conduct
on the most
junior officers, the Italian
enough by
campaign
odium.
World War,
Beginning in
the Italians
German
the First
were disparaged, the
their efforts
against the Austrians
its
in the successful
international
more than
Italy
almost everything about
Although
it
Adowa
had won. France and
344
Britain divided
nor France would
between themselves
ITALY
AND THE BALKANS
Germany's colonies and Turkey's Arabian dominions, Transjordan. All
Italy
Lebanon,
Syria,
on the
in 1921 to fix treaty limits
the
same
was obliged
The
disparity at
kingdom
was only
Britain
decided
which
to accept constraints
Mediterranean -
effectively set a sea in
its
which
it
naval strength
reasonably
felt
at it
be predominant.
to
inheritance lay in the
and
States
of fleet which the Allied powers were to be allowed
size
level as the Royal Navy's in the
had claims
and
got was a small slice of former Austrian territory and a foothold in the
Near East which proved untenable. Moreover, when the United
to operate, Italy
Palestine, Iraq
between
entitlement, as Italians perceived
Italy's
the root of the fascist revolution
appeal to the
in 1922. Mussolini's
partly
economic;
was equally
it
Italian
of
that
it,
and her post-war
which overwhelmed established order
a
working and lower-middle
class
veteran to veterans. At a time of
unemployment and financial turmoil, he not only offered work and security of promised honour to ex-servicemen and the territorial recompense to the that it had not received at the peace conference. The transformation of Libya,
recession,
savings but also
nation
annexed from Turkey during the Balkan wars of
1912-13, into an overseas 'empire'
followed by the conquest of Abyssinia in 1936 and the annexation of Albania in 1939.
War was
intervention in the Spanish Civil Italians that their
country would cut
and parcel of Mussolini's assurance
part
on the world
a figure
German
Axis,
efforts to build
an alliance centred on Austria,
had collapsed when Austria was incorporated
of 1938, which automatically devalued his
The
Anschluss
determined
that Mussolini
and
stage;
motivation also for his decision to enter the Second World
June 1940. His
was
Italy's
bilateral treaties
should become
that
War on as
to
was ultimately the
the
German
side in
an alternative to the
Italo-
into the Reich by the Anschluss
with Hungary and Yugoslavia. Hitler's partner in the
Second
World War. Circumstances dictated, however, that
though Mussolini strove
to
should never be an equal partner, hard
Italy
make himself one.
It
was not only
that Italy's
support only one-tenth of the military expenditure met by Germany
Germany S7415
million in 1938);
it
was
also that Italy's military strength
absolutely during the inter-war period, so that
it
was
1940 (as long as the war with France lasted) than divisions
were weaker
numbers were
in infantry
and
artillery
match
had been
for Britain
$746 million,
had declined
and France
in
for Austria in 1915. Italian earlier, partly
because
diverted, entirely for Mussolini's political conceit, into the Fascist Party's
dubiously valuable Blackshirt formations.
brilliantly
it
less a
than twenty-five years
Italian
through the surge of emigration to the United
and
economy could
(Italy
manpower had continued
States. Italian
to decline
equipment, though elegant
engineered, was produced by artisan methods which could not match the
output of British - and eventually American - factories working to volume demands. The Italian services also suffered
from the disadvantage of having been driven by Mussolini's
urge to national aggrandisement into rearming too early. Italian tanks and aircraft were a
whole generation outdated by
their British equivalents;
equipment, which reached the
British in 1942, they
345
when confronted
appeared antediluvian.
by American
THE WAR
There was
mitment
to
a
enemies Hitler had chosen is
Consequently East Africa
it
whose known
a half-hearted Italian
little
after
assistance in February 1941,
and notably
simpatico
Italian
com-
towards the
sentiment; but
Nazism influenced the national
arm) which crossed swords with the
British in
confidence had not been improved by
in 1940-1. Its
never
hostility
the American entry into the war.
October-November December and, despite the
it
no
peasants and artisans have high
against the Greeks in
Wavell's counter-offensive in
to Italy's effective
or
may be an
Italy's
hostility to
- and decisively so
and the Western Desert
poor showing
general,
them. Mild Francophobia
for
notably Anglophile, while
start
was
1943-1945
harboured
side: the Italians
regard for the United States,
outlook from the
THE WEST
and ultimately disabling impediment
final
war on Germany's
the Italian upper class
IN
1940.
arrival
really recovered. Brilliant
though the ordinary
It
of the Afrikakorps to
though soldiers
Italian
its
was severely shaken by
Rommel was found him,
commanders could not but remember that the origins of his reputation lay at Caporetto in November 1917, when he had captured several thousand
its
as a
their
in his exploits Italians at the
head of 200 Wurttemberg mountaineers. By the end of the campaign
had become prisoners of the in
1943 - exceeded 350,000,
Mussolini's African empire Italian
at
1943, the total
- in East Africa in
more than the
May
in Africa in
Allies
number of
the
number of Italians who
1941, in Libya in 1941-2
and
who had
those
in Tunisia
garrisoned
of the war. Even before the Tunisian debacle, the
start
army, which Mussolini had been planning the year before to raise to a strength of
ninety divisions, had equipment for only thirty-one. divisions in Africa, so
(220,000 strong)
high
fascist
regime
to
loss
reduced
it
Italy's
many of
Italian
shadow; and these twin
to a
generals
of so
by the
examine the wisdom of continuing
support.
its
The
after the catastrophe suffered
at Stalingrad,
command
Italian
soon
the best
Eighth
crises
Army
drove the
to lend Mussolini
and the
were disproportionately drawn from the
northern society of Savoy-Piedmont, seat of the royal house where their loyalty ultimately lay.
They had acquiesced
interests.
Once
it
became
position. During the
weight of Allied to action
in fascism as
clear that
summer of
air attack,
it
long as
was
1943,
it
favoured the monarchy's and the army's
failing to
and
do
so,
they began to reconsider their
particularly as Italian cities
began to
feel the
they were driven into plotting Mussolini's removal. The trigger
was the appearance of Allied landing forces on the southern coast of
Sicily
on
9-10 July 1943.
The decision
to invade Sicily after the expulsion
been taken without disagreement between the Husky,
as the
of the Axis from Tunisia had not
and Americans. To the Americans,
operation was to be known, risked diverting forces from and even setting
back the Second Front. To the benefits:
British
British
it
seemed
the domination of the central
to
promise highly desirable
Mediterranean, from which
levelled at the 'soft underbelly' of the Axis in southern France
if
intangible
threats could
be
and the Balkans; the
humiliation of Mussolini, perhaps leading to his downfall; the acquisition of a stepping-
stone towards the location of the invasion of Italy
346
itself, if
that subsequently
proved
easy,
.
AND THE BALKANS
ITALY
The
desirable or necessary.
Washington Americans
in
May
British eventually
had
their way, at the Trident conference in
that year. In the event, the invasion
took Hitler even more by surprise than Mussolini - or his
harboured no
persuaded the
1943, but then only because the changing circumstances
Second Front could not be opened
that a
about the sympathies of the
illusions
enemies. Hitler
Italian
On
Italian ruling class.
14
May he had
told his generals:
In Italy
we
some way. The
corps, the clergy, the Jews
The broad masses
royal family,
at liberty;
[still
and broad sectors of the
Semitic]
for
and lacking
guard about him. But the
fascist
Moreover he
uncertain of himself in military as
is
Mussolini's faults he was not anti-
all
marshalling his is
leading
all
service are hostile or negative towards us.
civil
apathetic
are
incompetent generals
Hitler
had
just offered
and southern
Italy
The Duce
leadership.
in real
power
in the
is
and has
affairs
to rely
Mussolini
been refused. As
a precaution, plans
ation Alarich, so
named
German
five
from the rear
on
easily
and
Sicily,
for the
that the
Hitler insisted that the island
Anglo-American descent would a
re-formed in
occupation of Italy (Oper-
Teutonic conqueror of Rome). However,
after the fifth-century
Peloponnese. The spectre of
least
but his offer had
although Mussolini warned that he expected the Allied army released by Tunisia to attack
at
[my] offer of troops.
lost in Tunisia,
had been prepared
its
was too heavily defended fall
on
victory in
to be taken
Sardinia, Corsica or the
Greek
landing in Greece aroused Hitler's worst forebodings;
threatened not only the opening of interruption of supply of Germany's
a 'third front' in
most
from the Balkans and, most precious of
vital
all,
.
his hostile or
divisions, to join the four
of those
parties
.
now
is
hands of others.
evident from the incomprehensible reply -
coming from the Duce - turning down or evading
Sicily
may be got rid of members of the officer
can rely only on the Duce. There are strong fears that he
or neutralised in
raw
oil
it
the rear of the Ostheer but also the
materials, bauxite,
copper and chrome
from Romania's wells
at Ploesti.
Operation Husky A remarkable
Allied deception plan involving the planting of a corpse bearing fabricated
top-secret papers
had further helped
to convince Hitler that any
enemy
invasion
fleet
detected in the Mediterranean would be heading for Greece, Corsica or Sardinia, not
Italy.
Even when an earthquake bombardment of Sicily's offshore
commander
to capitulate to the Allies
of an invasion of
Italy.
intensification of the
the
German
Hitler,
on
11
June, he
still
island, Pantelleria, forced
its
refused to consider the possibility
moreover, was distracted by events elsewhere - by the
combined bomber
offensive against the Reich, by the worsening of
situation in the Battle of the Atlantic
and by last-minute decisions over the
launching of the Kursk offensive (Operation Citadel)
347
in Russia.
He had
also just
changed
THE WAR
headquarters again. Since March, the Ukraine, he had been
only
the
at
Prussia, it
end of June
at his
for his
after a
THE WEST
IN
prolonged sojourn
gloomy
his
The
should
divisions
had brought
Allies
armada which
have
began
in 1943
been divided
at
it
offensive potential,
Patton's
of Cape Passero on 9
east
and two airborne divisions
eight seaborne
in
there
was understandable
moment when
the
and
their descent west
left
Rastenburg in East
at
Red Army's
depended,
exceeded not only OKW's forecast of
greatly
He
before Citadel began on 5 July. Since
to destroy the
of the war on the Eastern Front
attention
Montgomery's
Werwolf headquarters
Wolfschanze
forest retreat,
a bare four days
was on the outcome of Citadel, designed
that
at his
holiday house, the Berghof in Berchtesgaden.
and was re-established there
that the course
1^43-1^45
their
and
July.
to the assault - an
amphibious
capability
but also the Axis force deployed on the island. Alfredo Guzzoni, the Italian general in overall
command, disposed of twelve
of negligible worth; four other
match
divisions, but
Italian divisions,
for the Allies; only the 15th Panzergrenadier
Panzer Division (the disparity in strength
of these
six
were
and the newly raised Hermann Goering
of the Luftwaffe's ground troops) were
elite
static Italian divisions
though capable of manoeuvre, were no
first class.
Despite the
and the surprise the invaders achieved, however, Operation Husky,
the Sicily landing was
codenamed, went
less
as
smoothly than planned. The Allied airborne
drawn from the US 82nd and British 1st Airborne Divisions, suffered enormous casualties when inexperienced pilots dropped them into the sea and nervous anti-aircraft forces,
down
A key operation by British paratroopers to seize the Mount Etna on the fourth day of the invasion proved particularly costly when the German 1st Parachute Division counter-attacked. However, the seaborne landings mounted against Italian 'coast' units were uniformlysuccessful, and some of the 'defenders' even helped unload the invaders' landing craft. On
gunners shot
their aircraft.
Primosole bridge south of
15 July
Major-General
Sir
Harold Alexander, Patton's and Montgomery's superior, was able
to issue a directive for the final elimination of Axis forces
occupied the western secure Messina into the toe of
half,
Montgomery was
the north-eastern
at
Italy.
to
Mount Etna on
pass to the west.
the island. While Patton
thus cutting off the Axis garrison's line of retreat
tip,
In the event, Patton
made
rapid progress against light resistance, but
Montgomery, opposed by the Hermann Goering of
on
advance each side of Mount Etna and
Division,
found
it
impossible to pass east
the short route to Messina and was forced to redeploy his divisions to
On
20 July Alexander accordingly ordered Patton to delay his assault on
Palermo and Trapani and instead turn eastward to drive along the coast road to Messina. Hitler,
who had
sent a
German
Guzzoni's conduct of the army,
now
battle,
and
five
ordered two of them, the
Sicily to stiffen
German
von Senger und
Etterlin, to
oversee
divisions as reinforcements to the Italian
Parachute and the 29th Panzergrenadier, into
1st
the defence.
Confronted by these Patton and
liaison officer, Frido
Mount Etna and
advance slowed.
forces, the Allied
Montgomery had formed
a line
It
was not
until 2
August that
running south-east and north-west between
the north coast of the island. Even then they
348
moved forward
only by
AND THE
ITALY
BALKAN'S
using seaborne forces in a series of amphibious hooks
enemy from
the
early as 3
sailing at night, the)
of Messina. The Germans began to evacuate on
evaded Allied
largely
and were even able
air attack
portion of their equipment (9800 vehicles). The Allies
Messina on
had indeed secured the Allied hollow achievement.
to
a
to save a large
triumphal entry into
had not by
the enemy's troops,
m
North
an)' visible sign
were
Africa
now
had come Irom the west.
sufficient pressure
on the
The Americans,
all
those sent
Churchill's
it
a
1st
it
24 Jul))
(after
Parachute
would
exert
bring about a reversal of alliances.
represented by General George Marshall, the chief of staff, in any
as
reversal of alliances. As always the) held to the view that direct
Europe was the only quick and
They had been deflected from converted to
be seen whether
to
anti-fascist forces in Italy to
doubted the value of a
assault into north-west
it
brought Turkey nearer to joining the
Russia, since
remained
It
was
over, that
the 16th and 26th Panzer, 3rd and 29th Panzergrenadier and
Divisions,
August;
11
of communications through the Mediterranean to the
had not diverted German divisions from
Italy,
case
It
made
much damage on
failed to inflict
line
wars there and
East; but, since the
it
as
enem\ had escaped.
August; but the
17
Although Operation Husk)
Allies;
16 August) to unseat
Guzzoni had accepted
August that his situation was ultimately indefensible and had begun to evacuate
his Italian units across the Straits
Middle
and
15
(8, 11,
his strong defensive positions. Nevertheless.
by
this position
by argument. They suspected
commitment
to
'peripheral'
a
underbelly' of Hitler's Europe, better seen as
would be a blow to his where he had genuinely
prestige
and because
against
Hitler.
1942 but had never been
retrospect,
(in
strategy its
means of toppling
certain
practicalities in
rightly so)
the logic of
what he called the
dewlap. Hitler valued
Italy
because
'soft
its
loss
offered flank protection to the Balkans,
it
vital economic and strategic interests. However, if he had been on General Marshall's assessment of Italy as a secondary front where operations would 'create a vacuum into which is essential to pour more and more means', he would have wholeheartedly agreed. A reversal of alliances was nevertheless at hand. The arrival of the Allies in Sicily and the incontrovertible evidence of how limply the Italian forces in the island had opposed them now persuaded Italy's ruling class that must change sides. Churchill, in conference
able to eavesdrop
it
it
with Roosevelt
at
Quebec (Quadrant,
news of approaches from Mussolini's enemies: 'Badoglio he
is
going to double-cross
tricked." Hitler Sicily
.
.
it
.
in progress,
.
.
.
likely that Hitler will
and assure him of his support,
peninsula with his
own
troops
at
the
first
in a
a
summons
to
be the one to be
While the
flight
first
admits
battles
of
to Italy to see his
form of words intended to disguise
his
and seizing the defensible portion of the sign
of treachery.
Grand Council requested Mussolini's resignation
meekly obeyed
Jul).
he had made the long
intention of neutralising the Italian ami)
Fascist
is
the
[the senior Italian general|
himself had formed the same impression on 19
and Kursk were both
fellow dictator
someone
when he heard
14-23 August), remarked
the royal
palace
349
On
as
by the
25
Jul) a
meeting of the
Prime Minister. king,
When
he
he was arrested and
THE WAR
imprisoned. King Victor
IN
THE WEST
Emmanuel assumed
1943-1945
command
direct
of the ctrmed forces and
Marshal Pietro Badoglio became Prime Minister.
The new government
publicly
announced
that
it
would remain
in the
war on
side but secretly entered immediately into direct negotiations with the Allies.
meeting took place
on
in Sicily
5 August, the day before Raffaele Guariglia, the
German ambassador
Foreign Minister, gave the
negotiating with the Allies. Eisenhower was
Churchill to conclude an armistice, but
While the
Italians
his
word of honour
Hitler's
The
new
that Italy
first
Italian
was not
soon afterwards empowered by Roosevelt and
on terms much harsher than Badoglio expected. on the mainland went forward. The
quibbled, preparation for a landing
would land north of Rome and seize the capital by parachute moves they guessed Hitler had in train to occupy the peninsula himself. Eventually, on 31 August, they were presented with an ultimatum: either to accept the terms, which were in effect unconditional - as Churchill on 28 July had told the House of Commons they would be - or to suffer the consequences, which meant German occupation. On 3 September the Italians signed, believing that they were being given time to prepare themselves against the German intervention they knew must follow as soon as news of the armistice became public. Only five days later, however, on 8 Italians
hoped
that the Allies
landing, thus forestalling the
September, Eisenhower
made
the announcement, just a few hours before his troops
began landing south of Naples
—
at
Salerno.
The Salerno landing (Operation Avalanche) was not the mainland.
On
3
—
Hitler's countermeasures first
by the
Allies
September Montgomery's Eighth Army had crossed the
on the
Straits
Italian
of Messina
to take Reggio Calabria as a preliminary to the occupation of the toe of Italy. Hitler
nevertheless
decided
to
discount
Montgomery, who was disgruntled
this at
move
as
unimportant,
being shunted into
a
a
secondary
view role.
had by
shared
The Salerno
landing, by contrast, stirred Hitler to order Operation Alarich to begin. Although he failed to prevent the sailing of the Italian fleet to Malta as required
by the armistice terms, the
Luftwaffe did succeed in sinking the battleship Roma en route by release of
one of its new
a guided glider bomb. In almost ever) other respect, Operation Alarich (now codenamed Achse) worked with smoothness. Washington was reluctant to commit forces to Italy because it was determined the
weapons,
Alliance
should launch an invasion of north-west Europe without avoidable delay.
Accordingly,
it
was very much
and divisions had obliged him able to use the divisions
to Hitler's advantage that
to
go ashore so
far to
Eisenhower's lack of landing
the south. In consequence Hitler was
which had escaped from
Sicily
to
concentrate against the
Avalanche forces, while he deployed those brought from France and elsewhere (the Panzer Division was temporarily transferred from Russia for the mission) to occupy
and subdue the
Italian
army
in the centre
craft
1st
SS
Rome
and north of the peninsula. Before the invasion
350
ITALY
AND THE BALKANS
he had received contradictory advice: Rommel, one of his trying to
favourites,
had warned
hold the south; Kesselring, the general on the spot and an acute
had assured him both men's
against
strategic analyst,
could safely be established below Rome. He now employed Rommel took charge of the divisions which had been rushed down military and civilian resistance in Milan and Turin (and to
that a line
While
talents.
through the Alps to put
recapture the tens of thousands of Allied prisoners liberated from captivity defection), Kesselring organised the
Tenth Army
on
Italy's
check and contain the
in the south to
Salerno landing.
German troops elsewhere moved rapidly to disarm and imprison Italian troops or when it was offered. The areas of Yugoslavia under Italian occupation were brought under German control or that of their Croat (Ustashi) puppets. Italian-occupied France was taken over by German troops (with tragic consequences for extinguish their resistance
who had found
the Jews
were both
refuge there). Sardinia and Corsica, regarded as indefensible,
evacuated, the former
skilfully
Free French invading force had in revolt
on news of the
actually scored a
come
on 9 September, the
armistice. In the Italian-occupied sectors
September
by
(brutally put
down by
Italian garrison
the Germans,
who
captured), the British, in the teeth of strong and wise
Dodecanese
the Italian-occupied
air
as
after a
who had
risen
of Greece the Germans
on
islands
12
shot
all
of the Ionian islands on the Italian officers they
American discouragement, invaded
September and, with
Italian
took Kos, Samos and Leros. Sensing an easy success, offered by their local -
October
1
remarkable success against the run of strategic events. Encouraged by an
outbreak of fighting between the Germans and the 9
latter
to the rescue of the local insurgents,
acquiescence,
command
of the
the Americans had perceived but the British refused to acknowledge - the Germans
assembled
a superior triphibious force,
retook Kos on 4 October, forced the evacuation of
Samos and seized back Leros by 16 November. The Dodecanese operation, painfully humiliating to the British, was then extended into the Cyclades. By the end of November the
Germans
directly controlled the
and several thousand entering the war
Greek adventure
on
whole of the Aegean, had taken over 40,000
British prisoners,
and had
actually set
the Allied side - Churchill's justification for
in the
first
mounting
On
16
his
second
place.
These were not the only chestnuts plucked by Hitler from the defection.
Italian
back the likelihood of Turkey's
September an airborne
task force, led
by an SS
fire
officer,
raised
by
Italy's
Otto Skorzeny,
rescued Mussolini from the mountain resort in the Gran Sasso where he was currently confined. Mussolini
at
once proclaimed the existence of an
north of the country; after 9 October still
loyal to
opponent the
him and
in Egypt.
it
was
to
have
led by Marshal Rudolfo Graziani,
The
its
'Italian Social
own
Republic' in the
army, formed from soldiers
once governor of Libya and Wavell's
creation of Mussolini's successor state to fascist Italy ensured that
growing resistance to German occupation of the north would swell into
with
brutal
and
indifferent. Italy's
tragic
change of alliance
a civil
war,
To those consequences Hitler was entirely relieved him of the obligation to supply a large part of
consequences.
351
THE WAR
the country with the coal
on which
it
IK
depended
body of Italian volunteer workers
to the
who
million military prisoners
Meanwhile the defending
in
for energy;
work
minimise the
ill
it
added
a captive
and
brought him nearly
industry;
set to
it
effect
a
mountain
product of the general
spine, rising in places to nearly 10,000 feet, throws
and west towards the Adriatic and Mediterranean. Between the
deep
valleys to the sea. Rivers, spurs
defensible lines
at
close intervals,
made
the
all
more
are
dominated by
natural strongpoints
Salerno, the spot
landing in
Italy, falls
Mount
Vesuvius.
formed the perhaps his
all
sides by high
Had
south
east
offer a succession
breach because the spine
where the bridges
recommending
ground and the
exit
that carry
them
the
main
staff for
the beaches to the planners),
northward
Kesselring had sufficient force available
as Naples.
of
he had assured
Commanding
as
he
did,
is
at
it
is is
blocked by the massif of
the outset, he might have
was
Hitler
militarily feasible,
however, only seven divisions
in
he was obliged
to
at full
strength,
strength he had against the northern edge of the bridgehead with the aim of
denying the invaders
above the
numerous spurs
chosen by the Central Mediterranean Force
Tenth Army, of which the 16th Panzer alone was
commit what
had
on the spurs above.
line across the peninsula that
as far
staff elite,
The peninsula's
exactly within this topographical pattern. Although the coastal strip
unusually wide and level (the factor
dominated on
difficult to
strip,
an officer
spurs, rivers flow rapidly in
and mountain spine together
pushes the north-south highways into the coastal
the chances of
affiliation
correctly argued that the Italian terrain lent itself admirably to defence. central
a
of the Allied invasion of the
founded. Kesselring, by
of the Luftwaffe but by training and background
labour force
for the Reich.
Rommel's deprecation of
to his satisfaction.
south of Rome had proved
Italy
1943-1945
German
could also be
strategic effort to
mainland was developing
THE WEST
a swift exit
be
city (eventually to
towards Naples, and thus win time to construct
known
as the
a front
Winter Position).
Despite the Tenth Army's immediate weakness,
it
nevertheless gave the Avalanche
week of the invasion. Mark Clark, the American general commanding the Fifth Army, had two corps under his command, the British X and US VI. Supported by overwhelming naval and air bombardments, both got easily ashore on 9 September. The) were slow to exploit their initial superiority, however, and next day came under heavy counter-attack from German reserves, including those from the toe of Italy force a
bad time
who had
in the first
escaped Montgomery's army. Counter-attacks by the 16th Panzer Division were
particularly effective.
On
Battipaglia, close to their
12
September
it
retook from the British the key village of
boundary with the Americans; the next
Panzergrenadier Division,
it
in half and cut the British off
from the Americans
who
a
lost Altavilla
and Persano and were
managed to stabilise the firepower on the advancing Germans. tremendous weight of
preparing to re-embark their assault divisions.
bridgehead by unleashing
day, together with 29th
redoubled the pressure, threatening to break the bridgehead
While the infantry of the US 45th Division took to
The
Allies
their heels, the division's artillerymen
stuck to their guns and, with naval and air support, eventually halted the
352
German
ITALY
AND THE BALKANS
Panzergrenadiers in their tracks.
By
15
September, thanks to the landing of
infantry in the bridgehead, the crisis direct
command
against him,
armour and American airborne
British
had passed. General Heinrich von
and Kesselring accordingly sanctioned
a righting
reinforced by the British
On
first
Airborne Division, which on 9 September had landed
1st
contact with the Americans in the bridgehead south of Salerno.
Germans began
shifted
Army had been
September spearheads of the Eighth Army, advancing from
16
now
withdrawal towards the
of his chosen mountain lines further north. Montgomery's Eighth
Taranto.
Vietinghoff, in
of the Tenth Army, recognised that the balance of force had
their withdrawal, covering
it
by blowing the bridges
Two
Calabria,
at
made
days later the
in their rear as the
Army pursued them. On October British troops entered Naples. Meanwhile the Eighth Army had pushed two divisions, including the 1st Canadian, up the Adriatic coast to capture the complex of airfields at Foggia, from which it was intended to mount strategic
Fifth
1
bombing
raids into
southern Germany. In early October the Fifth and Eighth Armies
established a continuous line across the peninsula, 120 miles long, running along the
Volturno river north of Naples and the Biferno river which flows into the Adriatic
at
Termoli.
Kesselring's
Winter Position
Now began the bitter and costly winter campaign defended the approaches
to
to
breach the line by which the Germans
Rome. Advance along
the central mountain spine being
impossible, the Eighth and Fifth Armies' offensive efforts were confined to short stretches
on
either coast,
on
fronts
at
most twenty miles
long. This -
and the
failure
of the
British
and Americans to co-ordinate their offensives - greatly simplified Kesselring's strategy, since
it
allowed him to leave his central sector almost undefended while concentrating his
best divisions
they had been
on the Mediterranean and Adriatic drawn from OKW's central mobile
remain so throughout the
Italian war. In
flanks.
German troops
reserve,
were of high
in Italy,
quality
because
and would
October Kesselring deployed the 3rd and 15th
Panzergrenadier Divisions against the Fifth Army, with the
and the 16th and 26th Panzer, 29th Panzergrenadier and
1st
Hermann Goering
in reserve,
Parachute, together with
two
on the Adriatic flank. Against these nine divisions the Allies could deploy only nine of their own, of which one alone was armoured; and, although Clark and Montgomery had additional tank resources in independent units, they did not enjoy infantry divisions,
material superiority, nor could they count
Germans from of
Italy
made
established
their fortified positions. all
their total
Airpower has
too evident. The Allied
on and behind
on air
its
command limitations,
forces posed
steep, rocky hillsides, they
no
of the
air to
unseat the
which the topography
threat to the defenders:
had no need
to
manoeuvre and
required only the barest of essentials to sustain their resistance. Historians might have recalled that Italy
had only twice
in
modern
times been overrun
353
in a rapid offensive, first
THE WAR
by Charles
THE WEST 194M94S
of France in 1494 and second by Napoleon
VIII
French had brought
case the
first
IN
after
Marengo
in 1800. In the
revolutionary weapon, mobile cannon, to the
a
campaign, and in the second they had been confronted by inept and divided opponents. Neither condition obtained in the winter of 1943. The Allies enjoyed in a battle
with
a
resolute
standing his ground.
The
and
at
best material parity
enemy who had nothing to lose and much to gain by make him loosen his grip on the crags and outcrops of
skilful
effort to
the Apennines was to involve the British and Americans in the bitterest and bloodiest of their struggles with the
Wehrmacht on any
The bloodiness of the
Italian
Mediterranean Force because, by
drawn from narrowly
56th and 46th Divisions divisions, 4th
and
states
Second World War. harder by
the
all
the
Allied
were The US 36th and 45th Divisions were its
divisions
formations of the National Guard, while the British
from the
raised
felt
chance of assignment, so many of
came from London and
were
8th,
was
localised recruiting areas.
and mountain
respectively Texas
a
front of the
fighting
Canadian was formed of volunteers from
the North Midlands.
'martial race' minority
a
dominion which,
of the
after the
The two Indian Raj,
while the
1st
tragedy of a failed
on Dieppe in August 1942. harboured ill-concealed suspicions about the freedom with which British generals shed its soldiers' blood. Three other groups of soldiers under Alexander's command, the 2nd New Zealand Division and the French Moroccan and the raid
Polish
Corps, were
II
renowned
for their hardihood; the Poles in particular
the fiercest determination to pay back the
enemy
country since 1939. However, in the prevailing circumstances,
make good
means
to
fragility
of the instrument under their
the losses they suffered
command
at
the
most harassing
fighting
was
all
all
between Gaeta and
Pescara.
Its
their
human
the Allied generals throughout
it.
to follow immediately
success, as the Allies drove forward to attack the Winter Position busily fortifying
on
three lacked any easy
the front. Recognition of the
afflicted
the battle for Italy and deeply affected their conduct of
Some of
demonstrated
for the sufferings inflicted
on the Salerno
which Kesselring was
western end, hinged on the great fortress
abbey of Monte Cassino. where Benedict had established the roots of European monasticism in the sixth century, was section of the
whole
position.
Its
known
between
heavily in the five offensives they launched
From
12 to 15
October the
Fifth
as the
Gustav Line and was the strongest
approaches were strong also and were to cost the
Army
12
October and
Allies
17 January to reach
it.
established bridgeheads across the Volturno, just
north of Naples. Meanwhile on the Adriatic coast the Eighth
Army
crossed the river Trigno
beyond Termoli, which had been captured on 6 October, and then breasted up to the line of the river Sangro. The Sangro battle (20 November to 2 December) proved particularly difficult.
Winter rains turned the
the
week.
first
The
Italian
river to spate
When Montgomery campaign, a slow and
and forced both sides
into inactivity during
got his army across he was prevented from exploiting
bitter slog
Po
until
22
up the peninsula. The April 1945.
354
Allies did not reach the
THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN Line reached by Allied forces y-t Ma] I94S *"-^/y. in Western Europe, 7 May
—
,
—7£-Line reached by Russian forces
SWITZERLAND
355
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1943- 1
by the tenacious German defence of the coastal town of Ortona, where the
his success
Canadian Division suffered heavy casualties
Montgomery's
last
Mediterranean theatre
house-to-house
in
battle before
he
left
to
Sangro was
fighting.
assume
1st
command
of the
Overlord forces.
While the Sangro campaign was
in progress,
Army had been
the Fifth
inching
maze of broken country and enemy demolitions, to the river Garigliano, from which the valley of the Liri led past the Monte Cassino massif towards Rome. The approaches to the Liri were, however, dominated by the peaks of Monte Camino, Rotondo and Sammucro, each of which had to be scaled and conquered in a succession of bitter actions between 29 November and 21 December. Winter snowstorms then imposed a pause until 5 January, when the American and French divisions of the Fifth forward, through a
Army
attacked again to reach the Rapido river, which flows into the
move
heights. As a final
make an
Division to
in his drive to enter the Liri valley, Clark
assault crossing
Liri
below the Cassino
ordered the 36th (Texas)
of the Rapido, on the seaward side between Cassino
junction with the Lin, on 20 January 1944. The American engineer commander responsible for clearing the mines with which the Germans had strewn the battlefield, and in charge of bridging the watercourse once the infantry had crossed in assault boats, warned beforehand that 'an attack through a muddy valley that was without suitable approach routes and exit roads and that was
and
its
blocked by organised defences behind an unfordable situation practice.
and
result in a great loss
The Texans
of
life.'
river [would] create
some
tried for three days to cross the river;
reach them, and most of them
an impossible
His prediction was gruesomely borne out in
swam back
to the near side.
did, but
When
all
help failed to
the operation was
abandoned, 1000 were dead, out of an infantry strength of less than 6000. The report of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division which the disaster
it
had
merely
inflicted,
stating that
it
after-action
opposed them conveyed no sense of
had 'prevented enemy troops
crossing'.
The repulse of the Texan attack ended all Mark Clark's hopes for an early breakthrough to Rome up Highway 6, the main north-south route on the Mediterranean coast. He did not despair of capturing
Rome
quickly, however, for since 3
November
a plan,
sponsored by
Eisenhower, had been afoot to unhinge the Winter Position by an amphibious landing the Fifth Army's rear military;
to
it
at
Anzio, close to
partook of the
match Overlord
in
politics
of the
Normandy with another
landing (Anvil, later Dragoon) in the south
of France. General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of Anvil as a wasteful diversion. However, that for
its
support
it
1944, since Anvil could only Pisa to
Fifth
was
his
duty to
fleet
staff,
facilitate
scheduled to leave
be launched from northern
Rimini was regarded
by mid-1944 the
it
personally regarded
it,
and he recognised
required the retention by the Central Mediterranean Force of
considerable portion of its landing
from
in
Rome. The genesis of the plan was not entirely Second Front, in particular the controversial plan
Italy.
as essential for a successful
Army would have
to get north
356
Italy for
of
England
at
the
a
end of
Possession of a line running
launching of Anvil; to reach
Rome
quickly;
and
it
to advance
ITALY
An American Sherman
AND THE BALKANS
tank debarking from a Landing Ship Tank (1ST) ai Anzio,
May
1944, at the time of the break-out from the bridgehead.
beyond Rome at
it
would require landing
craft to
make
a descent
behind the Winter Position
once - hence Anzio and Operation Shingle.
The
logistic
was
calculation
According to Bedell Smith's plan,
were detained February.
On
in the
P.
sixty
Mediterranean
22 January the
US
troops as well as the American
John
flawless,
Lucas, debarked
at
which included
thirty miles
Had Lucas
risked rushing
at
a large
Divisions,
extended to 6
complement of
commanded by
British
General
south of Rome. The landing achieved
complete surprise; neither the Abwehr nor Kesselring's preparation.
was lamentable.
Landing Ships Tank (the key amphibious vessel)
Armoured and 3rd
Anzio
practice
until 15 January, a terminal date later
VI Corps,
1st
operational
the
Rome
the
staff first
had detected any sign of day, his spearheads
its
would
probably have arrived, though they would have soon been crushed; nevertheless he might
have 'staked out claims well inland,' as Montgomery was to
357
try to
do
in
Normandy.
In the
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1943- 1*45
event he did neither but confined himself to landing large numbers of
and securing the perimeter of
a tin)
bridgehead.
He
men and
vehicles
thus achieved the worst of both
worlds, exposing his force to risk without imposing any on the enemy. The Germans,
rescued from
crisis
by his
assembled 'emergency
inactivity, hastily
from soldiers returning from
leave,
and these were rushed
to
were transferred from the north and quiet sectors of the Winter tried to
move
on 30 January he found
inland
way
the
undertaken
on
in great strength
people of the
men
Lucas's
fate that
sea,
offensive,
warning
Hitler's orders as a
American landing could be thrown into the
on
barred; and
formed Fourteenth Army counter-attacked him. This
and
successor, General Lucius Truscott,
was
Lucas
newly
Fischgang,
was
to the Allies that an Anglo-
reassurance to the
as a
He was
When
15 February the
Position.
codenamed
awaited the invaders of northern Europe.
besieged in squalor and danger.
units' (Alarmeinheiten)
Anzio while formed units
Fischgancj failed;
relieved
German but
it
left
on 23 February and
his
to sustain the defence for the next three
left
months.
A Having
Rome
failed to take
crisis in
both
Allied strategy
via the Liri valley
found himself confronted by the necessity
to
and
smash
monaster) of Cassino which dominated Highway
Anzio, General
via
Mark Clark now
way forward past the great fortress had been chosen by St Benedict his contemplative monks; the monks
his
-
6.
1400 years earlier as a place of impregnable refuge for
It
remained, assailed on three sides by the clamour of war; the monastery was
immediate environs were garrisoned by the
impregnable
as ever. Its
one of the
best in the
commander and
a lay
monastery buildings all
member
of
St
Benedict's Order,
for defence; but the crags
the defences they
Four times
Wehrmacht. Frido von Senger und
needed
to
hold the
in the next three
1st
as
Parachute Division,
Etterlin,
the local corps
would not allow them
to use the
and re-entrants of the mountain provided
Allies at bay.
months, between 12 February and 17 May, Allied troops
came forward to the assault and three times they were repulsed. In the First Battle of Cassino the US 34th Division merely learned the painful lesson of how naturally strong and how strongly defended the Cassino position was. In the Second Battle the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Division, assaulted the monastery
commanded
and the town
at its
by Bernard Freyberg, the veteran of Crete,
foot
between
15
and
18 February; their attack
was preceded by the bombing of the monastery by 135 Flying Fortresses which reduced it to ruins, but both bombers and troops failed to dislodge the German parachutists from their positions. In the Third Battle, 15-23
heavier
air
impregnable than
it
had been
the monaster)'- and the parachutists
March, Freyberg's divisions tried again, with even
support. Again the attack failed, leaving the Cassino position
burrowed
to
at
the outset: constant
town below
into
a
heap of
form tunnels and bunkers.
358
bombing and ruins,
into
shelling
still
more
had tumbled
which the German
ITALY
AND THE BALKANS
By April the conduct of Allied strategy
become openly
scathing
and Fourteenth Armies; although attack
and German
cities
was almost
in Italy
in crisis. Churchill
had
the lack of progress. Hitler exulted in the success of the Tenth
at
vast sectors
of the Eastern Front were
rocked nightly under Bomber Command's
Anglo-American enemies had advanced only seventy miles
in eight
Russian
falling to
assault, in Italy his
months. Mark Clark,
perhaps the most egocentric Allied general of the Second World War, feared for his career, his
temperamental antipathy Alexander,
Cassino.
the
Command
been fed by
to the British having
commander
theatre
since
their
double
failure at
Eisenhower's assumption of the
could see no way forward, and even model of the military aristocrat, had begun to doubt his will and capacity to unlock the stalemate. What was needed was a plan and a new impetus to relaunch Allied Armies Italy on to the path of victory. Behind the locked front the Allied air forces were playing their part. They were commanded by Ira C. Eaker, who had been transferred from Britain, where he had directed the first (unsuccessful) stage of the American strategic bombing attack on Germany. From March onwards, they had been prosecuting Operation Strangle, designed
Supreme
Allied
Churchill,
who
revered
to destroy the logistic
and
in
in Britain in January,
him
as the
network which supplied the Tenth and Fourteenth Armies
missions against units in the front
line,
was
a
model of military
logic; then, in
Alexander's chief of staff, John Harding, began to construct an equally logical plan to
exploit the Allied capacity for
manoeuvre on
the ground.
Since the end of the previous year Allied Armies reinforced.
The
(commanded by late
Anzio
the Italian roads and railways presented profitable
strategic targets for aircraft. Eaker's interdiction plan
April,
at
the Winter Position. Although the terrain precluded successful ground-attack
Polish
II
Corps was
now
present in
its
Italy
full
significantly
The Eighth Army
Oliver Leese after Montgomery's departure to England for Overlord in
December) had been joined by an additional Indian
armoured
had been
strength.
division
division,
a
South African
and another hard-fighting Canadian formation, the 5th Armoured
Division. Truscott's corps in the
Anzio bridgehead had doubled
Expeditionary Force, formed largely of Moroccan
hill
in size. Further, a
tribesmen to
whom
French
mountain
warfare was second nature, had taken over the sector between Cassino and the coastal plain.
These reinforcements
largely
compensated
for
the
withdrawal to
Britain,
in
preparation for Overlord, of the six experienced British and American divisions which had
fought the Italian campaign thus
far.
Out of
their disparate but
complementary
qualities,
Harding began to construct an operational plan (Diadem) designed to turn the Cassino
open up the Liri valley and draw in the Anzio force, with the object of encircling Germans south of Rome and delivering the city into Allied hands.
position,
the
Harding's plan was
that,
covered by an elaborate deception (Dunton) designed to
persuade the Germans of the danger of another amphibious descent the
Pisa-Rimini
position
peninsula, the Poles
which marked Kesselring's ultimate
would
attack
and seize Cassino
359
in a
in their rear,
line
of retreat
nearer in
the
Fourth Battle from the north,
THE WAR
while the French valley to the
infiltrated the
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
mountains from the south. This move would open the
Liri
Canadian and South African armour, while the Americans on the west coast
drove across the Garigliano to link up with the Anzio corps, which would break out from its
bridgehead to block the Germans' line of retreat to Rome.
promised
A major
encirclement victory
to stand in the offing.
Much
of the
initiative for this
the French Expeditionary Force,
plan
came from General Alphonse
who promised
Juin,
Harding and Alexander
commanding
that his
North
way through the mountains to which Anglo-Saxons were blind. When Diadem opened on 11 May they were indeed able to do so. The Poles, opposed by the German 1st Parachute Division, at first failed to match the North Africans' progress; but after Juin's mountaineers, led by his Moroccan irregulars, had wriggled their way through into the entrance to the Liri valley by 17 May, the Poles carried Monte Cassino in a final and self-sacrificial assault. The mouth of the Liri valley and the coastal zone thus being opened, the American infantry and British armoured divisions started forward on 23 May, the same day on which Truscott's VI Corps broke out of the Anzio bridgehead.
Africans
had the experience
to find a
A
British soldier brings in
two German prisoners under Castle
Cassino was taken by Polish
$
5$* jW '^' :
,:>- ;
II
Corps
Hill at Cassino,
after a savage battle.
May
1942.
ITALY
AND THE BALKANS
Both the German Tenth Army and encirclement of the declared an 'open
city',
Rome now
and thronging with escaped
prospect of
a
who
Rome,
circulated
remained, awaited liberation. The
triumphal entry overcame Clark's strategic sense. Always impatient of
whose
style
of
command was
advisory rather than emphatic, and increasingly
suspicious of what he conceived to be his British
own on
of victory, he issued orders of his their
Allies' grasp, the
Allied prisoners of war
who
openly under the noses of the few Germans
Alexander,
stood within the
inevitably determining the occupation of the second.
first
26
allies'
May
intention to rob
him of the
American troops
for his
to
laurels
abandon
northward drive across the rear of the retreating Germans, thus surrendering the
chance to encircle them, and drive directly into the
While
directly into Kesselring's hands.
Valmontone and of the Tenth positions
Velletri in the
Army
Alban
across the Tiber
on the Gothic
Line,
The realignment played
his rearguards fought effective delaying actions at
hills
south of Rome, he hurried the intact formations
and made post-haste
which
capital.
his engineers
for the
were
first
of a series of defensive
fortifying
between Rome and
Rimini. Clark's entry into
Rome on
crowds were absent; fearing
4 June proved, therefore,
a last-ditch stand
a
hollow triumph. Even the
by the departing Germans, the Romans kept
behind locked doors, thus depriving the supremely publicity-conscious (and photogenic) 'American
Eagle', as Churchill called
Kesselring's
conduct
a fighting
the north,
him, of his lap of honour. in retreat, and would way to the Pisa-Rimini Line, 150 miles to next most defensible position across the Italian
Tenth and Fourteenth Armies were nevertheless withdrawal as they
which he had
made
identified as the
their
peninsula. Allied Armies Italy followed as best they could; but the withdrawal of seven divisions - four out of the seven
American
3rd, 36th
French divisions
and 45th -
to
mount
that
had come from North
Africa
south of France, scheduled for mid-August, prevented Clark from pressing the Kesselring succeeded in fighting
two delaying
and then on the Trasimene Line, before
and the
the Operation Anvil/Dragoon landing in the
actions,
first
on the
safely reaching sanctuary
retreat.
so-called Viterbo Line
on the Gothic Line
in
early August.
The focus of action
in the
Mediterranean
now
shifted to the coast of southern
German Nineteenth Army of Army Group G. It was already depleted by withdrawals of troops to Army Group B which was locked in struggle in
France, defended by the
Normandy, and, although initially it contained four good divisions, which remained were dispersed so widely between Nice and Marseille
the eight divisions that they
could not
adequately deny the Allies landing places. Churchill had long opposed the operation as militarily valueless,
but Marshall's staff in Washington had insisted that Marseille was
to the logistic support of the
Roosevelt, sensitive to Alliance politics, had argued that giving offence to Stalin.
On
15 August, therefore, the
Army under General Alexander
vital
Anglo-American invasion of the north of France, while it
could not be cancelled without
newly constituted American Seventh
Patch debarked between Cannes and Toulon, preceded by
361
THE WAR
a brilliantly successful
THE WEST
IX
airborne landing, and supported by
army, which had been collected from ports as
Oran, got ashore with
meanwhile launched
1943-1945
though
loss and,
little
a thrust
up the
valley
of the Nineteenth Army, including the
had
it
air
far afield as
and sea bombardment. The
Taranto, Naples, Corsica and
to fight hard for
Toulon and
of the Rhone which drove the mobile elements 11th
Panzer Division, pell-mell past Avignon,
Orange and Montelimar towards Lyon and Dijon. As Army Group B was by
late
August, the Nineteenth
Army
did not
tarry.
September, but by 14 September about half of the Nineteenth
The
in Italy,
Army had found
11
refuge in
stood ready to defend the approaches to Germany's West Wall.
of the south of France was not
loss
of the campaign territory,
it
itself in full retreat
The spearheads of Patch's Seventh and
from Normandy, met north of Dijon on
Patton's Third Armies, the latter advancing
southern Alsace, where
Marseille,
even though
might actually be counted
it
in itself significant in Hitler's view; the
had entailed the surrender of
as strategically
a
course
broad band of
advantageous to the Germans, for
it
left
the bulk of the Allied forces in Italy lodged against the strong defences of the Gothic Line, at a safe
distance from the Italian industrial area and the Alpine approaches to the borders
of the Greater Reich, while Anvil had actually diverted the
Allies'
amphibious
fleet
and the
bulk of their disposable reserve into an operationally vacant zone and away from the Balkans,
which
still
bulked so large
importance for
in
his
conduct of the war.
The Balkans British
support for the resistance
Although up
the Yugoslav mountains,
had thus
in Yugoslavia
to thirty Axis divisions
far
troubled the
Wehrmacht
little.
had been engaged
in internal security operations in
Bulgarian,
Hungarian and Croat (Ustashi)
including
Italian,
formations, only twelve were German, most of a military value too low to permit their
employment on
the major battlefronts. Even after the British had definitively transferred
sponsorship of Yugoslav resistance
their Tito's
communist
guerrillas,
who
in
December
1943 from the royalist Chetniks to
then numbered over 100,000, the Germans were able to
keep the resistance forces constantly on the move, forcing them
to migrate
from Bosnia
to
Montenegro and then back again during the campaigning season of 1943 and in the process inflicting 20,000 casualties on their troops, as well as untold suffering on the rural population. The capitulation of
Italy
in
September 1943 had eased
Tito's situation.
It
brought him large quantities of surrendered arms and equipment and even allowed him to take control of much of the area relinquished by the Italians, including the Dalmatian coast
and the Adriatic Partisans
A
from
islands.
However,
as
long as the Germans continued to isolate the
direct contact with external regular forces, the rules
of
guerrilla warfare
Beaufighter of the Balkan Air Force attacking the German-held town of Zuzembork in
Yugoslavia during the closing days of the war. The Balkan Air Force provided Tito's partisans.
362
vital
support
to
**•
-
-r ****£&
t
i
-IE
ir,
m
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
Partisan units parade on the island of Vis, off the Yugoslav coast, in 1944. During Tito took refuge in Vis,
applied: Tito lines
had
1944
which had been captured by the Royal Navy.
a strong nuisance value but
an insignificant
strategic effect
of communication with Greece and the areas from which
it
drew
on Germany's
essential supplies
of
minerals. In the
autumn of 1944, however, Germany's
position in the Balkans began to weaken,
so threatening to elevate Tito from the role of nuisance to menace. Hitler's Balkan satellites, Bulgaria,
Romania and Hungary, had been brought
into the
combination of threat and inducement. Hitler could no longer the principal threat to these states' welfare and sovereignty was
war on
offer
his side
by
a
inducement, while
now prescribed
by the Red
Army, which between March and August had reconquered the western Ukraine and advanced to the Russian lands.
foothills
Much
alliance with Hitler. Allies since
scheme
for
March;
making
German King
of the Carpathians, southern Europe's natural frontier with the
earlier in the year the satellites
had begun
to think better of their
Antonescu, the ruler of Romania, had been in touch with the Western his
Foreign Minister had even attempted to draw Mussolini into a
a separate
peace
May 1943. Bulgaria - whose staunchly proon 24 August 1943 - had made approaches to
as early as
Boris died by poisoning
364
ITALY
AND THE BALKANS
London and Washington
in January 1944
understanding with
Hungary, which had benefited so greatly
Stalin.
and then placed
its
by the Vienna Award of August 1940, was meanwhile playing Prime Minister, had
them
arranging through Keitel,
head of
made
OKW,
a
contact with the
West
hopes at
own
its
game:
Kallay, the
staff
suggested to
be defended by Hungarian troops only -
much German
device intended to keep not so
to an
September 1943 with the aim of
in
surrender to the Russians, while the chief of
that the Carpathians
coming
in
Romania's expense
as
Romanian troops
a
off the national
territory.
Even while the German troops were advancing
down
in full retreat in Italy
irresistibly to the Carpathians, Hitler
a revolt in the
puppet
He had easily put when they Red Army on their
of Slovakia, raised by dissident soldiers
state
imminently but over-optimistically expected the doorstep. In
and the Russians were
could deal with Hungary.
arrival
March he had quelled the Hungarians'
initial
of the
display of
in July
independence by
requiring Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, to dismiss Kallay and grant
control of the Hungarian
economy and communications system and
Germany
full
of free
rights
movement into and through the country by the Wehrmacht. Horthy 's dismissal of his proGerman cabinet on 29 August alerted Hitler to the revived danger of Hungary's defection. When on 15 October, therefore, Horthy revealed to the German embassy in Budapest that he had signed an armistice with Russia, German sympathisers in Horthy's Arrow Cross party
and
in the
in his residence,
army were ready to take control of the government. Horthy was isolated where he was persuaded to deliver himself into German hands after
Skorzeny, the rescuer of Mussolini, had kidnapped his son as a hostage.
The occupation of Hungary, though smoothly achieved, could not the unravelling of the Balkan skein.
Hungary had ultimately been driven
negotiations with the Russians because
otherwise
make
its
own
it
forestalled; as
into
deal with Stalin and secure the return of Transylvania,
soon
as the
Red Army crossed
it
opening
Romania might
feared, quite correctly, that
had been forced to cede to Horthy under the Vienna Award. However,
had been
at that stage halt
which
was Hungary
it
that
the Dniester from the Ukraine
on
20 August, King Michael had had Antonescu arrested, thus provoking Hitler to order the
bombing of Bucharest on 23 August and so allowing Romania to declare war on Germany next day. This change of sides forced the German Sixth Army (reconstituted since Stalingrad) into precipitate retreat
men
them because on (with
towards the passes of the Carpathians.
Few of its
escaped. Bulgaria, into which they might have fled southward, was
whom
it
5
now
200,000
closed to
September the government had opened negotiations with the Russians
had never been
at
war) and promptly turned
its
Romania, reported Friesner, the commander of the Sixth Army,
army
against Hitler. In
'there's
no longer any
general staff and nothing but chaos, everyone, from general to clerk, has got a
rifle
and
is
fighting to the last bullet.'
The defection of Romania immediately entailed the loss of access to the Ploesti fear of which had so deeply influenced Hitler's strategic decision-making
oilfields,
365
THE WAR
throughout the war.
It
was
the Crimea long after
first
was
it
which,
that fear
control of the Balkans in the
THE WEST
IN
place, to
militarily
1943-1945
measure, had driven him to take
in large
contemplate the attack on Russia, and to hold
sound
to
do
Now
so.
that the synthetic oil plants
which had subsequently come on stream within Germany had been brought under
US Eighth Air Force, the loss of Ploesti was doubly disastrous. However, Hitler could not hope to recover them by counter-attack, for not only did the Russian Ukrainian Fronts which entered Romania on its defection enormously outnumber his own local forces; the simultaneous defection of Bulgaria put the German forces in Greece at risk also and on 18 October they evacuated the country and began a difficult disabling attack by the
withdrawal through the Macedonian mountains into southern Yugoslavia. Tolbukhin,
commanding
on 4 Romania and Bulgaria. The 350,000 Germans under the command of General Lohr's Army Group E thus had to make their escape from Greece past the flank of a menacing Soviet concentration, through mountain valleys the Third Ukrainian Front, entered Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital,
October, having
made
his
way
and overflown by the Allied
infested with Tito's Partisans
from
Adriatic
The
there through
security of the other
Army Group F now closely depended upon
German
Hitler of his Balkan occupation area
defend northern
Italy.
eastward through the
Should
'gaps',
it
fall,
forces -
Allied
Armies
Italian ports across
a small scale. At a
concluded influence'
a
remarkable,
the Adriatic, as the
meeting with
if largely
between Russia and
Stalin in
one
divisions, while that
free
both to
strike
Adriatic,
June 1944), had already begun to
Moscow
October 1944, Churchill
in
Britain in the Balkans. Unlike the
and Eighth Armies reached the Gothic
five fresh
to
unenforceable, agreement advocating 'proportions of
a
Americans, Churchill
Balkan venture offered. In the event
was not Allied scheming but German force allocation
the Fifth
would be
commanders of Land Forces
at Bari in
continued to be fascinated by the opportunities that it
what remained
major amphibious operations from the
also to launch
supported by the Balkan Air Force (established
do on
Italy
in
Kesselring's ability to
notably the Ljubljana gap which led into northern Yugoslavia
and so towards Hungary, and northern
operating across the
air forces
their bases in Italy.
that
decided the
issue.
By the time
Line, their strength stood at only twenty-
of the German Tenth and Fourteenth, thanks to the transfer of
formations and the
manpower
for three others,
had increased
Although the Gothic Line was eighty miles longer than the Winter Position, by an excellent lateral road, the old
Roman
Emilian
Way from
to twenty-six. it
was backed
Bologna to Rimini,
which
allowed reinforcements to be sped from one point of danger to the other, and on the Adriatic coast
formed
a
was backed by no
less
than thirteen rivers flowing to the
sea,
each of which
major military obstacle.
This terrain and the onset of Italy's
on northern
Italy,
if
autumn
rains
now
not the whole of the Gothic Line
ensured itself,
that Kesselring's
hold
could not be broken.
Alexander, correctly assessing that the route towards the great open plain of the river Po
was more
easily negotiable
on the
right than
on the
366
left,
secretly
had transferred the bulk
AND THE BALKANS
ITALY
Army
of the Eighth
On
to the Adriatic coast during August.
25 August
it
attacked, broke the
Gothic Line and advanced to within ten miles of Rimini before being halted on the Couca
While
river.
it
paused
to regroup, Vietinghoff,
Way
reinforcements along the Emilian
on
offensive
12
September but were
commanding
check
to
opposed; the
fiercely
the Fourteenth Army, rushed
advance. The British renewed the
its
1st
Armoured
many of its tanks that it had to be withdrawn from offensive operations. enemy strength from the British front, Alexander ordered Clark to open
Division lost so
In order to divert his
own
offensive
on the opposite coast on 17 September, through the much less promising territory north of Pisa. So narrow is the coastal plain there, dominated by heights reminiscent of Cassino, that
it
made
whole
very slow progress. During October and into
battlefield into a
dragged on, while ground was lost 14,000 killed
November,
and wounded
won
in miles
and
autumn
in the
Ravenna on 5 December and pushed onwards
on
miles of Bologna by 23 October; but
wounded
had
it
The Canadian
to reach the Senio river
optimistic
and winter weather determined
to a halt.
It
had been
December won back
in
that at Christmas 1944 the
a gruelling passage
of
fighting,
and manmade,
natural
its
soldiers bent
had
on conquest. The left
painters
encumbered with
artillery
mountain landscapes and
must be
a
sharp eye of
at
spoke
how
every turn to
modern army
Salvator Rosa's savage
vehicles.
for themselves.
an advance
difficult
to an army, particularly a
and wheeled and tracked
battle scenes
earlier.
whose landscapes had delighted European
warnings to any general with
across the topography they depicted
first
scenery of crags and mountain-
top villages, ruined castles and fast-flowing rivers, threatened danger
collectors
campaign
almost from the
weeks of landing and the easy advances south of Rome sixteen months
The spectacular beauty of Italy,
and
than that on the Eighth
difficult
front. So weakened was it that a surprise German offensive some of the ground it had captured in September north of Pisa.
came
1945.
also lost very heavily - over 15,000 killed
- and was confronted by terrain even more
Losses, terrain
Corps took
II
by 4 January
centre, reached to within nine
Army's
in Italy
Army
the Adriatic coast, the Canadians
Army, attacking through the mountains of the
Fifth
turned the
thousands. The Eighth
lives lost in
fighting
bearing the heaviest share, for they were in the forefront.
The
as rains
slough and raised rivers in unbridgeable spate, the campaign
Claude Lorrain's deceptively
imbued with menace; would automatically choose as
serene vistas of gentle plains and blue distances were equally painted from points of
dominance
his observation post, they
commanded by standing
hills,
that
demonstrate
the defender in
Italy
an at a
artillery officer
glance
and what
mountain spurs and abrupt
fire
the
blown bridges
easily
and
regularly
ground can be
wealth of obstacles - streams,
defiles
were the consistent heroes of the campaign under
a
how
- the countryside
in Italy in 1943—4;
the Allied armies encountered
it
at five-
offers.
lakes, free-
The engineers
was they
who
rebuilt
or ten-mile intervals in
up the peninsula, who dismantled the demolition charges and Germans strewed in their wake, who bulldozed a way through the ruined towns which straddled the north-south roads, who cleared the harbours choked by the
the course of their advance
booby
traps the
367
THE WAR
The
destruction of battle.
more than
infantry
around strongpoints losses
put
it
in the
west cost the
in bitter small-scale fighting
all
and the Germans,
Allies
as
were the
the bleakness of the Italian winter. As
natural hardships of
Bidwell and D.
S.
Graham
in their history of the campaign: 'A post on some craggy knife-edge would be held
by four or
five
squad or find
men ... if one of them were wounded he would have to own way down the mountain to an aid post ... if he
his
burden
to his friends
find his
way down
his
and wounds suffered
the Winter Position, the Anzio perimeter and the Gothic Line. Such
at
were shared equally by the
the campaign, above
1943-1
proved heroic: no campaign
infantry too
Italy, in lives lost
THE WEST
IN
way
.
.
.
and would freeze
the
mountain
it
was
all
too easy
... to rest in a
British, Indians,
come
who opposed them
there and
Losses and hardships were
made
to
at
at
(later)
by the
Allies,
difficult to bear, particularly
knew
divisions.
of Allied Armies
Italy,
Mark
of Hitler's Europe,
commander of the
Fifth
Army
Allies, after
D-Day,
were sustaining the
at
worst merely tying
and, under Alexander,
sustained his sense of personal mission throughout. Convinced of
his greatness as a general,
deliberation of British
Clark,
were holding the
that they
fighting a decisive campaign. At best they
threat to the 'soft underbelly' (Churchill's phrase)
down enemy
who
Frenchmen and
arm's length from the southern borders of the Reich. The
were denied any sense of
tried to
Parachute Division
1st
Zealanders, Poles,
because of the campaign's marginality. The Germans
enemy
he
the Gothic Line.
more
the
If
sheltered spot ... or lose
such an end; many, too, of the Americans,
New
South Africans, Canadians,
stayed he was a
of blood.
loss
and die of exposure.' Many of the Germans of the
held Cassino so tenaciously must have
Brazilians
from
to death or die
remain with the
he drove
his subordinates hard,
methods poisoned
relations
and
between the
his frustration at the staffs
of the
Eighth Armies - a deplorable but undeniable ingredient of the campaign.
Fifth
More
and
junior
commanders and the common soldiers were sustained, once the spirit of resistance to German occupation had taken root among the Italians, by the emotions of fighting a war of liberation. No great vision of victor)- drew them onward, however, as it did their comrades
who
landed in France. Their war was not
a
crusade but, in almost ever)' respect, an old-
fashioned one of strategic diversion on the maritime flank of 'Peninsular War' of 1939^5. That the)
were continuing
brought the campaigning season to an end
purpose and stoutness of
at
a
to fight
continental enemy, the it
so hard
when
winter
Christmas 1944 was a tribute to their sense of
heart.
368
20 OVERLORD November 1943 Hitler refused to concede to generals or associates that the Until Greater Reich was threatened by the opening of Second Front the west. his
a
Although from the Britain's
Union from
rescuing the Soviet
no longer
had pinned
his
having thrown the British out of
that,
feared them, while he relished the opportunity, should
of teaching the Americans
arise,
Hitler
of the army's western headquarters
staff
the continent once, he
Stalin
defeat and, after
American counter-invasion of western Europe, he told the
in
hopes on December 1941, on an Anglowould have none of it. In June 1942
weeks of Barbarossa
first
a
lesson.
Moreover, on 19 August
a
it
major Allied
reconnaissance-in-force raided the port of Dieppe in northern France, and only 2500 of
committed managed
the 6000 largely Canadian troops
to return to Britain. This defeat
reinforced Hitler's confidence. Although the raid had been planned as an experiment to test
how
difficult
it
would be
to seize a
harbour
understandably chose to believe he had inflicted
and Americans from staging
a full-scale invasion. In
three-hour speech to Goering, Albert Speer, his
Commander-in-Chief West invasion could be delayed
for the
beyond
OB
base will be protected against
down
divisions
finest
enemies
to
air raids. In
Mesopotamia
into
British
Minister,
a
and Rundstedt, the
West), he told
them
that,
if
an
when the Atlantic Wall would be He went on: 'We have got over the worst
of our foodstuffs shortage. By increased production of
home
would deter the
that
the spring of 1943,
complete, 'nothing can happen to us any longer'.
the
blow
September, during the course of
Armaments
West -
(Oberbefehlshaber
opening of a Second Front, Hitler
a severe
make peace where and
as
[Iraq]
we
anti-aircraft
the spring
guns and ammunition
we
shall
and then one day we
march with our shall
force our
want.'
By November 1943 the bloom had gone off the apple. The dismissiveness expressed in
1942 had been rooted in
reality.
Then
the British
army was indeed
still
reeling
from the
shock of the defeat of 1940; the Americans were not yet hardened to the rigours of warfare against the rightly
Wehrmacht. His
convinced him, even
Second Front
in
year, his blithe
skilful
in the
penetration of the
weak spots
in
absence of objective evidence,
1942 and probably not
in
minimisation of Germany's
an adversary's position that there
1943 either. However, by the difficulties
369
would be no
autumn of that no longer held good. The Anglo-
THE WAR
American
air
far
from the approaches
producing areas of western Russia
Army on
6
confidence
many
November as
combat
1943-1^45
homeland was growing
offensive against the
had been driven not only
THE WEST
IN
The
(Kiev, capital
1943).
soldiers.
British
in weight.
The German armies
to Iraq but also out of the richest food-
of the 'black earth' region,
fell
to the
had regained and the Americans won
Worst of all, the
Atlantic Wall
Red
their self-
had not been completed,
in
sectors not even built.
On
3
November
1943, therefore. Hitler issued Fiihrer Directive
half-dozen most important of his instructions to the
The hard and .
.
.
costly struggle against
The danger
Anglo-Saxon landing. The to lose
ground, even on
system of Germany.
vast extent
a large scale,
a greater
breaching our defences on
of territory without
unpredictable. Everything indicates that the
no longer
places
war.
now
in the east
a fatal
appears in the west: an
makes
it
blow being struck
possible for us to the nervous
enemy succeed
in
at
enemy
will
launch an offensive against
the latest in the spring, perhaps even earlier.
I
can
take responsibility for further weakening the west, in favour of
other theatres of war. those
one of the
wide front here the immediate consequences would be
a
the Western Front of Europe,
therefore
danger
very different in the west. Should the
is
It
51,
Bolshevism has demanded extreme exertions.
remains, but
in the east
No.
Wehrmacht of the whole
I
have therefore decided to reinforce
its
defences, particularly
from which long-range bombardment of England [with
pilotless
missiles] will begin.
Fiihrer Directive
No.
51
went on
to specify the particular
measures
for strengthening
OB
West's forces. They included the reinforcing of Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions in his
zone of operations and
a
guarantee that no formation would be withdrawn from
it
except
OB
West (Rundstedt) commanded all German ground forces in Belgium and France, organised into the Fifteenth and Seventh Armies (Army Group B) and the First and Nineteenth Armies (Army Group G), from his with Hitler's personal approval. In
headquarters
at
November
Saint-Germain near
Paris.
1943
The boundary between the army groups ran
Army defending the Biscay and the Nineteenth the Mediterranean coast, the Fifteenth Army in Belgium and northern France and the Seventh in Normandy. Unbeknown to all in Germany, it was in Normandy that the Allied stroke west-east along the Loire, with the First
was destined
to
fall.
Rundstedt's divisional strength stood
at forty-six,
ten Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions. Six of the Loire, four south. That
assembly of the Nazi
was
fication in
depth
at all
it is
armoured
divisions
were north of the
warned an
time Directive No. 51 was issued that 'along a
impossible to reinforce the coastal front with a system of forti-
points.
well-equipped reserves
to be raised to sixty, including
entirely appropriate. Jodl, Hitler's operations officer,
Party's Gauleiters at the
front of 2600 kilometres
soon
in the
.
.
.
Hence
it is
essential to
have strong mobile and specially
west for the purpose of forming Schwerpunkt [centres of mili-
370
OVERLORD
tary effort].' Strategic analysis revealed that the Allies'
own
Schwerpunkte against the Westheer,
even if reinforced by another in the Mediterranean, must be formed by forces assembling
and lie on the Channel coast. Hence the Panzer concentration north of the Loire. The Panzer concentration was critical because the rest of OB West's divisions were barely mobile. The two parachute divisions stationed in Brittany and the army divisions in Britain
with numbers in the 271-278 and 349-367 series were of high and adequate quality
though lacking mechanised transport. The
spectively,
quality but their
were not only of average
were wholly dependent on the French railway system
permanent bases
drawn; their infantry
marching
rest
no
indeed,
or,
if
re-
low
they were to leave
and supply
units
were horse-
except for bicycle reconnaissance companies, manoeuvred by
units,
speed
a
at
Napoleon's
for the invasion front. Their artillery
to
faster
than
Charlemagne's.
Moreover, they would have to move under the threat of Allied airpower, which, he had already conceded on 29 September 1942, would be absolutely supreme. Railway and even road movement would be severely inhibited.
was therefore
It
divisions,
vital that
which alone had the
rapid, off-road
the Panzer
capability for
movement, should be
posi-
tioned close to the invasion zone, to hold a line until the infantry
The coast
itself
reinforcements arrived.
would be garrisoned by
'ground-holding'
divisions,
(bodensttindige)
unable to manoeuvre but protected from Allied air crete
and naval bombardment by con-
fortifications.
positions
The beaches
that
wired and entangled with obstacles; this
their
overlooked were to be mined,
much
of
defensive material was to be stripped
from the Belgian
fortified
zone and the Magi-
not Line which had survived the onslaught of the
Wehrmacht The
in theory.
in 1940.
which
at
the
west of the Luft-
end of 1943 deployed
only 300 fighters in France (to hold in check Allied air forces
12,000 aircraft of
whose all
Gerd
von
Rundstedt,
strength
types
would
total
on the day of the
371
C-in-C
West, inspecting a coastal sector of the defences of France before the invasion. Rundstedt
scheme was excellent When complete it would go far to
Atlantic Wall
offset the feebleness in the
waffe,
Marshal
Field
subordinate,
was
coast little
Rommel,
to
disagreed about
be best defended.
and
his
how
the
Rundstedt had
faith in coastal defences, seeing
them
as the
momentum
means
of breaking the cohesion
of an
amphibious assault while counterblows
were prepared reserves held
in the rear coastal
back specifically
and
areas by mobile
for the
purpose.
THE WAR
on the day
invasion); but
IN
THE WEST
that Fiihrer Directive
No.
invasion danger, the Westheer had led a bucolic
was not
was issued the
Atlantic Wall
had
still
settled into a
life. Its
macht
comfortable routine
Saint-Germain reading detective stories and allowing
at
traditionalists cultivated to differentiate
favoured in the Live and
Ostheer.
let live
orationist, lent
was
Germany,
la Milice,
on the French
to join the million
allowed the Reichsbank to make
of defeat which did not
be posted
not actively collab-
it
German
du
held there in
still
which punished the contempt
powers. The cost of occupation rankled; the Ger-
a profit
affect the
(service
conscripted young French-
treasury, exacted at a 50 per cent overvaluation
only forced France to pay for the indignity of having
the ('very correct')
if
French prisoners of war
Vichy's paramilitary police force, its
Wehr-
accordingly. Life in France was agreeable.
support to the embryo resistance movement. Forced labour
of fellow countrymen by exceeding levy
'aristocratic' style that
themselves from the 'Nazi' generals Hitler
The lower ranks behaved
introduced in 1942, was unpopular because
to factories in
1943; so, too,
mark of the
characterised relations with the population, which,
little
travail obligatoire),
commander, Gerd von Rundstedt, in December 1941 he had
removal from the Eastern Front
a firebrand. After his
his staff officers to practise English conversion, a
man
51
go before completion. During the two years when Hitler had discountenanced the
far to
men
1943-1945
on the
a
German army
transaction.
French people
at large.
soldiers with resignation; the
to the only easy billet in the
of the mark, not
in
its
territory but
However, these were aspects
Most accepted the presence of Germans, more than content to
Wehrmacht's zone of operations, gathered roses
while they might, ate butter and cream, and worked no harder than their officers drove
them.
The cosy
life
ended with the
defences, then to take
command
arrival
of
of Rommel
Army Group
B.
in
December
1943,
first
to inspect the
Since his invaliding from Tunisia in
March he had held an undemanding post in northern Italy, but on the promulgation of Directive No. 51 he was selected by Hitler to put fire and steel into the western defences. According to
blew
in like
only
1.7
his biographer,
an
icy
Desmond Young,
'to
the snug
and unwelcome wind off the North
Sea.'
staffs
of the coastal sectors
Rommel found
[he]
that since 1941
million mines had been laid - he reminded his staff that the British had laid a
two months during his campaign against them in North Africa - though exwas sufficient to manufacture 11 million. Within weeks of his arrival, mine-laying had increased from a rate of 40,000 to over a million a month and by 20 May over 4 million were in place. Between November and 11 May half a million obstacles were million in
plosive held in France
laid
on the beaches and
likely
airborne landing-grounds, and he had ordered the deliver}'
of an additional 2 million mines secretary:
weeks,
I
'I
am more
a
month from Germany. On
confident than ever before.
won't have any more doubt about
If
5
May he
dictated to his
the British give us just
two more
it.'
The defence of the French coast could not, however, be assured by the Atlantic Wall alone. Rommel, a master of mobile warfare but also a respectful veteran of campaigns fought under conditions of Western Allied air superiority, knew that he would have to get
372
OVERLORD
tanks to the water's edge defeated.
To do so he must
land; the
second was
and
armoured
his
command
at
moment
the
solve
the Allies disembarked
two problems: the
first
was
to establish the shortest possible chain
units.
of the Panzer divisions under
OB
as the Allies
wreathed
West he must be able
their intentions in a mist
The war The
where they would
of command between himself
The problems were interconnected. To
where they could be best used; but he could not credibly
they were to be
if
to identify
lay
justify taking
to
show
that
personal
he knew
claim to the divisions as long
of misinformation and deception.
of mirrors
Allied deception plan for Operation Overlord, as the invasion of north-west
was codenamed
at
the Washington Trident Conference in
conceived to persuade the the Channel
enemy
would
that the landing
narrowest, rather than in
is
Normandy
fall
May
1943,
in the Pas
de
Calais landing
made
German
military sense:
it
Calais,
where
or Brittany (though Hitler's fears of
descent on Norway, to which he was acutely sensitive, were also kept profitable result of fixing eleven
Europe
was deliberately
alive,
divisions there throughout 1944-5).
entailed a quick crossing to level
a
with the
A
Pas de
and sandy beaches,
cliffs, whence the exploitation Germany was short. Operation Fortitude, as the deception plan was codenamed, centred on the implantation in the consciousness of German intelligence - the Wehrmacht's Abwehr and the army's Foreign Armies West section - of the existence, wholly fictitious, of a First US Army Group (FUSAG), located
which were not closed off from the hinterland by high route into the
Low
Countries and
opposite the Pas de Calais in Kent and Sussex. False radio transmissions from sent over the
air; false
whose reputation mentioned
as
its
references were
made
to
it
in bona-fide
as a hard-driving army leader was known to commander. Moreover, to reinforce the notion
debark on the short route to the Reich, the Allied
bombardment preparatory as
to
air
FUSAG on
that
the
Germans, was
that
FUSAG would
forces in their
programme of
Overlord dropped three times the tonnage east of the Seine
they did to the west. By 9 January 1944 the deception had borne
referred to
FUSAG were
messages. General Patton,
day and others followed.
It
fruit:
an Ultra intercept
was the proof the Fortitude
operators needed that their plan was working. They could not, of course, expect to distract
Germans from Normandy, the chosen landing site, for good; but they hoped to minimise German anticipation of a Normandy landing until it was actually mounted, and thereafter keep alive the anxiety that the 'real' invasion would follow in the the attention of the
Pas
de
Calais at a later stage.
Hitler
was only
partially
April,
to
deluded.
On
4 and 20 March and 6 April he alluded to the
Normandy landing. am for bringing all our strength in here,' he said on 6 and on 6 May he had Jodl telephone Giinther Blumentritt, Rundstedt's chief of staff,
likelihood of a
warn
that
'I
he 'attached particular importance to Normandy'. However, apart from
allocating Panzer Lehr
and 116th Panzer Divisions
373
to
Normandy
in the early spring,
he
THE WAR
made no
THE WEST
IN
1943-1945
decisive alteration of OB West's dispositions; indeed until he allowed divisions to
cross the Seine into
Normandy from
remained prisoner to the delusion of
the Pas de Calais
the very
at
end of July, he himself
'second' invasion throughout the crucial weeks of
a
the Overlord battle.
compromised Rommel's urge to Rommel's argument was that it was better
His concern to back both horses nevertheless disperse the mist of deception by direct assault. to
have some armour on the
keep armour At the to
even
right beach,
in central reserve
and then
end of January 1944 he was
fail
translated
commander of Army Group B
if
the rest was wrongly disposed, than to
move
to
it
He
Rundstedt had never experienced
therefore believed that there
arrived, to
make
a deliberate
Allied airpower descended.
from the post of inspector of the
(Seventh and Fifteenth Armies),
subordinate for defence of the invasion zone. Almost chief.
when
a battle in
would be
once he
at
as
fell
Atlantic Wall
Rundstedt's direct
into dispute with his
which the Luftwaffe was not dominant.
time, even after the
enemy
landing
craft
had
assessment of the military situation and then commit reserves
Rommel knew that an unhurried counter-attack would be destroyed From personal experience in Egypt and Tunisia he knew how great was
to a counter-attack.
by enemy the
aircraft.
power of
'forward'
the Allied
and committing
air it
forces
The Rommel-Rundstedt general, conventional military
own
and was convinced
by holding armour
that only
immediately could the invasion be met and defeated. dispute,
wisdom
in
which personal experience favoured one
the other, eventually reached the ears of Hitler.
when
He
him at Berchtesgaden on 19 March 1944. Panzer Group West, which oversaw the six armoured divisions of Army Group B, was split; three of its divisions were allocated to Rommel, resolved
it
on
his
terms, to neither subordinate's liking,
the
three to Rundstedt - but with the proviso that Rundstedt's divisions
were not
to
21st
Rommel had
was thus compromised from the
May
15
start.
[Rommel] using his
Montgomery,
do
will
his level best to 'Dunkirk' us
own
to avoid
tanks well forward.
it
.
.
and 2nd)
staff at
feared in the
first
OKW, place.
to launch a quick counter-attack
his old desert
opponent, had warned
get a
While
- not to
On D-Day
he .
.
good lodgement before he can bring up
we
are
very difficult the
lodgement
engaged
in
doing
fight the
armoured
battle
on
altogether and prevent our tanks landing by
beaches; (b) to secure Caen, Bayeux, Carentan.
.
116th
in his pre-invasion assessment:
ground of his choosing but
and
visited
Panzer Division was the only armoured division close to the beaches
chosen by the Overlord planners, Rommel's intention
on
(21st,
be committed without the direct approval of Hitler's operations
with the attendant risk of even greater delay than
As the
two
this,
will try (a) to force us .
We
must
blast
from the
our way onshore
sufficient reserves to turn us out.
the air must hold the ring and must
movement of enemy
areas.
374
make
reserves by train or road towards the
OVERLORD
Had Montgomery known,
the time he wrote this assessment,
at
how
grievously the
Rommel-Rundstedt-Hitler dispute on armoured deployment had harmed the
Westheer's
prospect of defeating the landing force, his fears for the successful outcome of D-Day
would have been
greatly relieved.
Montgomery was appointed
to the
command
commander of
for Overlord had been nominated
for reasons
Tehran
their
in
politics
it
must go
to an
American. However,
of nomination had been brought to
believe in "Overlord",' he
had asked,
'or are
a
later
Second Front. 'Do the
make
that
made
at it
British really
they only saying so to reassure the Soviet
week
than one
acquiesced and Roosevelt agreed to limit,
known
was only
it
head. Stalin had there
Union?' In the face of Churchill's protestations of commitment, he
mander be nominated not
no
1943
British chiefs
Alan Brooke, had been promised the
the test of Anglo-American dedication to the alliance's
end of the time
November
heads of government, though since August Brooke had
of international
that the issue
Sir
Tehran
at
Both the American and
at all.
General George Marshall and General
staff.
appointment by
of the landing force only on 2 January
conference
1944. Until the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill
the choice.
On
demanded
com-
that a
conference ended. Churchill
after the
5
December, however,
the
at
Roosevelt recognised that he could not spare his helpmate, Marshall,
from Washington, and told him
so; the
Supreme Command of
the Allied Expeditionary
Force would therefore go to Eisenhower. Because Eisenhower's talents were strategic
would be vested in a ground comon the soil of France had been consolidated Wehrmacht could not displace the Allied liberation
rather than tactical, however, operational authority
mander, Montgomery, into a 'lodgement'
until the 'foothold'
from which the
army.
Montgomery,
arriving in
England direct from
Italy
where he had been commanding
the Eighth Army, threw himself into the rationalisation of the Overlord plan with an
energy, familiar to his staff in the Mediterranean, that
General
less.
signate),
Sir
left
Frederick Morgan, Chief of Staff to the
had been putting together
Churchill-Roosevelt meeting
at
a
scheme
the
COSSAC
Supreme
headquarters breath-
Allied
for a landing in north-west
Casablanca in January 1943.
COSSACs
dilatory; but they had been deliberate. Morgan had set himself the Supreme Commander, when nominated, with a flawless military
Anglo-American
staff,
proceeding from
first
principles,
had
first
of
(De-
Europe since the
proceedings had not
been the
Commander
all
task of presenting
appreciation. His identified
where
would be possible. The operational radius of a Spitfire, the most numerous Allied fighter, was used to delimit the zone in which the Allies would enjoy unchallenged air superiority. It reached from the Pas de Calais to the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy; the landings
and west of those places could be eliminated. Within the zone, however, long
coast east
stretches of coastline
were too
steep, the
too easily sealed off
mended
were topographically unsuitable: the chalk
mouth of the Seine at its
cliffs
of the Pays de Caux
estuary was too indented, the Cotentin itself was
base. By reduction, therefore, only
themselves: the Pas de Calais, with
its
375
two
coastal stretches
recom-
gently shelving, sandy beaches, and the
THE WAR
Normandy
coast
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
between the Seine and the Cotentin. The Pas de
Calais
had the
attraction
of proximity both to the English coast and to the 'short route' into Germany; but for those reasons
it
could be judged the sector where the Germans would expect to be attacked and
COSSAC therefore plumped for Normandy. chosen stretch of Normandy had no ports, but also because
would defend most Because the
heavily.
mans could be counted on it
was decided
to fight to
to construct
the beaches once they had
two
artificial floating
been
The
seized.
disembarked from landing
sions,
deny nearby Cherbourg and Le Havre
craft
the Ger-
to the
enemy,
harbours ('Mulberries') and tow them to landing would be
initial
under heavy
air
made by
three divi-
and naval bombardment; airborne
troops would be dropped
at either end of the chosen bridgehead to secure 'blocking posion the flanks. As soon as the bridgehead was consolidated, seaborne reinforcements would be poured in to transform it into a 'lodgement area' from which a break-out into
tions'
Brittany
would
and then the west of France would be mounted. Eventually
pass through
Normandy;
the
mam
strength of the
a
hundred
divisions
American army, which would
supply the majority oi divisions, would be shipped directly from the United
States.
Success depended, however, on minimising the strength the Germans could oppose to the landing.
ranteed,
Although an intelligence blackout over the invasion
and German
air
fleet itself could
and naval interference be discounted, COSSAC agreed
it
be gua-
was
vital
more than three [German divisions] on D-Day, five by D plus 2 and nine by D plus 8'. The first week of the landings, in short, would be a race between the Allied and German armies' capacity to build up forces in and against the bridgehead. The Germans could not prevent the Allied that
near Caen, the Schwerpunkt of the invasion zone, there should be 'no
build-up; the Allies could, by contrast, prevent the
German. A
crucial
element of the inva-
would be the bringing to bear of Allied airpower against the roads, railways and bridges by which Rundstedt's sixty divisions would march to the battlefield. The greater the devastation Allied airpower could inflict on the infrastructure of the sion effort, therefore,
French transport system ply
its
at
whatever subsequent cost to the
armies in mainland France - the
vive the landing
and the shock of
Montgomery, on
more
initial
his arrival in
certainly
combat
London
in
would
in the
Allies'
own
capacity to sup-
the seaborne divisions sur-
lodgement
area.
January 1944, dissented from none of
COSSAC's broad criteria. However, he and Eisenhower, who was eventually to succeed him in command on the ground, had both briefly seen the operational plan when en route to England via Marrakesh (where Churchill was recovering from pneumonia), and they jointly judged that the attack
broader
front'. In brief, the)
would have
to
be launched
wanted the American landing
to
'in
greater weight and
be separated from the
on
a
British,
made in heavier weight, and the airborne contribution to be much increased. Montgomery warned that, as things stood, '[German] reserve formations might succeed in both to be
containing us within a shallow covering position with our beaches under continual covering
fire.'
He remembered
Salerno,
where
a
well-planned assault had almost
naught because of the rapidity of the German reaction.
376
come
to
OVERLORD
By to
21 January, therefore,
be mounted by
and
Canadian to the
a
American airborne sula,
and the
and the
east;
British 6th
major amplification of the landing.
It
dropped
astride the river Vire at the base
was
British
two
of Cotentin penin-
Airborne Division, dropped astride the river Orne between Caen
'rolling up' the
and the Orne would prevent the Ger-
Vire
amphibious bridgehead
by two others pre-loaded
divisions, reinforced
a
the original 'two airborne brigades' were to be increased to
divisions,
The creation of airheads on the
sea.
mans from
he had proposed
seaborne divisions abreast, two American to the west, two
five
in
between; within
landing
in
craft,
it
the five seaborne
would win ground
for the
post-invasion reinforcements to be landed and deployed. Specialist armour, including
'swimming' Sherman tanks, would accompany the 79th (British)
Armoured
composed of
Division,
assault infantry to their debarkation; the
obstacle-clearing tanks,
way out of the beaches for the assault battalions to move inland. Eisenhower, as Supreme Commander, at once endorsed these difficulty that
remained was
how
accumulate the
to
would open
proposals.
the amphibious
war
The only
necessary for the enlarged land-
craft
Admiral King, Chief of (US) Naval Operations, both an Anglophobe and
ing.
the
a
devotee of
of Allied landing-craft
in the Pacific, directly controlled the lion's share
production, since the vast majority were launched from American yards (82,000 were built in the
USA throughout
A
the war).
near-doubling of the D-Day assault divisions required
a
proportionate accretion of vessels in which to deliver and support them. These included the Landing Ship
Tank
(LST),
Landing
Craft
ing Craft
Mechanised (LCM) and Landing
versatile
amphibious truck
larly
(DUKW
Tank (LCT), Landing
or 'Duck'). King had
a
as well as the
surplus of such vessels, particu-
the crucial Landing Ship Tank, in the Pacific, but proved unwilling either to transfer
any from one ocean to the other or to make available Mediterranean. As (as
Land-
Craft Infantry (LCI),
and Personnel (LCVP)
Craft Vehicle
a result
COSSAC was renamed
SHAEF, the after
craft
Supreme Headquarters
no longer needed
in the
Allied Expeditionary Force
Eisenhower's nomination), was obliged to accept
a post-
ponement of Overlord from May to June, while its staff scrambled to find landing craft where they could. In addition, Operation Anvil, the landing in the south of France originally scheduled to coincide with Overlord, was set back a month further. Subsequent investigation has revealed rather than objective. to land the
vinced
D-Day
itself that
tion; but the truth
By 1943 the output of LSTs from
divisions;
the
that the shortage
US
American LSTs were
a
of landing
British yards
seems
to
be
that the shortage
was the
Pacific rivals.
result
helped rather than hindered the success of Overlord. Although
heer
illusory
of
it
staff
of
its
had con-
just alloca-
faulty allocation in
The postponement of Anvil,
moreover, though undoubtedly caused by the lack of landing the answering blow to the northern operation (hence 'Anvil')
was
alone already sufficed
COSSAC
bonus. The
Navy's anti-Japanese imperative was depriving
Europe, not of deliberate starvation by SHAEF's
craft
it
craft,
was
may
initially
actually
have
conceived
which would crush the
as
Wesi-
by concentric action, the force dedicated to Anvil - four French and three American
divisions -
was not strong enough
to
mount
a
major attack on the rear
377
of the Westheer and,
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
because of the conflicting demands of the
however many landing
creased,
Anvil's real value
proved
craft
Italian
campaign, could not have been
might have been assembled
be diversionary;
to
1943-1945
we
as
shall see, the
in the
mere menace of a
weeks when they were desperately needed
German weakness
Allied strength, the invasion
that
it
army assembling
might lack
anchorages
in
divi-
for the north
Normandy.
to fight the real landing in
To
'third'
German
landing, like that of a 'second' in the Pas de Calais, succeeded in retaining
sions in Provence throughout the
in-
Mediterranean.
southern England during the spring of 1944, the notion
in
would have defied all appearances. The great natural Channel coast abounds - Chichester, Portsmouth, Southampton,
for anything
which the
Poole, Portland, Plymouth, Falmouth - were
filling with warships and transports. So vast was the gathering armada - which could only have been assembled off Normandy where
the Channel
is
widest - that two of the seven seaborne forces into which
had to be harboured
were
to
sail
night of
as far
away
it
was divided
South Wales and East Anglia. These, Forces B and
as
the day before invasion and join the other five under cover of darkness
D-Day
mid-Channel 'Area
in the
Z'
from which, through channels cleared by
vanguard of minesweepers, they were to proceed
on which the
columns
a
to the five beaches
and swimming tanks would debark; the beaches were
assaulting infantry
codenamed from west
in parallel
L,
on the
Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. Operation Nepture, make the voyage, including 4000 landing craft, and a bombardment force of 7 battleships, 2 monitors, 23
to east Utah,
the Naval plan, provided for 6483 vessels to
hundreds of
'attack transports',
and 104 destroyers. Their
cruisers
the Atlantic Wall. Close
fire
role
was
to
engage and destroy the coastal batteries of
support was to be provided by squadrons of rocket-firing
while others embarked self-propelled artillery which would 'shoot itself in' German shore positions before rolling up the beach to follow the seaborne infantry. Behind the bombardment and amphibious squadrons sailed the craft bringing the infrastructure required by the assault waves - the 'beach parties' which would set up traffic landing
craft,
against the
control and signal stations, organise obstacle clearance and evacuate casualties. Assault engineers,
manning amphibious
also to follow the assault
forward
at
close interval.
air controllers, to call in rocket,
and ground-attack
were
waves
bulldozers, demolition tanks and fabric road layers,
aircraft
among
And
in the very forefront
bomb and machine-gun
strikes
were
would land
from the
fighters
the 12,000-strong British and American air forces that
to support the landings.
Of
these 12,000, over 5000 were fighters; to oppose
them General Hugo Sperrle's on 6 June 1944. A thousand
Third Air Fleet had only 169 available on the Channel coast
Dakotas were to destinations,
fly
the parachute battalions of the three airborne divisions to their
and hundreds of other transport
airlanding infantry,
artillery
aircraft
were
to
tow
gliders filled with
and engineers. The mightiest element of the
378
air
forces,
OVERLORD
RAF Bomber Command and
however, was provided by
medium bombers
'heavies' - Lancasters
weeks beforehand the
of the British Second and
On
French northern railway system.
US Ninth
Air Forces
to prepare and support and Fortresses - with the
had
largely destroyed the
morning of D-Day, Bomber
the night and
Force,
Air
Germany
temporarily diverted from the strategic campaign against the invasion. In the
US Eighth
the
Command
and Eighth Air Force, each dropping the unprecedented weight of 5000 tons of bombs the short haul allowed
them
to substitute
bombs
for fuel -
were targeted
against
German
defences in the immediate vicinity of the beaches.
The
moment
Allies'
overwhelming
air
superiority guaranteed not only
fire
of assault but security from surveillance 'beforehand. In the
support
at
the
months of
six
first
1944 only thirty-two Luftwaffe daytime flights over England were recorded; there was only
one
in the
first
week of June - on
intrusions into French air space
7 June, a day too late -
were
while the
of such
Abwehr had no
signals,
in the
Kent.
The Abwehr could,
all
in fact
been
basis,
volume
signals; the
presence of the invasion
to disguise the
compensation, draw on the reports of its network of agents
in
for indications
However, since every
existence of
fictitious
of the strength, timing and above
single
one of the agents apparently
at
'turned' by British counter-espionage (the 'Double-Cross System'),
that agents outside their control in
truth
meaning of Allied
in
were not only valueless but
their reports
Allied
FUSAG
and these were eagerly assessed
had
when
time
of swallows. Ultra was
as the flight
west of England and enhance belief in the in
this at a
and within France on an hourly
access whatsoever to the
objectives of the invasion.
liberty
units to
however, was carefully controlled
army
Britain,
common
as
meanwhile monitoring the movement of
and
by speculation, but none did
actively misleading.
The
British entertained fears
Lisbon and Ankara might succeed
so; the
on the Abwehr
in hitting
only serious leak of secrets, sold to the
out of the ambassador's safe in Ankara by his Turkish valet, contained references to an
'Operation Overlord' but was bereft of details over-inflated 'Cicero'
The
Westheer,
OKW
and
Overlord in the weeks before
jamming of selected German fleet
5/6
and
June
air
armada
itself.
in the
In the
(this
was the much misunderstood and
affair).
Hitler its
were thus denied any useful foreknowledge of
launching; last-minute intelligence was distorted by the
coastal radar stations
and the simulation of a bogus invasion
Channel narrows opposite the Pas de
weeks before D-Day, however,
Hitler
Calais during the night
and the
Normandy. Between
materially reinforcing the anti-invasion forces, including those in April
and June the excellent Panzer Lehr Division was returned from Hungary
only
a
day's drive
352nd and
91st Infantry Divisions,
put in coastal positions, the 352nd above
on
to Chartres,
from the beaches, and the 21st Panzer Division was brought from
Brittany to Caen; while the
casualties
of
Westheer did succeed in
the American
1st
Division
Omaha
both of good
beach, where
it
quality,
were
inflict
heavy
would
on D-Day. When these redispositions were
complete, the chosen beaches were defended by three instead of two infantry divisions, with another in close support; four instead of three Panzer divisions stood
379
at
close hand,
OVERLORD
one almost
directly
behind the
prescience, that dictated these
new
was prudence, not
It
but the effect was to strengthen the as if correct intelligence
had guided
location.
By the
enemy
beaches themselves.
key point, precisely
Westheer's capacity to resist at the
their
British
new deployments,
week of June, however, there was no more SHAEF could do to soften commitment of the invading troops. Throughout that week
first
resistance until the
they were confined to camp, isolated from civilian contact and entertained by cinema
would be high - the troops' commanders believed very high indeed. Most of the Americans and some of the British had no battle experience and contemplated the coming ordeal with sang-froid; those British divisions which had been brought home from three years of fighting in the desert and Italy were altogether less insouciant. They knew the ferocity with which the shows and record concerts. The
was
belief
D-Day
that
casualties
Wehrmacht fought and did not relish meeting it in the defence of the approaches to the Reich. Lieutenant Edwin Bramall, a new subaltern with the veteran 2nd King's Royal Rifle Corps (and
contrast,
action will
'as
of staff), thought the battalion 'worn
a future British chief
Everybody
their bolt.
who was
Eisenhower's naval aide found the young American officers
green
as
growing
corn',
and asked himself, 'How
Commander
they look in three months' time?'
anxieties
were
to prove equally
rose to the challenge of
unfounded. Most
Normandy;
making
soldier.
a
No
Normandy
reputation in
grew into
however
than the 12th SS Panzer Division 'Hitler
the
mid-month
tides failed
at
the age of sixteen in 1943.
end of the
first
week of June. The
down, the seaborne
divisions
turned back, the main armada kept to harbour. the weather
was judged
to
to coincide with
them; 4 June, the day chosen to launch the invasion,
produced winds and waves which made landing by sea or divisions stood
of training
more ferocious Jugend', whose soldiers a
good weather on which Eisenhower and Montgomery had counted favourable
how
battle-weary,
in value three years
had been recruited direct from the Nazi youth movement at
and
almost overnight, once
it
moreover, was to win
Sea and sky turned stormy in the Channel
By
not seen
Butcher's and Lieutenant Bramall's
combat exceeds
military formation,
a casualty.'
who had
will they act in battle
British troops,
the Americans
again demonstrating that three minutes of in
'They had shot
out':
any good had been promoted or become
which had It
was not
air
impossible.
The airborne
from the further ports
sailed
until the
have abated enough for D-Day to be
evening of
5
set for the
June
that
following
morning.
When
it
dawned, the spectacle
that
was perhaps more dramatic than any beginning of any as
battle.
On
the
confronted those embarked - and those ashore -
soldiers, sailors or
Normandy
the seaward horizon was filled with ships,
Above: A German
literally
Normandy
beaches.
ashore on D-Day, 6 June 1944.
381
and
as far
at
the
north
by the thousand; the sky thundered
view of (he Allied assault on the
Commandos wade
airmen had ever seen
coast the sea from east to west
Below:
THE WAR IN THE WEST
with the passage of
and dust
as the
aircraft;
and the
bombardment
had begun
coastline
bit into
it.
sea,
Artillery, 'are
of smoke and brick dust
dirty clouds
completely obscuring our target for
to disappear in gouts of
rise
smothered with
from the
target area
obstacles, diving to cover
bursts,
and
from enemy
fire
the British,
picking their
craft,
and struggling
and
out to
drift
Under these angry clouds
a time.'
Canadian and American infantry were debarking from their landing
between the shore
smoke
'The villages of La Breche and Lion-sur-Mer',
reported Captain Henry Bruce of the Royal
enormous
1943-1945
way
to reach the
cliffs and dunes at the head of the beaches. The time (H-Hour), depending on the set of the tide from beach to beach, was between 6.00 and 7.30, and the early minutes of the landing, for all except the Americans doomed to the agony of Omaha beach, were the worst. However, the wet and frightened infantrymen struggling through the surf along sixty miles of Normandy coastline were not
shelter of the
the
first
Allied soldiers to have landed in France that day. In the darkness of the early
morning the parachute battalions that rivers,
Vire
were
of the three airborne divisions, spearheads of the glider
units
to follow,
and Orne,
that
had already dropped across the lower reaches of the two
demarcated the bridgehead's outer
flanks.
The
British 6th
Airborne Division, compactly released by experienced pilots on to open pasture, had
made
good drop, rallied quickly and moved rapidly to their objectives. These were the Orne and its eastward neighbour, the Dives, which were to be respectively held and blown, in the latter case to prevent German armour 'rolling up' the British seaborne bridgehead by a drive along the coast. The American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had been less lucky. Their pilots were inexperienced, the narrow neck of the Cotentin peninsula was easy to overshoot and the valley of the Vire was heavily flooded by a
bridges of the
deliberate defensive inundation.
drowned
in the floods,
many
Some American
others, scattered
parachutists
fell
by bad navigation and
many
into the sea, fear
of flak, dropped
miles from their objectives; the 101st Division's 'spread' was 'twenty-five miles by
fifteen,
men
of the
with stray "sticks" even further 'Screaming Eagles' had
rallied,
afield'.
Twenty-four hours
Confusion in the The by
scattering of the
their
to
American parachutists was thought it
a calamity at the time,
most of all
can be seen materially to have added to
the confusion and disorientation the invasion was inflicting 91st
lines,
German camp
tidy-minded commanders. In retrospect
numbers. The general commanding
only 3000
roam for days behind enemy and ammunition lasted.
and some were
refusing to surrender while rations
later
on
their
German opposite
Division, for example, was ambushed and killed
by wandering American parachutists while returning from an anti-invasion conference
in
the early hours of 6 June, before he had even grasped that the event had begun. Elsewhere it
sometimes took hours
were receiving from
for
German commanders
units actually
under
attack
to
comprehend
that the reports they
by Overlord forces were
382
different
from the
OVERLORD
bombardments and commando
On
the previous three years. possibility
raids that
had disturbed
their
occupation of France during
the day before, Luftwaffe meteorologists had discounted the
of an imminent invasion because of bad weather forecasts. By
was temporarily absent campaigner
at
in
Germany on
leave,
Saint-Germain (he had been chief of
invade France in 1914 and had preparing for bed
at his
a thick skin for
holiday house
at
luck,
ill
Rommel
Rundstedt was sleeping the sleep of the old staff
of one of the divisions sent to
alarms and excursions), while Hitler was
Berchtesgaden on the Obersalzberg and would
noon
not be presented with the firm evidence that the invasion had begun until his
conference Local
when
six
hours
after the assault
commanders
nevertheless
they got firm indication that
arrive.
made such
number of German
had
left
unjammed
Reich) were scrambled to deal with the bogus
working radar
stations.
in the Pas
night-fighters available (most
narrows. The real parachute
in the
reactions as their authority allowed
landing had begun. Such indications were too soon to
a
Because only eighteen out of ninety-two radar stations were working - those the
Allied electronic-warfare teams
small
waves had touched down.
And
fly-in
de
Calais region
armada approaching from the Channel
air
was not attacked
at all,
morning, twelve miles off the Cotentin. At 4
move
pitifully
were permanently defending the since
it
was out of range of any
the seaborne armada was eventually detected by
Berchtesgaden for permission to
- the
am
sound
at
two
Blumentritt telephoned Jodl
at
Panzer Lehr Division towards the beaches but was
told to wait until daylight reconnaissance clarified the situation. As late at 6
am,
when
the
LXXXIV Corps, which commanded the threatened sector, reported to the Seventh Army that it 'appears to be a covering action in conjunction with attacks to be made at other points later'. Three German divisions, the 709th, 352nd and 716th, were thus to undergo attack by eight Allied divisions without any immediate support from their higher headquarters. The naval
bombardment was
already
devastating
the
beaches,
709th and 716th Divisions found themselves in particularly desperate
good
quality
and both lacked any means of manoeuvre. The
first
straits.
Neither was of
was defending the area
on which the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were dropping as well as Utah beach, where the US 4th Division was assaulting from the sea. It was an almost impossible
The US 4th Division was an excellent formation which put nine good infantry on to the beach in the first wave. The 82nd and 101st were the cream of the American army, trained to a knife-edge and prepared for battle; their eighteen battalions, mission.
battalions
though scattered, were the equal of.an ordinary force twice was
very
ordinary
outnumbered, surrendered
put
indeed;
up
after firing a
D-Day, and insignificant
its
scarcely
six
battalions,
any resistance.
few shots. Allied
when
The 716th Division, confronting the British on Gold, Juno and Sword beaches at the
better quality than 709th
and was
The 709th Division
50th,
eastern
surrounded
battalions
Utah numbered
of 23,000
also disorientated
383
their size.
themselves
The three
casualties at
set against the total
Divisions
no
finding
men
and
on the beach
197, the lowest
of
landed on that beach.
Canadian 3rd and
British
3rd
end of the bridgehead, was of
by the descent of the 6th Airborne
OVERLORD The invasion
of north-western Europe.
The Normandy beaches had been
chosen by the Cossac planners because they lay within range of air cover but were a at each
less predictable objective
end of the beach-head were
- two American, two right)
Utah,
defended by four
Montebourg
/
Ravenoville
"9
1058 Regt
Div
^ "**"
^
bnD
then to
five divisions
land on
(left to
Gold, Juno and Sword Beaches. The sector was divisions, of
which only one was of good
quality.
•
Regt
"0<
STO8E •
*"»«^ Come
Vierville
Aba L USIOIAbaDi
6 Rara St
•
and one Canadian - were
/
( 1057 Regt
German
to protect its flanks;
i
/f 91 Inf
British
Omaha,
than the Pas de Calais. Airborne drops
I
Re
du Mont* •
V
^^
St Jores
LXXXIV Corps •
• Samteny •
St Jean
Littry
Mine
la
de Daye
Foret de Censy »
384
Balleroy
Key
^W
Planned airborne dropping and landing zones
Utah
Glider landings
){
^^mbi
M __
£~^
(Dempsey)
Br
XXX
Br 50 Br 8
OF SEINE
56Bde 47
RM Cmdos
Inf
Div
Bde
69_Jde
3
Cdn
2
Cdn Armd Bde
9
Bde
I I 231
hrs
on D-day
f^m^
Counter-attacks by 21st Panzer Division
at
2400
^P>
Major German gun batteries
RCT
Regimental
hrs
on D-day
Flooded areas
Br
Armd Bde
151
2400
I
Combat Team
Corps
(Crocker)
(Bucknell)
Y
2400 hrs on D-day
at
Held by German troops
Army
Corps
Allies at
(ZtZ^Zfr
21st
[Montgomery)
Held by
. Allied objective
,
Br Second
waves
First assault
wmm Attacks by British 6th Airborne Division
—— Army Group
assault areas
Inf
Div
Cdn Bde
British 3 Inf British
Div
Armd Bde
4 SS Bde
I 7
27
Cdn Bde 48 RMCmdos 8 Cdn Bde
41
RMCmdos I
SS Bde
Cmdos
Br 6
Abn Div
Houlgate
? v •nth
Army
Jllminn)
I
9ISRegt
\
**\!
^
*
'
•Varaville
I Bene/* X'>art 736 Regt
j
Kobenomme
•StLeger
^*^
/ fBures 1
Fifteenth
Army
(Salmuth)
• TFoarn
Tilly sur Seulles
^
• • Fontenay
jit_
.
XLVM
Pz Corps 12
385
SS Pz Div
THE WAR
Division in
its
The
rear area.
British
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
had additionally brought two
the landing and three brigades of assault armour; their
commando
brigades to
swimming Sherman
tanks
were
briefed to leave their landing craft as close to the beaches as possible, so that the infantry
would have covering fire from the moment of touchdown. The effect of launching such large numbers of well-supported infantry against the scattered German defenders was notable. At Sword and Juno the British and Canadians got ashore with little loss and quickly pressed inland; the British 3rd Division joined up with the 6th Airborne later that morning. On Gold the 50th Division had mixed fortunes: one of its two landing brigades debarked
in front
beach
fortified
of dunes and crossed with
swimming Shermans were the
1st
Hampshires and
regiment to
late arriving,
and
meantime the two leading
in the
Dorsets (which 185 years earlier had been the
1st
set foot in India), suffered
One of
heavy
'touchdown' which,
in
last
mixture of dreadful
its
good
for the incidents
its
battalions, British
first
casualties.
Gunner Charles Wilson,
the brigade's supporting artillerymen,
picture of the extraordinary confusion of the
yards' distance, holds
the other was confronted by a
little difficulty;
which the naval bombardment had spared. By bad luck
village
moments of 'run-in' and and
fatality
hair's
supplies a
moments of
first
breadth survival
at a
few
of D-Day from one end of the bridgehead to
the other. His Landing Craft Tank (LCT) was carrying four self-propelled 25-pounder guns
which were
We
hit
firing at targets
ashore throughout the approach:
two mines going
in
- bottle mines on stakes. They didn't stop
our ramp was damaged and an sandbank. The a
first
man
stone in six feet of water.
were
commando
We
my
in the
shorts.
sank.
post half-track
wreckage,
bloke near
heap
my
lost
I
me
We He
grounded on
disappeared
vehicle off the LCT.
It
was blown
in the sand.
The
in half
half-track
its
by
a shell
icy water.
The net was
quite
We
let
were soaking wet. George
in
floated for a
and
stopped and
initial difficulties
I
other Allied formation
on D-Day. Closer by
far
kit,
his
bodies and
bits
of bodies.
lower part collapsed
managed
to struggle into
by mid-morning and by
advanced almost to the outskirts of Bayeux, closer
to
than the
its
US
planners had feared would be the
lot
386
One
in a
bloody
my
clothes.
nightfall
had
prescribed objectives than any 1st
Infantry Division,
beach had undergone the worst of the invasion ordeals, one nearly
lives as the
a
like
moment, drifted on to a George dived overboard and swam ashore. The battery commandgot off with one running behind. The beach was strewn with first
The 50th Division overcame
Omaha
killed.
full kit.
shoes and vest in the struggle and had
offered cigarettes but they
blazing tank, bundles of blankets and
a
was
rough water and dragged us away towards some mines.
Somebody
the bren carrier was
mine and
it
although
grasped the ropes of the net over which the guns
go the ropes and scrambled ashore. only
on
sergeant in
and plunged down the ramp into
to drive ashore
unmanageable
officer standing
off was a
us,
which on
as costly in
of all divisions landing on the morning of
OVERLORD
The
the invasion.
1st
on
in coastal positions
shingle banks cult,
Division had been
6 June. Moreover,
and overlooked
while the
cliffs
opposed by the 352nd,
at
either
it
defended beaches backed
end by steep
Exit
cliffs.
below
as the
landing
craft
the
1st Battalion,
direct fire support.
The
results
inert, leaderless
from shore
in
to
as
they
rough
seas,
were lamentable. The ordeal of
[the leading]
and almost incapable of action. Every
wounded.
...
It
had become
pushed wounded
the water
far
diffi-
was directed on
116th Infantry Division, conveys the experience:
Within ten minutes of the ramps being lowered,
killed or
fire
neared the shore and even
touched ground. Their swimming Shermans, launched too
had foundered. They had no
by steep
in places
from the beaches was
provided commanding positions from which
the seaborne infantry
German formation
the best
men
officer
a struggle for survival
company had become and sergeant had been
and rescue. The
ashore ahead of them, and those
who had
the sands crawled back into the water pulling others to land to save
men
in
reached
them from
A Company had ceased to be an rescue party bent upon survival and
drowning. Within 20 minutes of striking the beach assault
company and had become
the saving of
Had
all
the
a forlorn little
lives.
German defenders of Normandy been as well trained and resolute as more of the swimming Shermans,
those of the 352nd Division and had accident overtaken the debacle
Omaha
might have been repeated up and
down
five
beaches, with catas-
trophic results. Luckily, the fate of the lst/116th Infantry was extreme.
The Omaha landing
as a
at
whole was
occurred there. Yet worst the
was
Most of the 4649
costly.
some of the Omaha
afflicted eventually
end of D-Day
casualties suffered
all
by the American army on D-Day
battalions got ashore unscathed
and even those
gathered their survivors and got away from the water's edge. By
chosen landing places were
in places less than a
all
in Allied hands,
mile deep. The question which
whether the separate footholds could be united and
in
loomed
even as
if
the bridgehead
evening drew in was
what strength the Germans would
counter-attack.
The
battle of the build-up
German infantry Army Group B and OKW which
was the handling of the
Because of the immobility of all the
divisions,
Panzer divisions by
alone threatened the invaders with
riposte.
Of
it
the four within or close to the invasion area, only the 21st Panzer Division,
positioned near Caen
on
the eastern flank of the British
Sword beach and
'airborne
enough to the scene of action to exert a decisive effect. Its Rommel, was absent on the morning of D-Day (Rommel, by furious
bridgehead', was close
commander,
like
Ulm, would arrive at Army Group B headquarters at 10.30 in the evening). Rommel's chief of staff, Hans Speidel, succeeded in extracting permission from OKW for driving from
387
THE WAR
the 21st Panzer Division to intervene
IN
THE WEST
1^4^-1^45
6.45 am, but
at
was two hours before General Erich
it
command, passed on an operational order. probe into the gap between Sword and Juno beaches,
Marcks, next in the chain of required the tanks to
advance on Caen, which was only eight miles from the
British
and
sea,
That order to halt the
'roll
up' the
bridgehead.
Advancing on Caen from Sword beach was
2nd
brigade of British infantry led by the
a
Battalion of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry.
the tanks of the Staffordshire
Yeomanry but
It
German
beach. The Shropshires had therefore to take each
came
to
by orthodox
it
and movement. Progress was slow.
fire
Division,
once forced the Shropshires
Its
guns
Caen, and
its
22nd Panzer Regiment moved forward
at
throwing the
succeed
in
with
too exact foresight, 'we shall have
into the Staffordshire
British into the sea',
In the afternoon the tanks
still
holding out
gliders of 6th
at
go to ground, three miles short of
to
to attack the bridgehead.
the war; However,
Fireflies
its
Mark
IV tanks ran 17-
A few made contact with the infantry of the 716th Lion-sur-Mer; but, when they were overflown by the 250 losses.
Airborne Division bringing reinforcements to the parachutists across the
Caen remained
in
German
though
nightfall,
Sword bridgehead perimeter was
hands, the
intact
and the
of D-Day had passed.
Though
the
Germans could not know
it
- Marcks's gloomy prognosis was an
inspired guess - their opportunity to extinguish the invasion 7
you don't
(Shermans armed with the long
Orne, they concluded that they risked being cut off and withdrew. By
On
'If
Marcks warned the regimental commander
lost
Yeomanry's anti-tank
pounder) and suffered heavy
crisis
jam on the
o'clock the
at six
the front.
Division
in a giant traffic
defensive position as they
column ran into the vanguards of the 21st Panzer which had been delayed by one time-wasting mission after another on its way to
caught them up, but
all
should have been accompanied by
were trapped
the)
and 8 June the next nearest Panzer
to assault the
at its
outset
had
now
passed.
came forward
division, the 12th SS (Hitler Youth),
Canadians in their bridgehead west of Caen and inflicted heavy losses on
them, but the Hitler Youth reported seeing
some
failed to
break through to the
'crying with frustration'.
sea; a
Germany army
officer
Meanwhile the invaders were linking hands
Sword from Juno and Gold and the British from the American beaches (the British were joined to Omaha on 10 June, Omaha to Utah by 13 June), as their navies simultaneously outstripped the enemy in the race to bring reinforcements to the battlefront. The explanation of the Allies' success in 'the battle of the build-up' is simple. The Channel was a broad highway, wholly under Allied control; only a few ships were lost to mines and E-boat attack; and, although some of the new 'schnorkel' across the gaps that separated
submarines succeeded
in reaching the
so the general effect was
trifling.
Channel from
interior
of northern France
heavy
losses,
By contrast, not only was the carrying capacity of the
French roads and railways grossly inferior to
whole
Brittany, they suffered
lay
that
of the Allied transport
under the eye of the Allied
June onwards, redoubled their pre-invasion
efforts to
388
air forces,
fleet,
but the
which, from 6
destroy the transport infrastructure
OVERLORD
and shot in a
at
anything that
ground
Even
attack if
by
moved
in daylight.
the Fifteenth, the nearest army, until the
de
The Panzer
Calais,
it
the
end of July,
moved
Normandy from
the 9th
first;
thirty
and
month of the Normandy
development of
a
Germany but
to seize
in less
to Paris a
hundred miles away.
Montgomery had hoped
on
essential lay
the 12th SS Panzer Division
city.
on 7-8
A
ground
local offensive
June; an
armoured
a tributary
1
July),
open
line'
killed or
effort failed,
he launched
Caen on
13
June was
Normandy; finally a large codenamed Epsom, was blunted in
its last
gasp, Operation it
at
Epsom
Caen. The
of Balaclava), which had been forced to
four years earlier and been reconstituted in Britain since.
open country south of the Odon
men had been
ground was
plains that led directly
of the Orne which joined
However, an attempt by the supporting tanks of the into the
which the Americans
was taken and held by the 2nd Argyll and
position, the village of Gavrus,
Saint-Valery
for
attack west of
by the recently arrived 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions. At
Sutherland Highlanders (the 'thin red
between
essential to the
by the Canadians was contained by
by one of the few Tiger tank battalions
secured ground across the river Odon,
were
than twenty-four hours.
18 June); for the British the essential
offensive by the 15th Scottish Division (26 June to
at
example,
for
within the bridgehead (they reached
Caen on 6 June; when the
to take
three separate attacks to take the
surrender
The march of
(6-8 June) and then
ground deemed
environs, from which they could plunge into the
its
a counter-
eleven days to
and break-out, and German mobile divisions
and the port of Cherbourg,
Caen and
most advanced
from
battle therefore resolved itself into a struggle
them down. The
the Atlantic coast of the peninsula
largely defeated
and Nineteenth.
a further
Normandy
Normandy
to
were attempting
successful offensive
seeking to nail and wear struggled, the Cotentin
First
positions. Allied reinforcement divisions
battle
meanwhile moving from southern England arriving Allied formations that
difficulty
the 'second invasion' materialise
10th SS Panzer, returning
miles from Brittany to
its
be drawn
to
was even more laborious. The 275th Division,
another three days to reach
first
17 July.
Army
the French frontier, entirely as a result of air attack.
divisions
took three days to cover
The
lest
and he only grudgingly released others from the
divisions
unmechanised
Seventh
was, he forbade the transfer of units from
offensive mission in Poland, took four days to cross
reach
on
staff car
for the
and Nineteenth, they would have found great
First
any rapid pace. As
in reaching the battlefield at
wounded
himself was to be severely
while driving in his
a British fighter
had allowed reinforcements
Hitler
wholesale from the Fifteenth,
in the Pas
Rommel
wounded
The
-
failed
and
Epsom was
11th
called
fight in the
Armoured
after five
Division to break out
days of costly fighting - 4020
off.
bocage
The Americans meanwhile were overcoming the German defenders of the Cotentin, the 243rd, 709th, 91st and 77th Divisions. Two of these, the 77th and 91st, were good-quality
389
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1945-1945
formations; the attacking American formations, the 4th, 9th, 29th and 90th Divisions, were
inexperienced and unprepared for the
of the soon to be infamous farmers 2000 years
form banks
earlier.
much
as
difficulty
bocage country,
Over two millennia
as ten feet thick.
of the
were
terrain.
The hedgerows, backbone
boundaries planted by the Celtic
field
their entangled roots
'Although there had been
had collected earth
some
talk in the
to
UK before
D-Day,' wrote General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne Division, 'none of us had really anticipated
how
difficult
they
would
Shermans with 'hedgedozers', but
in
campaign, the Americans
be.' Later in the
fitted their
June 1944 each hedgerow was impenetrable to tanks,
as well as to fire
and view. To the Germans they offered almost impregnable defensive
lines at intervals
of 100 or 200 yards. To the attacking American infantry they were death
Before them the green American infantry
traps.
commander,
to call too often
on the
Army
lost heart, forcing Bradley, the First
overtired parachutists to lead the assault.
American' and 'Screaming Eagles' never flinched from the
task;
The
'All
but the cumulative effect of
losses in their ranks threatened these superb formations with dissolution. Lieutenant
Sidney Eichen, of the incoming 30th Division, encountering
a
group of paratroopers
Cotentin asked, '"Where are your officers?", and they answered: "All dead."
"Who's eyed
in charge, then?",
GIs, the dirt) clothes
going to look
after
and some sergeant
and the droop
am".
said, "I
in their walk,
looked
I
and
at
in the
asked,
the unshaven, red-
wondered:
I
He
is
this
how we
are
a few days of combat?'
Germans were forced back
Step by step, however, the
into
the
perimeter of
fortresses -
as he had done in the Cherbourg. Hitler planned to hold the French ports as Crimea and was to do in the Baltic states - so as to deny them to the enemy, whatever
ground was
On
lost in the hinterland.
Schlieben, the port
commander,
June he signalled to General Karl Wilhelm von
21
expect you to
'I
fight this battle as
Gneisenau once fought
in the
defence of Colberg' (one of the epics of Prussia's resistance against Napoleon in
1807).
Five
days later Cherbourg
Americans to
artillery
fire
at
Immediately afterwards he and Hitler
demanded
that
the all
fell;
the
main
his
commander of
gate,
men marched
been many suicides
directed the in the
Normandy
Red Arm)
Mid-June 1944 was
a
misfires.
Margival
on
Normandy
17
One rogue
surrender.
On
a day,
26 June
who
all
commander of the Seventh Army,
but few so
far in
crisis for Hitler,
months
earlier.
the
Wehrmacht;
as the
the worst he had faced since
Although on 12 June he had
at last
of the V-ls was
much
Britain, the
launch rate
of which only half reached London, and there were
flying-bomb crashed directly on to
June during the course of the only
battle.
for flag.
number would grow.
secret-weapons campaign against
lower than hoped, about eighty
man)
pretext
took poison the same night. There had
battle,
in 1941
time of desperate
the surrender of Stalingrad seventeen his
a
Rundstedt inaugurate court-martial investigations against
shades drew in around the Reich the
opened
the citadel requested the
out under the white
could be held responsible. General Friedrich Dollmann,
whose headquarters
him
give
to
visit
Moreover, although the danger
390
Hitler's
command bunker
at
he made to France throughout the
in the
west was
great, a crisis
on the
OVERLORD
Eastern Front
now
suddenly compounded
weeks of
relentless
his strategic difficulties.
Red Army had opened Operation
anniversary of Barbarossa, the
armoured
22 June, the third
Army Group Centre and
destroyed
attack,
On
Bagration, which, in six carried the
Russian line 300 miles westward from White Russia to the banks of the Vistula outside
Warsaw;
thirty divisions,
350,000
German
soldiers,
were
wounded
killed,
or captured in
the catastrophe.
During those
men
terrible
weeks of Bagration, the
thousands but eventually succeeded
in
on the Normandy
stability
front after the
in
Westheer in
holding
Normandy continued
of defence. This illusory
a line
of Cherbourg therefore brought
fall
sense of relief to Hitler's twice-daily situation conferences
at
attrition
forces
it
on 6 June, he now conceived the scheme of would destroy the German mobile
point for successive blows which
as a focal
while
the
accumulated
Allies
reserves
for
reinforcement of the bridgehead was interrupted by
damaged
the American and
made good
which was being
hedgerow fighting, the perimeter of the down'. Montgomery had commited himself to
the capture of Caen; having failed to capture it
welcome
the
in
bridgehead seemed to have been 'nailed
using
a
Rastenburg. In early July,
despite a continuing erosion of the Seventh Army's infantry strength,
ground away by incessant
to lose
the
a great
break-out.
Channel
On
gale,
19-21
June
which wrecked
the British Mulberry harbours. Improvisation, however,
soon
the capacity, so that by 26 June there were already twenty-five Allied divisions
on
ashore, with another fifteen in Britain
represented not only
a
Panzer divisions. Hitler
their way, to
oppose fourteen German. That
quarter of the Westheer but two-thirds, eight out of twelve, of
may have been
able to convince himself that the invasion
its
had been
brought under control. Rundstedt could not; on 5 July he advised Hitler to 'make peace'
and was
at
once relieved
as
OB
West by Kluge. Montgomery,
intelligence of the rising losses suffered
making Caen
On
'the crucible'
7 July, after the
of the
by the
Normandy
RAF dropped 2500
daily
informed by Ultra
Westheer, stuck resolutely to his
scheme of
battle.
tons of bombs
on Caen,
virtually
completing
the destruction of William the Conqueror's ancient capital, the British 3rd and 59th and
Canadian 3rd Divisions advanced on the
city.
They
failed to take the centre
but occupied
codenamed Charnwood, almost isolated Caen from the rest of the German positions in Normandy. There was evidence too that continuing American pressure was also drawing enemy armour away towards the base of the Cotentin, where it was planned that the ultimate break-out should erupt. Montgomery therefore decided that one more blow would bring on the climactic struggle with the Panzers that he sought and clear the way into the open country that led towards Paris. This new offensive was to be called Goodwood and would be mounted from the 'airborne bridgehead' east of the Orne into the corridor between that river and the Dives. Only one all its
outskirts. This operation,
stretch of high ground, the
high road towards
Goodwood,
Bourguebus
ridge, closed the exit
from
that corridor to the
Paris.
involving
all
three British
armoured
391
divisions in
Normandy, the Guards,
THE WAR
THE WEST 194M94S
IN
bombardment
7th and 11th, began
on
yet staged in the
campaign, took the defenders completely by surprise, and
18 July.
was preceded by the heaviest
It
German
survivors trembling with shock.
aerial 'carpet'
prisoners collected in the early stages of the advance stumbled to the rear as
mid-morning the certain.
were
Then on the
in Paris to find
which had escaped the bombardment and a
commander of
regimental
a
from leave
battlefield straight
gunners, including those of
were used
(Pioniere)
Divisions
the 21st Panzer Division,
pockets of artillery and armour
1st
form an
to
Division had forced
and the 12th SS Panzer
SS
1st
of the ridge
to the foot
afternoon; and, as the British tanks began to deploy to climb salvoes of the Fife
75-mm and 88-mm
fire
were
it
was mid-
they were caught by
it,
from the high ground above. The leading squadron of
and Forfar Yeomanry went up
their rescue,
German in on the
anti-tank screen. By the time the British 11th
way through
its
SS Panzer Division -
an emergency - hastily dug
to acting as infantry in
were hurried forward
Armoured
seemed
co-ordinated a defence. While the
hastily
of Bourguebus ridge, while the tanks of both the
crest
drunk. By
Luftwaffe anti-aircraft battery, began to engage and slow the
advancing British tanks, the engineer battalions of the engineers
on the
in flames
hit as hard. 'Ever) "where
spot.
The 23rd Hussars, coming to figures ran and struggled
wounded and burning
painfull) for cover,' the regimental history recorded, 'while a remorseless rain
of armour-
we were not going had moved forward
piercing shot riddled the already helpless Shermans. All too clearly
"break through" that day. battle that
the
army's extraordinary qualities of resilience and improvisation
Hans von Luck,
asserted:
arrived
German
the
if
tanks were halfway to their objectives and success
British
left
tanks were overturned by the concussions and
.
.
.
Out of the
morning, one hundred and
armour
great array of
six tanks
now
that
lay crippled
to to
or out of action in the
cornfields.'
The correct
figure
was 126 from
Guards Armoured Division had
lost
11th
alone,
more
its first
battle.
Armoured
another
sixty in
being a disaster. Montgomery's post-battle protestations that
expected to produce
a
than half its strength; the
Goodwood was
out,
It
was
and the 'phase
Allies
him
D +
lines'
43 on 20 July, the day the
drawn on the
should be halfway to the Loire by
the projected line for that his
D
close to
really
been
break-out were treated with impatience by both Churchill and
Eisenhower. Churchill's patience in any case had been wearing thin
advance inland.
had not
it
-t-
17.
planners'
its
logic
at
the slow pace of the
fighting finally spluttered
maps before D-Day had
that date.
Montgomery had
grand design retained
Goodwood
As
it
was they had not
forecast that the
yet
even reached
to argue at length to Churchill to persuade
and
that a result
would not now be long
delayed.
Compulsively
self-justifying
though he was, Montgomery was
disappointment of Goodwood behind him and to argue it
had indeed pulled Army Group
the
was
moment when a great
B's
that
it
right
both to put the
had served
armoured reserves back towards the
a
purpose. For
British front at
they had been concentrating to meet what growing evidence indicated
American offensive
in the
making. During July the Americans had been fighting
392
American
75-mm
anti-tank guns in action in the
Normandy bocage
fighting to break out into Brittany in July
a horrible
and
costly battle in the bocage south of the Cotentin.
29th and 35th Divisions had lost respectively 2000 and 3000 five
times the
country during the
1944.
Between
men
18
and 20 July the
in the battle for Saint-L6
-
number of casualties suffered by the British armoured divisions in the same German losses were even worse: the 352nd Division, the Americans'
period east of Caen.
principal opponent,
ceased to exist
still
in action after
after Saint-L6. Its casualties
Seventh
Army
Ersatzheer
(Replacement Army)
since 6 June, for
2313 tanks produced in
in
German
its
stubborn defence of
went
Omaha
beach, almost
to swell the total of 116,000 suffered
by the
which only 10,000 replacements had come from the
Germany. Material
losses
had been equally
factories in May-July, 1730
severe: against
had been destroyed, one-third
of them in France, but by the end of June only seventeen replacements had arrived. The strength of the perimeter
drawn around the
393
Allied bridgehead
was stretched close
to
THE WAR
breaking-point; and
On own
the
it
was about
morning of 25
infantry - four
1943-194S
be subjected to
to
a
infantry
a
powerful blow
when American
He had
a reputation for
with anybody, even by radio. By like the face
their
to the assault
hard driving of subordinates
commanding Panzer Lehr
day's events justified. General Fritz Bayerlein,
looked
bombed
and two armoured divisions moved
Corps's path, testified to the weight of the attack: 'After an hour
lines
weakest point.
at its
aircraft
heavy carpet bombardment. They belonged to General
'Lightning Joe' Collins's VII Corps.
which the
THE WEST
July - after a false start
American
west of Saint-L6 behind
IN
noon nothing was
moon and
of the
at least
I
in VII
had no communication
My
and smoke.
visible but dust
front
70 per cent of my troops were knocked
out - dead, wounded, crazed or numbed.' The next day opened with another carpet
bombardment.
Progress, less than a mile the day before, increased to three
American 2nd Armoured Division reached positions from which Kluge,
out.
OB
West and
new commander
also the
of
it
Army Group
'sent word',
B,
Bayerlein recalled, 'that the line along the Saint-L6-Periers road must be held
but
it
at all costs,
was already broken.' He promised reinforcement by an SS tank battalion with
Tigers;
my
and the
stood poised to break
arrived with
it
five.
'That night', Bayerlein
division south-west of Canisy.
retreat.'
I
went on,
had fourteen tanks
in
'I
all.
We
could do nothing but
Panzer Lehr had once been perhaps the best and certainly the strongest armoured
division in the
German arm).
had been reduced by
six
Its
condition was an index of the state to which the Westheer
weeks of fighting
in
Normandy.
crumbling front must be restored and
that the
Hitler
was nevertheless adamant
the situation reversed.
The July bomb
plot
Five days before Cobra, as the American breakthrough operation was
of army
sixty
assembled the remnants of
officers
had made an attempt
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, Ersatzheer,
placed a
and
to Berlin
Germany with
bomb under
codenamed,
a disabled veteran
who
the conference table
at
held a
staff
appointees.
By
a
a
group
20
July,
appointment with the
Rastenburg and then escaped to
succession
fly
throughout
direct a conspiracy designed to replace the Nazi leadership
military
On
to assassinate Hitler in his headquarters.
of mischances the conspiracy
The bomb wounded but did not kill Hitler. An early misapprehension that the explosion was an act of sabotage was corrected. The signals officer who belonged to the miscarried.
conspiracy was accordingly prevented from interrupting outward communication from Rastenburg. Goebbels was thus able to mobilise soldiers loyal to Hitler in reaction against the conspiracy in Berlin. several of them, including Stauffenberg,
danger of fortress,
a
coup had been averted and
was once again secured
in
The conspirators were quickly were shot the same evening. By
Hitler,
even though isolated
a
military
arrested,
and
nightfall the
in his
Rastenburg
power. However, the 20 July Plot understandably
army of cavalryman -
reinforced every one of his deep-laid prejudices against the higher ranks of the
which Stauffenberg was the epitome. An
aristocrat, a
394
devout Christian,
a
OVERLORD
church and the nobility but also horses,
Hitler hated not only the
riding, equestrian
apparel and everything they represented - Stauffenberg had been drawn into the anti-
he recognised the mortal danger of defeat into which the Fiihrer
Hitler conspiracy because
had led the fatherland and anticipated the disgrace and punishment
Nazism would bring
to his
countrymen
rather than moralistic,
patriotic
though
that the iniquity
of
its
wake. Stauffenberg's motives, in short, were
his
moral sense was deeply engaged by the
in
conspiracy. For both his patriotism and his morality Hitler had only hatred and contempt,
which
feelings
he
automatically
Stauffenberg's social class
all
he
caste. Far
too
transferred
and professional
officered the Westheer. General Heinrich Graf
to
von
identified
in hospital.
and since
the 'old' officer class
He had
also a suspicion,
17 July
breakthrough
at
Saint-L6
Only
B.
to
believed,
governor of
Rommel, even though he
had been lying seriously injured
though not proof, of the complicity of Kluge, since 4
July the linchpin of the battle against the 'Anglo-Saxons' as both
commander of Army Group
belonging
Stiilpnagel, the military
France, was certainly in the plot; so too, Hitler believed, was
came from outside
as
many of them, he
a resolute
would convince him
OB
West and
direct
- and successful - riposte to the American
were misfounded and
that his suspicions
restore his belief in the dedication of the Westheer to the National Socialist revolution.
The
of the Westheer's loyalty - also designed to produce
test
military situation in the west -
flank of the
was
to
be
a counter-attack
with
all
a strategic reversal
armour
available
American spearhead which was driving south from Saint-L6 between the
country and the sea towards the interior of Brittany.
OKWs
Rastenburg, Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of
headquarters
at
On
operations
reached Kluge's
staff,
La Roche-Guyon, believing he was to discuss with the field marshal the
however, he discovered
expected
its
soon
that Hitler
had meanwhile sent
as possible, to start
results
August - to lead to
-
as
from Mortain and drive
a 'rolling
up of the
entire Allied position in
The Mortain counter-attack began on
July,
and 2nd
7 August.
SS,
Hitler
and the 9th and 10th SS from the Caen
deploying 1400 tanks, would lead the Westheer, a great
It
On
his arrival,
begin a counter-
to the sea,
and
that
he
in
Normandy'.
involved, immediately, four Panzer
and was intended
and 9th from the south of France, which
towards
in orders to
Warlimont discovered when he returned to Rastenburg on 8
divisions, the 116th, 2nd, 1st SS 11th
bocage
2 August an emissary from
question of withdrawing to a defensive position deeper within France.
offensive as
of the
into the
to
draw
in four
had already promised
sector.
more, the
to Kluge
on 27
Together these eight divisions,
an operation
codenamed
Luttich (Liege),
counter-encirclement of the invaders, the consequences of which would
match Ludendorffs breakthrough into the rear of the French armies
at
Liege exactly thirty
years earlier to the day. As Hitler
had told Warlimont on the eve of his mission
to Kluge,
'The object remains to keep the
enemy confined
to inflict
serious losses
upon him
in
order to wear him
395
to his bridgehead
down and
finally
and there
destroy him.'
THE WAR
IK
THE WEST
1943-1945
TANK BATTLE
FALAISE The
of which Operation
battle
Liittich
marked
the opening stage was to develop into
the largest clash of armour in any of the campaigns fought
on
the Western Front,
if
not the largest of the war. Only the Battle of Kursk, fought the previous July, had
assembled but
at
a larger
divisions - twelve, against ten in
number of German Panzer
Normandy;
Kursk the German offensive had been defeated by minefields and anti-tank guns
rather than by mobile riposte. gigantic
Battle
manoeuvre of twenty armoured
tank, over
frenzied
The
of the Falaise Gap, by contrast, took the form of a divisions (ten
German, ten
Allied), tank against
800 square miles of countryside and extending through the two weeks of
movement and
violent combat.
By the summer of 1944 the mystique of
summer of 1940
Kleist
even rumour - of tanks to panic infantry into
no longer have such
Blitzkrieg
and Guderian had been able flight
to
had been long
overlaid. In the
count on the mere appearance - or
or surrender.
Now commanders
could
Green or shaken infantry would, of course, still run at done so on numerous occasions in Normandy; but experienced infantrymen had learned for themselves, as they had been taught, that flight was even more dangerous than keeping to their positions in the face of armoured attack. expectations.
the approach of tanks, and had
For by 1944 tanks did not operate,
as they
had
in their
palmy
days, as
independent
spearheads; they advanced only in close concert with specialist infantry of their own, the Panzergrenadiers,
and under the
Defending infantry
who
left
bombardment of supporting artillery. make for safety thus exposed themselves to
protective
their trenches to
several sorts of fire: that of the tanks themselves, that of the tanks' foot soldiers their associated gunners. In the face
of
this
most
terrifying
of
defenders struggled to hold their ground, counting on their
available
and
that
of
assaults, therefore, the
own
anti-tank
weapons
to
at bay while calling for their own artillery support and air strike if that - and hoping that friendly tanks would come forward to do battle with
-
hold the attackers
were
all
396
FALAISE
those of the enemy. In short, by 1944 the tank had ceased to be an
of strategy but had taken achieved
effects
its
by
place
its
autonomous instrument tactical attrition, which
an elaborate machinery of
in
cumulative wearing-down of resistance rather than by
a
a rapier-like
penetration of the enemy's front.
The dethronement of the tank from the
weapon
to that
of workaday tool of
history of armaments.
The
appearance been hailed
as
status
followed
tactics
ironclad, the torpedo
of revolutionary 'war-winning'
a pattern
long established in the
and the machine-gun had each
making defence, even war
'impossible'; to each, in turn,
itself,
an antidote had been found and the 'revolutionary' weapon subsumed within altered
a slightly
and more complex system of war-making than had prevailed before. However,
although the tank had undergone
displacement,
a similar
its
from the outset and disputed energetically between the two always be associated with
will
at first
masterminded the
first
its
autonomy had been doubted great theorists whose names
development. Major-General
great tank offensive at
Cambrai
J.F.C.
who had
Fuller,
saw no future place
in 1917,
but the tank arm on the battlefield; Basil Liddell Hart, his friendly
for
rival in their
any
paper
debates of the 1920s and 1930s, argued that the tank would not win battles single-handed
and
that
all
arms, including infantry and
produce armies which would resemble
artillery,
fleets
would
in future
be mechanised, to
of larger and smaller armoured and mobile
'land ships'.
Liddell Hart looked too far into the future; not until forty years after the
Second World War would even the most advanced industrial resources to Fuller,
who saw
a land fleet
mechanise
states
their field armies completely.
and
it
was with
OB
end of the
the wealth and
was nevertheless he, not
It
the future true. Already by 1944 'land fleets' existed in embryo.
of Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions that
Allied invasion;
command
West had
It
was with
striven to defeat the
of armoured and mechanised divisions
a land fleet
that
Montgomery'' and Bradley would achieve the encirclement and destruction of Army Group B. Allied
tanks were to play the leading part in blunting the
the Battle of the Falaise
Gap and then
encirclement around the enemy; but the ground they their
accompanying
completed by
and
its
infantry
German
won was
their supporting artillery
initiated
and
air
line
of
Falaise pocket
squadrons. Falaise was an all-arms
was
battle,
nature exactly depicts the extent to which armoured tactics had been rationalised
when
the Panzer generals had acted as
The diminution of the tank can development. Gamelin, for
in
fact
his ineptitude
all
was to aim armoured counter-thrusts
at
if
invincible.
be traced to an early date in the war's
of decision, correctly perceived the proper
riposte to the Panzer thrust immediately after the crossing of the
18
which
consolidated and held by
and the work of destruction within the
since the early days of the war,
Two
attack
making the advances which drew the
in
Meuse on
13
May
such counter-thrusts were mounted by de Gaulle's 4th Armoured Division
May and by
unsupported by
Frankforce
at
Arras
large resources
on
1940;
it
the neck joining tank spearhead to infantry shaft.
May. Unco-ordinated
21
of infantry and
397
artillery,
in time,
at
Laon on
however, and
both counter-strokes
failed.
It
was
THE WAR
the
THE WEST
IN
1943-194S
Germans rather than the Allies who profited by the experience of these engagements. Rommel, commanding the 7th Panzer Division, rescued himself from over-
At Arras,
exposure by halt
heavy (88-mm)
calling into service the
anti-aircraft
and turn back the charge of the Royal Tank Regiment into
had evaded
which
armoured
his
his lightly
gunned Panzers had
might have extinguished
flak battalion to it
eighty-eights stopped the heavy British tanks -
The
screen.
guns of his
his divisional centre after
do - and saved him from
failed to
a defeat
which
then and there.
his career
Germans that the most effective means of waging armoured enemy was to use a combination of tanks and anti-tank weapons; in their desert war against the British that these tactics worked in
Arras emphasised to the
warfare against an equal
and they were
to learn
offence as well as defence. At the First Battle of Tobruk in April 1941 the Afrikakorps broke the perimeter of the fortified port with
tanks, but
its
many of these were
quickly lost to
Australian tank-hunting parties because the defenders closed the gaps behind the intruders
and prevented the German infantry from following
w in were
shortly to be used by
to a screen of anti-tank
robbed the propelled
against the British desert
method whereby he engaged
perfected a
British
artillery
These
Rezegh and Gazala, from November 1941
desert battles of Sidi
enemy on
Rommel
in support.
British tanks
army to
of divide-and-
itself.
his
a
In the
open
Rommel
June 1942,
with his own, retreated to draw the
guns and then advanced when the losses
of the means to conduct
accompanied
tactics
inflicted
had
mobile defence. Motorised infantry and
self-
advancing tanks, thus ensuring that
British positions
overrun could be held and consolidated. It
was
positive advantage to
a
extraneous reasons, the
number of
Rommel
in his
adoption of these
German Panzer
tanks in
divisions
tactics that, for
had been halved
since 1940. Hitler's purpose in reducing divisional tank strengths in late 1940 was to
accumulate divisions
The
a surplus
was
in fact
on which new Panzer
doubled between the
indirect effect of this bisection
was
divisions could be built; the
number of
of France and the opening of Barbarossa.
fall
to force
German commanders
to
make
better use
of the non-tank elements of their Panzer divisions, particularly the mechanised infantry (Panzergrenadiers) and self-propelled
artillery.
Out of
this
necessity was
born
a true
doctrine of tank-infantry-artillery co-operation which the Panzer divisions brought to
a
high level of practicality in 1943^1, as they found themselves progressively outnumbered
by the enemy,
particularly
below 200 (from the 400
on the Russian front. Even when divisional tank strengths fell had been standard in 1940), German Panzer divisions proved
that
themselves equal or superior to 10th Panzer Division
much
stronger Allied formations -
demonstrated when
it
Kasserine in Tunisia in February 1943. British the
German
were
as, for
example, the
Armoured Division at divisions followed American armoured and 1st
pattern of organisation from mid-war onwards, shedding tank battalions and
acquiring larger .
routed the US
e a better
complements of motorised
infantry
and self-propelled
anti-tank artillery to
balance of arms. The Americans, out of their large automotive capacity,
actually able to put their
'armoured
infantry' into tracked carriers,
398
with
a
notable
FALAISE
improvement
in mobility.
German Panzer formations - those of the the army's Lehr and the Luftwaffe's Hermann
Even
so, the best
privileged SS and such favoured divisions as Goering - remained superior to their Allied counterparts
Normandy and White combat and
the rear by aerial
at
bombardment, began
Army and
the battles of
after
imposed
at
the front by
to depress their strengths
which losses of men and equipment could be
level at
until,
Russia, the relentless effects of attrition,
made good from
below the
the Replacement
the tank factories.
—
—
The technology of armoured warfare
Superior organisation and experience alone, however, did not explain Germany's
wage armoured warfare on equal terms
ability to
against a coalition of industrially superior
powers
The quality of German armour also counted significantly in the balance. German armoured vehicles were, with only one or two exceptions, better than their equivalents in the opposing armies. British armour in particular was lamentably from
early 1942 until late 1944.
inferior to the it
German
products.
September
in action in
1916,
Though
and
the British had invented the tank,
largely
first
deployed
conceived the theoretical basis of armoured
Second World War. That
warfare, they did not succeed in building an effective tank in the
between firepower, protection and mobility which underlies successful
crucial balance
tank design eluded them. Their Infantry Tank
Mark
I,
which
Rommel found he
Arras
at
could penetrate only with his eighty-eights, was strong but almost immobile. The Churchill
was equally tough but scarcely
faster.
Only the Cromwell, which appeared
the reconnaissance battalions of British
gun remained inadequate. As American Sherman fast,
reliable
for their
and easy
British
armour
power, was
that
Britain, in 1944,
was
quality
and
it
all
strength, but the
The
Anglo-American armoured capability was to
to specially adapted
great merit of the
Shermans, called if
produced only 5000
fit its
Fireflies,
Sherman, and
a tribute to
fearsome
17-
which provided
German
America's industrial
USA produced
47,000
tanks.
among Germany's enemies, which matched
time
its
output of tanks
In 1944 Soviet tank production totalled 29,000,
independent American designer, Walter
armour,
though
defects:
not only antidote to heavy
could be manufactured in quantity. In 1943-4 the
quantity.
at a
its
Shermans, while Germany produced 29,600 tanks and assault guns.
Russia, alone
Christie's chassis
1944 to equip
were dependent on the
Sherman too had
comprised the remarkable T-34. This tank owed much of prototypes
in
had speed and protection;
burnt readily and lacked gunpower. Britain's most
divisions with their principal
in 1944-5.
tanks, almost
It
gun
anti-tank
armoured
it
divisions,
the British divisions of 1944
main tank
to maintain,
successful contribution to
pounder
a result
armoured
when
fiscal
Christie,
from
stringency kept the
whom
its
technology to the
the Soviet
US Army on
a
in
most of which
Union bought
shoestring budget.
To
and suspension the Russians added an all-weather engine and sloped
as well as
an effective gun, thus producing such
399
a
well-balanced design that in
CLASH OF ARMOUR Above:
Tiger
II
heavy battle tanks,
often called Royal Tigers, in a tank
park. Introduced into service in the
autumn
of 1944, the Royal Tiger
the heaviest, best protected
was
and most
powerfully armed tank to go into production in the Second World War.
But
its
battlefield superiority
was
purchased at the price of manoeuvTabilit) and
However,
its
reliability.
88-mm
long, powerful
gun could outrange and outshoot nearly
all
Allied tanks,
enabled the Tiger
II
engage targets as
it
were
to
chose.
built before the
Right: The IV Panzer
and
this
stand off and
Only 485
end of the war.
business end of a
Mark
of the 12th SS Panzer
Caen
in
June 1944. The Division took part
in
Division Hitlerjugend west of
some of the most
bitter fighting in
Normandy.
400
Left:
A Sherman
armoured
of a British
division rumbles
down a
French lane, deadly country
armoured ambush. The
heavily dependent on the
Sherman, counting on
inferiority to
its
reliability in
thumb was to
401
Tigers
US Army's
that
it
and sheer
to offset its
German
Panthers. The
were
American
action, ease of maintenance,
weight of numbers,
for
British
took
five
knock out one Panther.
and
rule of
Shermans
THE WAR
when
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
Dr Fritz Todt as head of the German armaments German army actually considered copying it wholesale as a successor to the ageing Panzer Mark IV. That humiliating concession of technical inferiority was ultimately avoided by the production of the Mark V Panther. Although the new tank failed at Kursk 1942,
Albert Speer succeeded
industry, the
as late as
January 1944 Hitler was calling
bomber -
disappointing
Normandy, where 1944,
it
it
'the crawling
Heinkel
177' in
eventually justified the effort put into
it
equipped many of the Panzer
its
an allusion to
in
Even
in
battalions of the SS divisions.
however, the Mark IV remained the Panzer arm's mainstay.
It
had originated before
1939 as the final series in a ladder of designs, each larger than the one before. The in particular finally,
when equipped for the T-34
with
a 'long'
75-mm gun
as
main armament,
its
became almost
it
predecessors, notably the Panzer 'assault'
Mark
III,
had
also
been
readily adaptable as self-
guns, and from February 1943 onwards,
pioneer Heinz Guderian became Inspector-General of Panzer Troops, with the tanks into a
new
weapons
'Panzer arm'. Such
it
when
the tank
was incorporated
from the disadvantage
suffered
fired only in the direction that the vehicle itself was pointing; but,
guns
to detect
difficult
Americans and
opponents
and they
British,
Panzergrenadier divisions
the
like
main
overcoming the reluctance of the
which, according to
its
provided the mobile firepower of the
largely
17th
SS,
The German army
in France.
assault guns. Indeed. Guderian's in
made
well-chosen defensive positions on the
in
Their design was rational enough to be widely imitated by the Russians as well
battlefield.
as the
when deployed
that
because they
lacked complex turret machinery, they were cheap to produce, and their low profile
them
which the
itself
Allies
distinguished
found such formidable little
difficulty in reorganising the artillery
between tanks and
Panzer arm in 1943
to relinquish control
of
its
lay
assault guns,
senior officers, provided gunners with their sole opportunity to
win the Knight's Cross, the Wehrmacht's ultimate decoration
for bravery.
The only instrument of armoured warfare which German commanders regarded qualitatively different from the rest was the Mark VI Tiger, which was not allotted divisions
to crucial offensive
kept under central control and and counter-offensive missions. The Tiger had defects - its
enormous weight was symptomatic of creeping it
of speed while
its
'gigantism' in
turret traversed with
88-mm gun and 100-mm-thick armour,
it
ponderous
German
was something
in the distance
Tigers, Panthers,
armoured
battle in
about to begin
map
table
by
at
Mark
IVs
all
and
proved consistently superior,
Normandy which,
Allied soldiers assault
all
in static if
its
not
Tiger's engine starting
remembered with
guns were
respect.
to play their part in the great
culminating in the holocaust of the Falaise Gap, was
Mortain on the night of 6-7 August.
a pictorial
tank design which
deliberation: but, with
mobile operations, to every other tank of the war. The cough of the
up
as
to
but organized in independent battalions,
committed robbed
a
itself.
propelled anti-tank and
their
Mark IV
had proved remarkably adaptable and had been progressively improved;
match
Its
a
development
Hitler, inspired as so often at the
glimpse of opportunity, had decided that the outpouring of the
402
FALAISE
American armies from Normandy into the narrow corridor between Mortain and the sea laid
them open
announced
OKW
American spearheads
We
beachhead.
must not
enemy was
It
this
be cut
off.
.
come
.
We
later.
We
might even be able to cut off their entire
in cutting off the
Americans
must wheel north
Omar
their
at
have broken
and turn the
US
Bradley's
and 2nd SS Panzer
SS
1st
Mortain, only twenty miles from the Atlantic,
First
Army which was
them, for the Westheer and for
Brittany. Disastrously for
who
like lightning
decision which had brought the 116th, 2nd,
the flank of General
he had
the sea the
rear.'
Divisions to stand shoulder to shoulder
had directed
.
bogged down
get
from the
front
strike like lightning,'
'When we reach
operations staff on 2 August.
will
through. Their turn will entire
'We must
to a decisive counter-stroke.
to his
however, the
Hitler,
deployment had been monitored by the
on
streaming southwards into signals
which
Ultra decryption service since 5
August; their objectives, Brecey and Montigny, were passed to Montgomery's head-
American
quarters and four
Armoured which
in support,
Hitler
divisions, the 3rd
were directed
had designated
as their
Armoured, 30th and
to block their path
down
4th,
with the 2nd
the valley of the river See
avenue to the ocean.
The Westheer's ordeal Some 200 German surprise,
advanced
tanks (in in
line),
first
two columns
attacking without artillery preparation to assist
either side
of the See during the night of 6-7 August.
The southern column overran the outposts of the 30th Division but was stopped when the American
infantry coolly
dug
in
on high ground,
called forward the divisional tank-
destroyer battalion equipped with assault-gun-type weapons, which destroyed fourteen
and waited
tanks, aircraft
for daylight
and better weather conditions
which would wreak even greater damage. Thus did
infantry division deal with the vanguard of the
2nd
to bring out the tactical
average American
a quite
SS Panzer Division, almost invincible
sword of the Panzer arm.
On
2nd Panzer and
the north bank the
had never
failed the Fiihrer)
1st
SS Panzer (the
were stopped even more
easily
Adolf Hitler Division, which
by the infantry of the US 9th
commander of the 116th Panzer Division declined to of command. At daybreak the US 2nd Armoured Division
Division; the
relieved
'appeared to materialise out of thin the Ultra secret was
still
air',
noted the
jealously guarded.
Typhoons of the Second
in
victory.'
at a
time
it
when
The 2nd Armoured Division and rocket-firing which flew 294 sorties on 7 August,
British Tactical Air Force,
that the attack 'be
must believe
counter-attacked;
writing
official historian,
reduced the 2nd Panzer Division's tank strength to
demanded
intervene and was
As dusk
fell
on the Mortain
Westheer's ordeal.
403
.
.
.
Hitler
Each and every
man
however, defeat
battlefield,
confronted each unit which had been committed to Operation
Other events of 7 August increased the
From Rastenburg
thirty that day.
prosecuted daringly and recklessly.
Liittich.
On
that
day Montgomery
THE WAR
had launched
new
a
aimed towards
the track of the
THE WEST
German
drive into the
Falaise.
IN
1943-1945
lines at the opposite
end of the bridgehead,
down
followed two recent but aborted thrusts, by the Canadians
It
Goodwood
offensive
on 25
and by the
Jul)
British
towards Caumont
(Operation Bluecoat) on 2 August. Operation Totalise, mounted on 7 August, was not the
Montgomery hoped it would be. even though preceded by a carpet bombardment as heavy as that before the Americans' Cobra two weeks before. It was again mounted by the Canadians, who met heavy resistance from their sworn enemy, the 12th SS outright success
Panzer
(after a
massacre of Canadian prisoners by the Hitler Youth Division early in the
campaign, few of its soldiers survived capture
were their
now own
stronger than
which had
Home Arm)
of the
its
objectives; but
from which
engaged
in
the)
it
menaced
thrust these
(less
the 12th SS, which
ten divisions and was grouped
and before 6 June the strongest
divisions, the late
1st,
at
stood on the
still
the far western
in
2nd, 21st and 116th Panzer had
all
weak
largely intact.
Mark
German
Panzer arm, was
armour
damaged
Normandy from
now in
army's 'demonstration'
shadow;
a
all
four SS Panzer
in close
combat since
was
a cripple; the
to begin with,
Even the 9th Panzer did not have
IV, half Panther);
had almost no tanks
in
British front)
end of the bridgehead -
suffered heavy tank losses, the
only the 9th Panzer, which had arrived in
(half
its
2nd, 9th and 10th, had been grievously
June; the 17th SS Panzergrenadier,
remained
Operation Totalise
divisions forward into
whole German Panzer concentration
the rear of the
various states of disarray. Panzer Lehr, originally the division
force.
two armoured
Normandy.
That concentration
numbered
battle currently raging in
and the security troops of the German occupation
did not reach positions
1st Polish Armoured Division, made all the more bitter by the Warsaw between Bor-Komorowski's
Division and also by the emigre
quarrel to settle with the Germans,
a particular
Poles' awareness
Canadian hands). However, the Canadians
any stage of the campaign; they had recently been joined by
at
Armoured
4th
at
last in
the Mortain battle;
the south of France in August,
its full
complement of
176 tanks
average tank strengths were half the figure, and Panzer Lehr
at all.
wrong place. The surviving German infantry divisions, terribly reduced in numbers, were bunched into three groups, one group of seven standing in the path of the British and Canadians advancing on Falaise, one group of The
divisions,
five scattered
nineteen
still
about
moreover, were
in the
path of the American break-out into Brittany, the remaining
clinging to the collapsing perimeter of the bridgehead they
stoutly since 6 June. All
were
in
imminent
Army Group drove south to American 12th Army Group swung 21st
divisions
in the
peril
of encirclement,
had defended so
as the British-Canadian
cut off their line of retreat to the Seine, while the
eastward to meet
it
of what had recently been designated the
behind Fifth
their backs. But the Panzer
Panzer Arm)
were
at
the
dream of decapitating the American break-out at Mortain had carried them to the furthest end of the Normandy front, from which they could battle their way to safety from between the closing jaws of the Allied encirclement
extremity of danger. Hitler's maniac
only
at
the cost of mortal combat.
404
FALAISE
How
was becoming the 12th SS Panzer had
great that cost
the three Canadian infantry battalions of the 4th the campaign
time in
in
armoured
carriers,
Armoured
mounted
had suffered only seven
for the
armour
first
during
fatal casualties
so dense was the strength of their accompanying
their assault;
where
learnt in Totalise,
Division,
that
it
had
simultaneously succeeded in bringing an end to the career of Michael Wittmann, the
Wehrmacht's most renowned tank commander. He had destroyed
117 Russian tanks
before arriving in Normandy; there he had been largely responsible for blunting the British
on
attack at Villers-Bocage
Shermans which destroyed
On
13 June.
7 August
were
now
by
five
losses within final
it,
such disparities of
outcome of
the
Normandy
inevitability.
had been hurried forward
Inevitability
by
German
standard and would determine the
with mathematical
battle
in his Tiger
with a concerted salvo of gunfire. Given the opposed effects
it
of Allied reinforcement of the bridgehead and strength
he was cornered
telephone conference held between
a
Bradley (with Eisenhower
Montgomery on had suggested and the
that, since
Panzer
Fifth
at
8 August.
and
his side)
The Americans
Army
the Seventh
Army were
no
clearly
longer able to manoeuvre as a result of the rained on them in Goodwood, Cobra and Totalise
blows
strategic
plan,
the
recent
operations,
sense spoke for abandoning the
conceived before D-Day, for
envelopment
Normandy
of
the
reaching as
They proposed instead
far
a 'wide'
Wehrmacht
in
south as the Loire.
that a 'short
hook' be
staged by the Americans, designed to achieve rapid
with
formations
Canadians near
the
and
British
Montgomery agreed
Falaise.
that 'the prospective prize
was
great'
and
left
Bradley to issue the necessary orders to his
George
subordinate,
commanded for a 'short
who
Patton,
the formations which the plans
hook' would bring into
Patton, the
phantom with
authors of the D-Day deception
play.
whom
An
uncharacteristically genial exchange between
Patton
(left)
Montgomery.
and
Relations
be-
tween them were frequently strained. Patton and
Montgomery were denced
showmen,
instinctive
as evi-
by the former's famous pearl-handled
Colt revolvers and the latter's cap badges. Stand-
the
scheme had
ing between
more
them, General Bradley assumes a
sober style of
command.
deluded the Abwehr during the spring of 1944,
was
now
a figure
of substance and power on the
Army which had assumed which had driven
it
Normandy
scene.
responsibility for the Saint-L6 breakthrough
It
and
was his
his Third
dynamism
through the defended zone and out into open country. 'The passage
405
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
NORMANDY BREAKOUT
THE
2lst
Cherbourg
/
I2th
.
^my Group
Army Group, (Bradley)
_,
(Montgomery)
'
Canadian jonii»n'
US
First
Army
The Cotentm St
L6
/ Second \
Armv
/
Avranc
^f '
£ aen
La Roche
Vc
V
-J""**"}
\
CaJmon
US V Corps r x * / US XIX Corps J"'>
Corps
(First Armjr. s
^3t
^
\
V
W^r
•^^^ \
Falaise gap sealed
August
Gr»
m
c».
— „»u
a
—
M.
I
1
—
— —
German
front on morning of
German
front on evening of 16 August
^4
German
counter-attack 7-8 August
WK^
Allied thrusts
— —™ • Tours
O Nantes
VIII
The Allied break-out
in
northern France. In 1940 the
four weeks. In
Army through
operation.
US XV Corps
establishes bridgehead
K es
IN
of Third
^
Mames-(^ssic^jrc 19
px
Guyon
20 August
*
Two
1944
it
at
XII
I
army group boundary
Allied
army boundary
British
Corps
German army had conquered France
took six months to lose
the corridor
XXX
Allied
it,
left
August
in
at irreparable cost.
Avranches', he wrote
roads entered Avranches; only one
I
it
later,
'was an impossible
over the bridge.
We
passed
this corridor 2 infantry and 2 armoured divisions in less than 24 hours. There was no plan because it was impossible to make a plan.' Patton characteristically exaggerated his achievements. The logistics of the Avranches manoeuvre were chaotic, and the tactical success of Operation Cobra owed more to the personal leadership of his VII Corps commander, Collins, than to his own generalship. Nevertheless, without Patton's relentless demand for action, the Third Army's Blitzkrieg would not have occurred. Blitzkrieg was what Third Army's breakthrough amounted to; it was the first - and, as it would turn out, the last - true exercise in that operational form achieved by a Western
through
406
FALAISE
army
Second World War.
in the
penetration
proper entailed not merely the sudden and brutal
Blitzkrieg
of the enemy's front by concentrated armoured force and the
exploitation of that success;
it
enemy
also required that the
forces lying
rapid
beyond the point
of break-in should be encircled and destroyed. That was the pattern of operations that the
Wehrmacht had achieved Thereafter
had
it
in
France in 1940 and in western Russia in June to October
advances into southern Russia in spring and
on
the scale
summer
which had brought the Red Army
1942 had not achieved encirclements
to the verge
of destruction the year before,
while the great eastern battles of 1943 and early 1944 had been struggles of Kursk, or bludgeoning Russian frontal offensives.
Rommel and
North Africa by
The
attrition, as at
lightning dashes along the coast of
British adversaries
his
1941.
combatant army's grasp. The Wehrmacht's' great
fallen outside every
in
more resembled
1941-3
old-
fashioned cavalry raids than campaigns of decision; had the Anglo-American Torch army
not arrived in Algeria in protracted? In
Italy,
been touched by the of the
November
where the electricity
Normandy campaign
Germans had
can say
how
long the
game might have been
precluded breakthrough, none of the fighting had
of Blitzkrieg; while Montgomery's
to unleash the lightning of
foundered because of
all
who
1942,
terrain
their
efforts in the early stages
armoured penetration
against the
system of fixed defences and rapid counter-
by which the Red Army had brought about the destruction of Army Group Centre in June 1944, was the only operation in the preceding three years of combat which replicated in its form and effects the spectacular German triumphs of Sickle Stroke attack. Bagration,
and Barbarossa.
The There was an excellent reason
why
September 1941 and why the chance 1944:
Blitzkrieg
depended
for
its
biter bit
had lapsed
Blitzkrieg
to revive
effect
its
after the
Kiev encirclement ol
form reappeared
on the co-operation
or.
in
at
France
the very
in
August
least,
the
acquiescence of the enemy. In France in 1940 the Allies had both acquiesced and cooperated. By failing to provide their front in the Ardennes with adequate anti-tank
defences - obstacles, anti-armour weapons, tank counter-attack forces - they had invited the
German armoured
offensive
at that
point;
by
their
simultaneous advance into Belgium
which carried the best of their mobile divisions eastward Panzer divisions
at
the precise
moment when
past the shoulder of the
German
those were hunting westward, the) actively
co-operated in their isolation and ultimate encirclement.
The penalty
for acquiescence
and co-operation
quickly learned, by Germany's enemies
and the
British correctly identified
at least.
during the
in the
Indeed, as first
opponent's
we
week of
the
1940 that the right response was to attack into the flank of the
drove towards
its
Kursk, a sector in
Blitzkrieg
plans were
have seen, both the French
German
Blitzkrieg
of Ma)
armoured column
as
it
The Russians too eventually learned the same lesson and at which the)' had been given time to prepare the ground, they not only objective.
407
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1945-1945
amputated the German spearheads but then ground the attacking forces to pieces dense minefields and network of fire positions ma}' be regarded as the
been equipped if
first
which the
battle in
enemy
possible destroy attacking
anti-tank gun, with
performed the role intended
as earl}" as 1918. actually
in the
which they had become engulfed. Kursk
in
which
for
it
infantry
had
- to deflect and
tanks without recourse to supporting armour.
By 1944 each British and American infantry division had 60-100 anti-tank guns, as well as several
hundred hand-held anti-tank missile projectors; the latter were weapons of last former were genuine tank-destroyers. The enhanced effectiveness of the gun derived not only from the growth in its distribution but also from the greatly
resort, but the
anti-tank
increased calibre of those
75-mm common and of
thumb
that
armour
the thickest tank
engaged
issue to the infantry by
is
80-mm and 90-mm
Mortain, infantry could
penetrable by rounds equal in diameter to
Liittich
now
found
in their attack
hold their positions and
weight of concentrated armoured
The precariousness of the
enemy
mid-war - S7-mm was standard,
available in specialist units.
armour exceeded 100 mm. Therefore,
Operation
in
on
the heavier
as
on
the
It is
a rule
thickness,
and only
German armoured
divisions
its
the American 30th Division
inflict
losses
on
the
enemy under
attack.
Panzer Army's position, confronted by superior
Fifth
tank concentrations and by genuinely self-defending infantry formations, was
extreme.
Its
best
hope was
to
at
the
now
form protective flanks along both southern and northern
Army behind which the battered German make their withdrawal to the Seine. If Kluge, commanding both the Fifth Panzer and the Seventh Armies, as well as Army Group B, had enjoyed the freedom to make strategic decisions, there seems little doubt that he edges of the salient occupied by the Seventh
infantry divisions in
Normandy could
begin to
would have ordered what that
exactly that disposition of his force. But freedom of decision was not would concede him. On the contrary, on 10 August he sent orders to Kluge Operation Liittich was to be resumed the following day: 'The [Panzer] attack failed Hitler
because
it
was launched prematurely and was thus too weak, and under weather
conditions favouring the enemy.
a
be repeated elsewhere with powerful
to
It is
Panzer divisions were to engage in
more
forces.' Six
command
south-westerly direction under the
of General Hans Eberbach.
To
attack south-westward
was
Eisenhower's 'short hook' was impresario of deliver his
given the
Blitzkrieg,
armoured
commit
to
now
the Panzer divisions into the pocket
drawing around the Seventh Army.
was thus orchestrating exactly the manoeuvre best calculated
striking force to
its
destruction. For
all
the evidence
Wehrmacht of the dangers of acquiescence and co-operation tactics which more closely co-operated in a hostile
was now bent on
employed by
which
Hitler,
their enemies. Kluge, his
immediate subordinate
its
the to
enemies had
in Blitzkrieg, Hitler Blitzkrieg
in the west,
than any
was aware of
the 'incredibility of a large military force of twenty divisions blissfully planning an attack
while
far
behind
it
an
enemy
is
busily forming a
he was inhibited, even more than most
noose with which
German
408
generals in the
to strangle
it'.
wake of the 20
However, July
bomb
FALAISE
own
by the knowledge that his
plot,
that their suspicions
complicity was suspected by the SS and Gestapo, and
had substance. Kluge had known
man)' of the plotters had previously served on dissociated himself from pig
it
nor,
when
shown
invited to join,
loyalty
was dead' were the words he had used on the evening of 20
that
was
that a plot
in the
his staff in Russia, but
by refusing;
He now
July.
he could rescue himself from suspicion only by accepting the
right
ignorant of front-line conditions', as the Seventh Army's chief of staff put situation
from
East Prussia'. His
making, since
he had neither 'Yes, if the
recognised
command
of
'a
it,
'to
judge the
two immediate subordinates, General Paul Hausser of the
Seventh and General Sepp Dietrich of the Fifth Panzer Armies, both SS officers recently
nominated by loophole
Hitler to replace
army
were currently taking advantage of
generals,
away from the tightening clasp of the American 'hook'. Kluge accepted the their
redeployments but
felt
driven,
the offensive as Hitler directed.
both
his
armies were
now
carrying out his orders.
On
none
whom
Group
B's
August he
15
15
at
The events of the
set off
on
tour of the pocket in which
a
day, ironically,
staff car, exactly
in ditches
were
'the
worst day of
commander was planning
my
life'
lead the
'to
to
produce exactly the
Rommel had been
as
incommunicado
Hitler
- had convinced himself that
Army
whole of the Western Army
Late in the evening he decided to relieve Kluge of
capitulation'.
Walther Model,
him and ordered
'the Fiihrer's fireman', to replace
marshal to return to Germany. Kluge,
who
rightly divined that
by the Gestapo, took poison on the homeward
Nor could Model,
broken
fronts, rescue
far into
danger for anything but
it.
Hitler's
for
he was
command,
into
sent for
the disgraced field to
be met on
arrival
flight.
Kluge's suicide could not expiate the mistakes
present predicament.
twenty-nine
and reached the Seventh Army's
midnight. During the hours he had remained
August was
military logic of
go through the motions of reviving
less, to
he spent most of the day skulking
earlier,
headquarters only - for
the
confined, with the object of persuading Hitler that he was
opposite impression. Attacked in his days
a
renewal of the attack to draw their divisions eastward and so
in his orders for the
which had led Army Group B
his
all
proven expertise
co-operation in the American a pell-mell retreat to
save
its
Blitzkrieg
into
its
in reconstructing
had carried
it
too
remnants from annihilation.
And remnants were what the divisions of Army Group B now amounted to; though some 300,000 German soldiers were entrapped in the Falaise pocket, eight of the twenty surrounded divisions had disintegrated, while the tank strength of the best Panzer divisions respectively
1st SS, .
2nd, 9th and 116th - had fallen to
The renewal of Operation
Liittich
thirty, twenty-five, fifteen
and twelve
was out of the question. Fortunately
commanders, had
for the
Model arrived in France on 17 August with orders to re-form the line on the Seine, holding enough ground to sustain the V-weapons attack on Britain and protect the frontiers of Germany from survivors, Hitler, in changing
also
changed
his tune.
direct assault.
His mission was overtaken by events. Seine north-west of Paris
at
On
19
August Patton's spearhead reached the
Mantes. This extension of Eisenhower's hook, ordered by
409
THE WAR
Bradley
on
through which
THE WEST
1^43-1945
conceded the trapped Germans
14 August,
after that date the
IX
American concentration
Army Group B had
the Anglo-Canadian concentration
at
to escape, did not at Falaise.
a
temporary breathing space, since
Argentan, forming one shoulder of the gap
The
move
thrust to
meet
further northwards to
Mantes nevertheless
nullified
any hope the Germans had of sustaining
a defensive line on the Seine, which thereafter became merely the barrier that Army Group B must cross to make good its escape out of Normandy. Meanwhile the Germans within the pocket, from which all anti-aircraft units had been evacuated in the hope of using them later elsewhere, were being devastated by constant air attack, while the British and Canadians were bearing down from Falaise to
Argentan to put the stopper
in the bottleneck. In the
Allied formation, the 1st Polish
Polish
army
in exile
commanding
Armoured
sustaining
still
its
war
effort against the
of Chambois between
heights
bottleneck
itself a
newly arrived
Division, representative in the west of the large
desperate battle from 18 to 21 August.
Falaise
Germans, took and held the
and Argentan
days
three
in
of
tank crews and infantrymen launched a
Its
Army Group B streamed to the Seine made by the equally resolute 12th SS performed the last of its many crucial
succession of assaults against the road below where bridges and ferries; but
a
defence against them was
Panzer (Hitler Youth) Division, which there operational missions in
Normandy.
The The
Hitler
Youth
liberation of Paris
Division's success in holding
open the neck of the
Falaise pocket until 21
August allowed some 300.000 soldiers to escape and, more surprisingly, 25,000 vehicles to
and
cross floating bridges
ferries
operated by
German arm)
engineers under cover of
darkness between 19 and 29 August. Behind them, however, the fugitives prisoners, SO, 000 dead
and the wreck of two armies' equipment. Constant
the clogged roads and fields of the pocket trucks
and
artillery pieces.
which escaped the holocaust.
in
had
left
Over 1300 tanks were
it
lost in
Normandy; of the Panzer
Hitler directed
3
August to
an encirclement of ports,
curtail his drive
Army Group B from
by contrast, was one of the highest
earlier insistence
on holding
Baltic
nullifed as
southward along the
the west. strategic
fifty-
altogether.
importance.
soon
as Bradley
Atlantic coast in favour of
The decision
and Black Sea ports even
It
to
occupy the Channel
lay in the pattern
of his
after their hinterland
had
Red Army, but in this case was far more strongly justified by logistic reality; while the Red Army depended scarcely at all upon seaborne supply, the Anglo-
fallen to the for,
out of
some of the fugitive divisions to enter and hold the Channel coast He had already garrisoned the Atlantic ports of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire
and La Rochelle, but the point of holding these ports had been had decided on
divisions
fifteen tanks
which had fought west of the Seine had disappeared
into
tanks,
Panzer divisions, Lehr and 9th, existed only in name; fifteen of the
six infantry divisions
ports as fortressess.
200,000
choked with burnt and broken
some semblance of order none brought more than
Two
left
air attack
410
FALAISE
American armies did so almost completely. The denial Havre, Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk gravely
advancing forces and was to have liberation throughout the Hitler's
impeded
coming autumn and
crisis,
to avoid the
ports of Le
their ability to provision their
impact on the development of the campaign of winter.
Channel ports decision demonstrated once again
moments of desperate
his
uncanny
ability,
Patton's
Blitzkrieg,
pocket.
It
soldiers
which had culminated
in the devastation
which the closing of the pocket had
mitigate the
of the Westheer within the Falaise
inflicted
on the German army. However, it to ensure that when he came to
immediate consequences and help
While the Channel ports were Fifteenth
Army and
flight to
was being played out conceived
a plan to
filling
up with
their garrisons
remaining units were joining the
its
Panzer Armies in the
the
in Paris.
West
rivers
might be
As the Normandy
battle
15
on
the Allied pursuers, even to allay this
at
of
climax, Hitler
its
Fifth
liberation epic
had
of the
retreat to the line
on which
the cost of turning
as
first
it
Somme
'into a field
was the
and
crippling losses
of ruins'.
arrival in
France
long anticipated, on the 'short route'
the Pas de Calais, but in the distant south, between Nice and Marseille.
The Seventh Army, the instrument of Operation five
of the Seventh and
swelled to
outcome. The
August of a second Allied invasion army, not,
Germany from
battle
of stay-behinds from the
drama of the
to use the city itself as a battleground
Two developments worked on
the west
transform the French capital into a great defended bridgehead through
and then
inflicted
fugitives
Wall, the final act in the
which the Seventh Army could make an orderly
to
at
could certainly not compensate for the irreplaceable loss of tanks and trained
mount his next - the last - great armoured offensive of the Second World War in he would do so on more equal terms than expected from the outcome of the Normandy in August 1944.
Marne
even
worst consequences of his acts of operational
could not compensate for his wilful and egotistic co-operation in the unfolding of
folly. It
would
a critical
them of the Channel
to
Anvil,
mounted by
three American and
French divisions, briskly overcame the resistance of General Wiese's Nineteenth Army
and by 22 August had raced up the Rhone
peremptory unseating of the only
valley to reach Grenoble.
effective
Its
appearance, and
manoeuvre formation remaining
its
to General
Johannes Blaskowitz's Army Group G, the 11th Panzer Division, not only threatened an attack
against
Lorraine.
It
the
also
West Wall from
a
hitherto unexpected direction, through Alsace-
made nonsense of any hope of holding
Paris
when
a
new
Allied thrust
menaced the rearward communications of the capital with Germany from the south. The second development was domestic to Paris itself. Its population was not overtly resistant. In March it had welcomed Petain with tumultuous popular demonstrations; as late as 13 August, Laval had returned to the city in the hope of reconvening the Chamber of Deputies to accord him powers as legitimate head of government who might treat on Overleaf: Members of the French resistance take cover from a German sniper during the liberation of Paris.
411
.>
i
»:/
THE WAR
THE WEST
IN
1
sovereign terms with the liberating armies. Nevertheless
occupation smouldered, and force
as
were numbered armed
police force had, Cite; as
soon
as
Partisans (FTP)
literally, it
soon
as
became
it
of resistance to
a spirit
clear that the days of the
On
resistance broke out in the streets.
German
occupying
August the
18
raised the standard of revolt over the prefecture
on
Paris
the He de
did so the covert resistance, of which the left-wing Franc-Tireurs
was the most numerous,
la
et
By 20 August the German
rallied to the flag.
garrison found itself under such pressure to maintain control of the streets that the
Commander truce.
the
The
penetrate
Paris, Dietrich
von
Choltitz, offered
had reached, however,
scale the fighting liberation.
city's
Stalingrad,
became
of Greater
While Hitler was ordering
Eisenhower and Montgomery had perimeter
its
'until
clear that the city
found themselves obliged intervention
la)'
is
it
a
sound
was struggling to
go
to hand. Since
1
and succeeded
now worked
that the city
be turned into
set their faces against
a
western
allowing their troops to
do
military proposition to to liberate
in negotiating a
to alter Allied plans for
so'.
As soon
as
it
however, the Allied leaders
itself,
The appropriate means of
to the insurgents' assistance.
August the French 2nd Armoured Division, which
owed
Normandy. On 20 August the general himself, whose title to the leadership of France the Allies would not yet admit, had also arrived uninvited, unannounced and by a circuitous route. On 22 August Bradley transmitted allegiance to General de Gaulle,
had been
in
orders from Eisenhower that the French 2nd
was
to direct itself on Paris.
country seat
at
De
Gaulle,
Armoured
who had
Division under General Leclerc
installed himself in the
French President's
Rambouillet, endorsed the order and prepared to travel in
23 August was spent traversing the 120 miles which separated the Division's positions
German
outskirts of the city. Detained
resistance, Leclerc despaired
American fete
from the
allegations that the
along back routes into the centre of the
2nd Armoured
named from Napoleonic
victories
the approaches by stiffening
city.
to Paris' (there
by
infiltration
At 9.30
on
had been outbreaks of
a small tank-infantry force
the evening of 23 August three
Division, Montmirail,
Champaubert and Romilly,
of 1814, stood under the walls of the Hotel de
day they would be joined by the bulk of the division which would historic heart
city against last-ditch
No one more how appropriate
himself.
grasp
of the
wake.
of entering the capital that day. Then, stung by
French were 'dancing
between episodes of fighting), he launched an
tanks of the French
on
its
2nd Armoured
German
resistance,
fight
and the day
its
after
Ville.
way
Next
into the
by de Gaulle
than he, the French army's apostle of armoured warfare, would it
was
that the capital
should be liberated by the tanks of
its
own
of the country
first
renascent army.
414
overwhelmed by
Blitzkrieg
22 STRATEGIC
BOMBING
O It
n 12 January 1944 Air Marshal Arthur Harris, chief of
RAF Bomber Command,
wrote:
is
clear
Command
that
the best and indeed the only efficient support which
can give to [Operation] Overlord
is
Bomber
the intensification of attacks
and when the opportunity
on
we
suitable industrial targets in
Germany
attempt to substitute for
process attacks on gun emplacements, beach defences,
this
as
communications or [ammunition] dumps
in
occupied
territory,
we
offers.
shall
If
commit
the
irremediable error of diverting our best weapons from the military function, for
which
it
has been equipped and trained, to tasks which
it
cannot effectively carry out.
Though this might give a spurious appearance of 'supporting' would be the greatest disservice we could do them. 'Bomber' Harris's prognosis of the
bombing of Germany correct. In the hit
first
effect
to 'precision'
place, his
of diverting his
strategic
bombing on France was
crews demonstrated
that they
to
the Army, in reality
bombers from
the 'area'
be proved dramatically
had
now
it
acquired the
in-
skill to
small targets with great accuracy and to sustain this 'precision' campaign even in the
German resistance. In March the objections of Harris and General Carl commanding the Eighth Air Force, Bomber Command's American equivalent,
teeth of fierce Spaatz,
were overruled and both Eisenhower's deputy. against the in a little
air
forces
were placed under Air Chief Marshal
From then onwards
strategic air forces
French railway system which was to cost them 2000
over two months. In April and
bombs on Germany
March, reversed
its
in
its
in
Arthur Tedder,
aircraft
a
campaign
and 12,000 aircrew
May Bomber Command, which had dropped 70
dropped 14,000 tons on Germany but 20,000 on France;
per cent of
Sir
embarked on
415
proportional
May
it
effort: in April
it
launched three-quarters
THE WAR
of
sorties against France.
its
when
IN
THE WEST
1^43-1945
During June the weight of attack on France increased again
on
52,000 tons were dropped in the invasion area and
rounding
the military infrastructure sur-
it.
Moreover,
RAF bombers
contradiction of Harris's forecast,
in flat
carried out their
missions with an effectiveness which not only 'supported' the arm}' very effectively indeed but went
far
towards determining the Germans' defeat
the British and American armies, the military
development.
on
tances
Its
equipment, even for formations which possessed
by
clusively
rail.
from April
to a previous generation
while
rail;
it
all
moved its
own motor
their
over short
of
dis-
supplies and heavy
moved
transport,
ex-
The interruption of the French railway system and the destruction of
bridges therefore severely restricted all;
Normandy. By comparison with
Panzer and motorised divisions apart,
and over long distances by
foot by road
in
German army belonged
to June,
its
ability
not only to manoeuvre but even to
and thereafter during the course of the Normandy
French railway working was brought almost northern French rivers were broken or
to a standstill
at least
fight at
battle
itself,
and most bridges over the major
damaged too
severely to be quickly re-
paired.
Much
of the devastation was achieved by the medium-range and fighter bombers of
Second
the British
Thunderbolt and
Tactical
British
and the recently formed American Ninth Air Forces; American
Typhoon ground-attack
fighters flying vast daylight 'sweeps'
northern France destroyed 500 locomotives between 20 and 28 far
serious structural devastation - to bridges,
more
- was the work of the strategic bombers. By
late
rail
May
over
However, the
alone.
yards and locomotive repair shops
May, French railway
had declined
traffic
55 per cent of the January figure; by 6 June the destruction of the Seine bridges had
duced
it
to 30 per cent,
and thereafter
declined to 10 per cent. As early as
it
3
June
a
to re-
des-
pairing officer of Rundstedt's staff sent a report (decrypted by Ultra) that the railway authorities 'are seriously considering
whether
it
not useless to attempt further repair
is
work', so relentless was the pressure the Allied forces were sustaining
The 1944
rail
capacity that Germany's
just sufficed to
OB West
of food,
in serious
danger of starvation
fuel
and ammunition (though not enough just
before
guaranteed to the fighting troops only fragile
and so
fixed to
its
inability to
inflexible
'make
and
speed that
June and July
its
liberation).
to revictual Paris,
which was
However, such supplies could be
long as they did not attempt to manoeuvre; so
was the network of communication improvised between the Reich
Once
a fighting
could depend upon
it
only
if
they remained
they moved, they risked starvation of essentials - hence their
withdrawal in France'.
bridgehead was destroyed by Patton's sible
as
that the troops at the battlefront
terminals.
on the network.
in maintaining in
provide the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies with the irreducible
minimum
and Germany
succeeded
Blitzkrieg,
to the next fortified position with
When
their fortified perimeter
they could only retreat
which
a
at
of the
the fastest pos-
communication system connected;
was the West Wall on the Franco-German border.
The Normandy campaign,
in
both
its
preliminaries and
416
its
central events, therefore
STRATEGIC BOMBING
proved Harris wrong. Airpower used stunning success
and
at
also understandable that Harris
bomber prided
from the
force
itself
attack
on having
powers had brought
whose
The chiefs
when
come
on German
cities.
After
all,
Bomber Command
of the Reich (the US Eighth Air
of founding
desirability
it
its
it
bomber force in 1934 German aircraft complement of large, long-range
therefore grew to maturity as a
leaders, for the
most
ground-support missions.
for
bomber arm,
part
against Britain in 1940-1
as Luftwaffe chief of staff in
ex-army
officers,
handmaiden of
were content
the
to accept.
was thus mounted with medium-range
When
Giinther Korten succeeded Hans
August 1943 he instituted
a 'crash' effort to create a
but the attempt foundered for lack of the appropriate aircraft as
by
his
predecessor
a a
earlier.
Korten's belated attempt to
motivated by the
belief,
industrial rear. In short the crisis
ation of British
endow
the Luftwaffe with a strategic capability was
which he shared with Speer, the Armaments
Army's assumption of the offensive its
Its
as a strategic
direct result of the decisions about the Luftwaffe's future taken
decade
his
justifiably
and unique raison d'etre was to bomb the enemy's homeland. on the other hand, never espoused such an operational doctrine.
campaign
bombers designed strategic
was inevitable
into being, but rejected the option because they judged the
army, a role which
Jeschonnek
it
Moreover, Harris was the spokesman of a
industry too underdeveloped to provide the necessary
'strategic'
the less
been the only instrument of force the Western
to the struggle).
machines. Like the Red Air Force,
Its
None
should have resisted pressure from above to direct
singular
Luftwaffe,
came
the strategic level.
directly to bear against the territory
had considered the it
at
for three years
Force had more recently service
support of armies had worked with
in the direct
the immediate and
in 1943
might be
had obliged him
offset
to take
by
a
up the policy which
and American airmen had adopted and refined
forced into the expedient of hastily adapting medium-range
Minister, that the
Red
counter-offensive against
at leisure.
bombers and
a gener-
While he was retraining their
crews for 'penetration' operations - operations which short-term emergencies would, the event,
deny him the chance
strong fleet of four-engined
to undertake - Harris already
bombers developed over many
commanded
a
in
thousand-
years specifically for penetra-
tion missions.
The command of the
air
commitment to the concept of strategic bombing can, indeed, be traced to the last World War. Even though the 'Independent Air Force' of 1918 succeeded dropping only 534 tons of bombs on German territory its strategy was already informed
Britain's
years of the First in
by the idea that the direct attack of the enemy's rear was the correct role for an
air force.
That idea was to be elaborated by the
coherent
philosophy of airpower, equivalent
in
Italian
airman, Giulio Douhet, into
a
scope to Mahan's philosophy of seapower during
the 1920s. Meanwhile, without benefit of elaborate theory, the Royal Air Force
417
was creating
THE WAR
the
navy' of strategic
first 'air
bombers
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
world had seen. The roots of its operational
that the
function lay in a study prepared by the 'father' of the Royal Air Force,
Supreme War Council
for the Allied
two
in the last
months of the
he wrote then, 'moral and material
factors,'
effect
First
Hugh
Sir
Trenchard,
World War. 'There
are
- the object being to obtain the
maximum of each. The best means to this end is to attack the industrial centres where you (a) Do military and vital damage by striking at the centres of war material; (b) Achieve the maximum effect on the morale by striking at the most sensitive part of the German population - namely the working
By advocating
who worked
class.'
simple and brutal strategy - to
this
bomb
principle so far admitted by civilised nations only in the siege of
armies had always operated by the code that citizens walls
siege
after
bombardment
was
a
and
and
civilian
The almost uncontested
pillage.
continental scale and
leaders,
how
how
closely the First
grossly
military
its
the) influenced
policies designed to avert air
forces to
on the
insisted
chose to remain within to
mount such
among
German
bomber would
air
member
home
their effect or
to
territory
to the defensive
enemy
scale, if
it
restrict the
the time; and
and France by prompting
maximise the capacity of their
enemy. Thus,
the Allies
at Versailles,
of the coalition government, was gloomily
even
fleet,
at
the cost of
would have
in the conviction that attack
Slessor, the Air Staffs classic
Chief of Plans
form when he argued
the immediate effect of forcing the
and the secondary,
indirect, but ultimately decisive effect
the conclusion that air
can be maintained even
output from war industry to
a
So acute and general were the the outset of the Second
1918
force
on
'It
is
difficult to
intensive
any length of time, can today
degree which would make
meet the immense requirements of an army on the and warlike stores of almost every
air
of crushing the
bombardment on anything approaching an
at irregular intervals for
was the
in the late
an offensive
that
enemy
army's capacity to wage war. In Airpower and Armies (1936) he wrote:
resist at least
at
of war almost
force in perpetuity; but by 1932 the British
bombing was rooted
expressed his service's views in
enemy
went
defences of fighter squadrons.
air
The RAF's commitment thirties,
sensitivities
the Western Allies
in Britain
resemble siege
always get through', while the leaders of the Royal Air
form of defence. Air Marshal John
against
to
proposals
Force were battling relentlessly for the expansion of the bomber
best
a city's
starvation,
of siege-warfare
generalisation
Trenchard's
raids against a future
abolition of the
that 'the
depriving the
hardships:
its
World War had come
governments
minimise
'air raids',
Stanley Baldwin, then a prominent
conceding
In siege warfare
cities.
prosecution had blunted the
Indeed,
alike.
uncontested: they met no principled objection
once the war was over
own
who
thereby exposed themselves
laid
morality demonstrates both
on
terrorise those
and. once the walls had been breached and the offer of capitulation
rapine
refused,
and
factories
there and lived nearby - Trenchard proposed to extend to general warfare a
model,
in
it
quite impossible to
weapons, ammunition
kind.' fears that the
World War -
prospect of strategic
fears very greatly
418
bombing aroused
enhanced by the
international
at
left's
STRATEGIC BOMBING
bombing of Republican towns by Franco's air force and the expeditionary squadrons of his German and Italian allies during the Spanish Civil War, of which Picasso's Guernica is the key document - that paradoxically even Hitler joined in an unspoken agreement between the major combatants not to be the first to breach the moral (and self-interested) embargo against it. Hitler did not extend the embargo to exclude attacks on countries unable to retaliate - hence the bombings of Warsaw in September 1939 and Rotterdam in May 1940 - or on military targets in those that could. The bombing of military targets including airfields, brilliantly
orchestrated condemnation of the
naval ports and railway centres
However,
war.
until
was
midsummer
under the most
legitimate
1940
all
held each other's
traditional
conventions of
cities inviolate.
Even
at
the
outset of the Battle of Britain, Hitler insisted that attacks be confined to airfields and to targets
that
might be deemed
military,
London Docks. Such
like
restrictions
became
increasingly difficult to observe, however, as the Battle of Britain protracted without the
RAF
prospect of outcome. As the argument for 'making the
on populated
direct attack
embargo. In
his victory
(Goebbels had inculpated both); in
in error,
raze their cities to the ground.
one of us
will
We
it
19 July
to justify breaching the
he had publicised the notion
it
will
British air force
had been mistakenly attacked on
10
May by an bombed
on our
were
cities [Churchill
will stop the
RAF on Berlin, he 'When [the British] declare had not done so], then we will
next night by the
that the gloves
in the Berlin Sports Palace
break and
fight' intensified, entailing
means
24 August another vagrant Luftwaffe crew
a retaliatory raid
announce
that they will increase their attacks
audience
fact
When on
provoking
seized the opportunity to
ecstatic
for
had already been bombed by the French or the
errant flight of the Luftwaffe.
London
looked
speech to the Reichstag on
that Freiburg-in-Breisgau
East
Hitler
targets,
off.
handiwork of these
on 4 September;
'the
air pirates,'
hour
will
he told an
come when
not be National Socialist Germany.'
Crisis in
Bomber Command
Bomber Command altogether lacked the power to bring Germany to breakingwhen began its bombing campaign in earnest in the winter of 1940. When it impertinently bombed Munich on the anniversary of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch of 8 November 1923, the Luftwaffe retaliated by raiding the industrial city of Coventry, destroying or damaging 60,000 buildings. In an attempted escalation of tit-for-tat the RAF attacked Mannheim on the night of 20 December, but largely missed the city and caused British
point
it
it
only tally
strategic 'area
of the damage Coventry had suffered,
if the score is reckoned by the of civilian casualties - 23 dead to S68 - which, gruesomely, was to be the measure of
a twenty-fifth
bombing
bombing' or
itself in
success thenceforward. Since the direct attack
on
civilians in
all
Mannheim raid was an exercise in Bomber Command now found
but name,
the unenviable position of having descended to the
Luftwaffe, while lacking the
means
same moral
level as the
to equal, let alone exceed, the Luftwaffe's area
419
bombing
THE WAR
capacity.
Throughout the
the acre;
on 29 December 1940
'blitz'
IN
THE WEST
1^43-1945
London and other
winter of 1940-1
British cities
burned by
the Luftwaffe started 1S00 fires in the City of London alone,
much of the remaining fabric of the streets familiar to Samuel Pepys, Wren and Samuel Johnson. No German city suffered equivalent damage during 1940 or even 1941. To all intents, Bomber Command, the service Churchill had told the War Cabinet on 3 September 1940 'must claim the first place over the Navy or the Army', was and would remain for months to come 'little more than a ramshackle air freight service exporting bombs to German)'. destroying
Christopher
The most shaming index of and German
civilians killed in the
former actually exceeded
was
material: the
poor
of the
latter.
The imbalance had
bombing
quality of British
and power
range, height
that
incapacity was the 'exchange ratio'
its
course of bombing raids during
to deliver large
aircraft,
bomb-loads on
several
which
between aircrew
number of the explanations. One
1941; the
lacked the speed,
as yet
Another was
to distant targets.
geographical: to reach German)' - as yet only western German)' - the
bombers had
to
where the Germans had already begun to deploy a formidable defensive screen of fighters and anti-aircraft guns. The third, and most overfly France, Belgium or Holland,
important, explanation was technological: committed to
bombing by night, bombers on
RAF
since the
did not have the long-range fighter escorts necessary to protect
daylight raids,
Bomber Command
its
lacked the navigational equipment not merely to find
targets - factories, marshalling yards,
but even the
themselves.
cities
power
stations - within the cities against
The suspicion
Bomber Command was bombing
that
even wild, was confirmed with exactitude by Churchill's scientific adviser. Lord Cherwell,
study prepared
a
in
August
1941.
findings were: 'of those aircraft attacking their targets, only
miles .
.
.
.
.
one
.
over the French ports the proportion was two
in four;
During crews
1941,
in short
it
was only one
when 700
were dying
hopes reposed
in
it
largely in
Command
over Germany
return from operations,
people
British
down, and
by very heavy bombers from
Churchill, the
RAF
first
of
to a strength
all
this
committed
machines was only
700); after that target
to accept that the
bombers
February the Air
as their
was bound
as a
it
five
whole
Bomber Command's Bomber Command's
only means of bringing the
to precipitate a crisis. At the
that
is
one
an absolutely devastating exterminating
itself to a
programme of
was recognised
to
building total
be unattainable,
emphasising
420
that
hit
up Bomber
of serviceable it
already deployed must in future be used to
which they worked could not be
Staff issued a directive
is
country upon the Nazi homeland.' Goaded by
of 4000 heavy bombers (when the daily
civilians, since the factories in
main
within
in three got
occurred. As early as 8 July 1941 Churchill had written: 'There
thing that will bring [Hitler] attack
the suggestion of
Butt Report's
order to crater the German countryside. Set beside the
by Churchill and the
crisis
flew
it
'wide',
in ten.'
aircraft failed to
v\ar directly to Hitler's doorstep, this realisation
end of 1941 the
one
in three;
at
The
over the Ruhr [the heartland of German industry and
principal target area]
designated
which
brought kill
itself
German
with precision.
On
14
henceforward operations 'should
STRATEGIC BOMBING
now
enemy
be focused on the morale of the
be taken, Air Chief Marshal
industrial workers'. Lest the point not
the following day:
suppose
'I
it
clear that the
is
quite clear It
if
it
is
that
it
should have been
revealed the central idea of area bombing, for that
.
.
.
This
to
is
it
Portal, the intellectual patrician,
depended
ultimately
had envisaged
'the
and maraud' by bombing
into the impulse to break loose
be
upon
who
class bias - the
slum
attack,
prevailing fear of insurrection,
classes'
which the success of the Bolsheviks
throughout Europe
after 1917.
all
three were
perhaps leading to
war-torn Russia had
in
Events would prove that
maddened
districts
thereby dramatising
statement of the theory in 1918. The preconceptions of
first
determined by the ruling revolution,
aircraft factories.
the latent discontents of the proletariat were the Achilles heel of an
industrial state. Liddell Hart, writing in 1925,
Trenchard's
Charles Portal wrote
Sir
points are to be the built-up
not already understood.'
was appropriate
judgement
new aiming
dockyards or
[residential] areas, not, for instance, the
made
population and in particular of
civilian
was the
it
proletariat's
rekindled
endurance
of suffering - particularly of 'dehousing' which Professor Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's
advocated in an important paper of March 1942 - that the effects of area bombing would most powerfully stimulate; but in early 1942 the proletariat's class enemies - as Marx would have identified them - had contrary expectations. The 'bomber barons' embarked on their campaign against the German working class in the firm belief that they would thereby provoke the same breach between it and its rulers that the ordeal of the First World War had brought about in tsarist Russia. Scientific Adviser,
There was
a
strong flavour of class reaction too in the Air Staffs choice of agent to
implement the new
policy. Arthur
mindedness. He had neither the area
bombing
refining
technical
bombing
an interviewer soon
He was more
aids,
1942.
means -
elaborating deception
bomber numbers,
increasing
measures -
to
'My reply
is
assume
that
it
has never been tried
command
at a
accurate bombing, 'Gee', was about to
position
on
followed in fitted
two a
pairs
December by
yet.
We
shall see.'
All
in
bombs
in
receiving aircraft to plot at a
1940-1. its
It
precise
preordained point. 'Gee' was
January 1943 by H2S,
ground beneath the
three navigational aids
finding capacity, though
its
a
the precision-bombing device 'Oboe', which was subsequently
Mosquitos, and
navigator a picture of the
its
moment when the first navigational aid to come into service. 'Gee' resembled the
of radio signals which allowed
gridded chart and so release
to Pathfinder
maximise
who say that bombing cannot win the war,' he told command at High Wycombe, the bomber headquarters,
'beam' system by which the Luftwaffe had been guided to British targets transmitted
coarse single-
of people
after taking
fortunate to
commander of
a
doubt nor moral scruple about the Tightness of
intellectual
policy and was to seek by ever)
effectiveness. 'There are a lot
on 22 February
'Bomber' Harris was
it
were
aircraft
greatly to
with
its
a
radar set that gave the
salient
landmarks.
improve Bomber Command's
was the formation of the
specialist Pathfinder
target-
squadrons
August 1942 which achieved the decisive advance. The Pathfinders, equipped with
421
in a
THE WAR
mixture of
IX
THE WEST
included the new,
aircraft that
fast
1943-1945
and high-flying Mosquito
preceded the bomber waves to 'mark' and 'back up' the starting fires into
which the main force then dropped
of the Pathfinder
creation
He
units.
believed
its
target
force.
commando
and
units)
However, he was rapidly obliged
they deprived
demonstrated of Bomber
how much more
diminished the
also
to
withdraw
effectively the)
found
bombers,
with incendiaries and
loads. Harris fiercely
flares,
opposed the
bomber
ordinary
the
squadrons of their natural leaders (the same argument was used by the formation of
light
British generals against
of the area bombing
size
when
his objections
the Pathfinders
targets than the unspecialised
crews
Command.
—
The
arrival of the 'heavies'
—
commitment to area bombing was also lent credibility by the appearance, at the took command, ol a new and greatly improved instrument of attack. The bombers available at the beginning of the war, the Hampdens, Whitleys and elegant
Harris's
moment he British
Wellingtons, were inadequate bomb-carriers. Their larger successors, the Stirlings and
Manchesters, were also defective because they lacked altitude and power respectively. The
and
Halifax a
new
particularly the Lancaster,
generation.
The
Lancaster,
however, which appeared
which
first
were bombers of March 1942, proved to
in 1942,
flew operationally in
be capable of carrying enormous bomb-loads, eventually the 10-ton 'Grand Slam', over
and
great distances fighters
without
be robust enough to withstand heavy attack by German night-
to
from the
falling
sky.
At the outset, though, Harris was concerned not with quality but with quantity. His
number of bombers over a German city with A successful raid on the Paris Renault factor)- in March prompted him to undertake a raid against the historic Hanseatic town of Liibeck on the Baltic on the night of 28/29 March 1942. He was coldbloodedly frank about his intentions: 'It seemed to me better to destroy an industrial town aim was
to concentrate the largest possible
the object of
overwhelming
its
of moderate importance than to to
be well "blooded"
...
to
defences and fire-fighting forces.
to destroy a large industrial city. ...
fail
have
a
taste
of success for
a
I
wanted
my crews
change.' Liibeck, a
gem
of
medieval timber architecture, burned to the ground, and the raiding forces returned to base 95 per cent
intact.
The 'exchange
ratio'
persuaded Harris
that
he had discovered
a
formula for victory.
On
four nights in April
Bomber Command repeated
incendiary success
its
Rostock, another medieval Baltic town; 'These two attacks', wrote Harris, 'brought the acreage of devastation by
bombing
in
Germany up
[on Britain] about squared our account.' (tourist-guide)
on
attacks
Canterbury. However,
it
the
historic
to 780 acres,
The Luftwaffe
and
retaliated
in regard to
at
total
bombing
by so-called 'Baedeker'
towns of Bath, Norwich, Exeter, York and
lacked the strength to match Harris's next escalation, which took
the form of an attack by a thousand bombers, the
422
first
'thousand-bomber
raid',
on Cologne
STRATEGIC BOMBING
A
magnificent view of a Lancaster's Merlin engines as
an
in
it
warms up
at the dispersal point
on
airfield perimeter.
May. By stripping training units and workshops of their machines, Bomber
concentrated the largest
number of aircraft
largest city in the Reich,
and burned everything
yet seen in in
its
German
Command
skies over this, the third
centre except the famous cathedral.
The success of Bomber Command's new tactics depended not only upon increased numbers and improved target-finding but also on a frank adoption of fire-raising methods. Thenceforward
its
bomb-loads were to contain small incendiaries and
large high-explosive
containers in the proportion of two to one. At Cologne 600 acres were burned. Thousand-
bomber
raids
Germany's
on Essen and Bremen in June achieved similar effects; Essen, in the Ruhr, had been already attacked eight times between March and
industrial centre,
April. In the spring
and summer of 1943 Bomber
of the Ruhr' which multiplied the incendiary
By then the
strategic
bombing
Command
effect
offensive against
devoted
its
efforts to a 'Battle
many times over. Germany had become
a two-air-force
campaign. The United States Army's Eighth Air Force had arrived in Britain in the spring of 1942 and undertaken
The
attack
many
its first
was staged
years before the
raid in August,
in daylight, in
war by the Army Air Force's
to destroy hostile naval forces operating in aircraft
and
a
when
attacked marshalling yards
at
Rouen.
officers.
Exercised by the pressing need
American waters, they had developed both an
to deliver large bomb-loads on to small targets with The Norden bombsight was the most accurate optical instrument yet
bombsight designed
precision in daylight.
it
accordance with the philosophy worked out over
423
STRATEGIC BOMBING
mounted
in a strategic
bomber. The bomber which carried
long range and heavy defensive armament, the
the B-17, was notable for
it,
latter central to
its
the American belief that, in
bombers could fight their way to and unacceptable losses. However, the requirements of range
the absence of a satisfactory long-range tighter, their
from the
without suffering
target
armament
and
placed
heavy
a
circumstances the bombload of fell
as
low
General
as 26001b.
Ira C.
on the
penalty
Redeployed from
a
Under normal
bombload.
B-17's
seldom exceeded 40001b and
B-17
a
maritime defensive to
a
man}' operations
in
continental offensive role,
Eaker's Eighth Air Force was destined for deep-penetration missions by
daylight to
complement Bomber Command's
territories.
By January 1943 Eaker had 500 B-17s
night raids into
Germany and
The combined bomber at
occupied
offensive
The integration of the developing American with the continuing
on German)' was formalised Directive', which laid the
its
available.
British
bombing
basis
for
'combined bomber
a
(codenamed
offensive',
Pointblank in May) against key targets. These were denned, in order of priority, as
submarine construction yards, the German
enemy war
other targets in
attacks
the Casablanca conference of January 1943 in a 'Casablanca
The
industry.
German
aircraft industry, transportation, oil plants
specification of targets disguised,
and
however,
a
sharp difference of opinion between the British and Americans over operating methods.
He remained
Eaker rejected British arguments for committing his B-17s to area bombing.
convinced
were best employed
the)
that
contemptuously dismissed from
his
as
chosen method. As
agenda between them, the
'panacea a result,
RAF
day light raids
The
first
on
'bottlenecks' in
'bottleneck'
the ball-bearing plant
on
17
at
attack,
targets'. Harris, for his part,
the
two
continuing
the built-up areas of the major
precision
in
its
what Harris
against
refused to be diverted
forces effectively divided the Casablanca
air
on
night attacks
which meant
'other targets',
German cities, while the USAAF committed the German economy.
who advised the USAAF was Germany, bombed by the Eighth Air Force
chosen by the economic
Schweinfurt
in central
itself to
analysts
August 1943. Analysis suggested that destruction of the factor), from which essential
components of
alternative sources of supply
which not only
dependence on
were supplied, would cripple
the gearing in aircraft, tanks and U-boats
German armaments production. The theory was only lay
from another plant
partially correct, since
outside the Allied targeting area but was also
coal
imports. The
traverse northern France
practice
bound
and half of German)
rises
above
a
in daylight
scene of devastation.
Thousand
Raid' on
to
German) by
was almost wholly disastrous. Forced without fighter escort, the
defending' Flying Fortress formations were devastated by fighter attack.
Cologne cathedral
Germany had
Regensburg and from neutral Sweden,
at
30/31
425
The
May
city
1942.
was subjected
Of the
to the
first
to
'self
229 B-17s
THE WAR
that
had
36 were shot
set out,
had been a
1943-1945
a
to 100 returning
been developed
weeks, and they would not be to escort the daylight
fully
bombers
fire,
more widely
across the cities of western
from March
to July, involved nearly
three
raid for,
deep-penetration missions into
its
resumed
until long-range fighters
had
to their targets.
The Hamburg While the American campaign hung
more than
on Regensburg were added in, it became clear that 17 August self-defending bomber had proved to
complementary bombers allowed
day of disaster. The pre-war theory of the
for five
16 per cent,
established as 'acceptable' for a single mission.
misconception. The Eighth Air Force suspended
Germany
of
'attrition rate'
the 24 B-17s lost suffered in the
and heavy damage be
down, an
Bomber Command had
times the rate that
When
THE WEST
IN
raids
the British had been spreading destruction even
Germany. The
800
of the Ruhr', which lasted
'Battle
aircraft in 18,000 sorties
which dropped 58,000 tons of bombs on Germany's
(individual missions)
industrial heartland. In
May and
August Harris was also obliged to mount two 'panacea' missions, both of which were squadron, 617, destroyed the
brilliant successes. In the first a specially trained
Eder dams, which supplied the Ruhr with raid laid waste the laboratories coast,
where
missiles
More provoked
to Harris's taste,
a 'firestorm'
requires
a
had revealed
that
Mohne and major
hydroelectricity; in August a at
Peenemiinde, on the
Germany's arsenal of secret
A
civil
however, was the four-night
and burned firestorm
is
defences.
consequences are catastrophic.
A
raid
on Hamburg
to cinders the heart of the great
Baltic
pilotless
in July,
When
of
prevailing
weather
which
North German port
not an effect that a bombing force can achieve
combination
particular
overwhelming of
its
built.
covering 62,000 acres. it
of
and engineering workshops
intelligence sources
was being
much
conditions
at will;
and
the
such circumstances are present, however, the
central conflagration feeds
on oxygen drawn from the
periphery by winds which reach cyclone speed, suffocating shelterers in cellars and bunkers, sucking debris into the vortex and raising temperatures to a level where everything inflammable burns as
if by
spontaneous combustion. Such conditions prevailed
Hamburg between 24 and 30 Jul) 1943. There had been a long period of weather, the initial bombardment broke the water mains in 847 places, and soon in
temperature of the
clogged the
When
it
of Hamburg's buildings remained
intact;
40 million tons of rubble
city's centre,
and 30,000 of its inhabitants were dead.
the total of fatal casualties
among
eventually burned
In
some
the
toll
areas of the city
cent.
of Hamburg's bombing victims throughout the war was calculated
was found to be only 13 per cent lower than the proportion of battle deaths soldiers recruited
itself
the inhabitants exceeded 30 per cent; 20 per cent of the
dead were children, and female deaths were higher than male by 40 per
When
the core
reached 1500 degrees Fahrenheit.
fire
out, only 20 per cent
hot, dry
from the
city
between 1939 and
426
1945;
and the majority had died
it
among in the
STRATEGIC BOMBING
Debriefing after No. left
617 Squadron's Dams
raid of
at the back, beside Air Vice-Marshal Sir
May
1943. 'Bomber' Harris stands on the
Ralph Cochrane, AOC-in-C 5 Group,
to
which
No. 617 Squadron belonged.
great raids of July 1943.
same
effect, if
days.
Later Wiirzburg
Hamburg was not
with lower casualties, in
the RAF's only firestorm.
October
(4000 dead), Darmstadt
at Kassel,
where
was
It
fires
to achieve the
burned
(6000 dead), Heilbronn
Wuppertal (7000 dead), Weser (9000 dead) and Magdeburg (12,000 dead) would in the
also
burn
same way.
Hamburg, however, encouraged periphery of industrial
Command's London.
In
first
targets
November
coming season of long attack.
seven
for
(7000 dead),
It
had
because of
last
its
when
it
assumed
nights,
been attacked to
ports.
which were in
make
Berlin
a retaliatory role
1943 Harris decided to
make
it
beyond Germany's western had been one of Bomber
during the Luftwaffe's
his crews'
main
target
their best protection against
January 1942 but was thereafter
long distance from
which combined
Harris to set his sights
and Hanseatic
cities
Bomber Command's
the 'attrition rate'
on
427
left
bases and
'blitz'
German
fighter
off the targeting its
on
during the
list
strong defences,
Berlin raids exceptionally high. Probing
THE WAR
attacks
mounted
had become
in
IN
THE WEST
August and September suggested, however, that the German
a softer target
Between
that night
RAF
acres of
since August 1940,
and 2 March 1944
its
built-up area
and
it
its
residential
like
districts,
von
Trott,
one of the
interrupted
at all
major
a
in
home
of
the raids
all
as the capital
not only of the
and
industrial, administrative
and theatres flourished; so
Dahlem,
on the city. No mounted by the
sixteen major raids
had been damaged
remained
It
great hotels, restaurants
Vassilchikov, an Anglophile
mounted
it
haut-bourc|eois
White Russian refugee
force,
the 'Battle of Berlin'.
itself to
continued to function normally
Reich but of Hitler's Europe. centre:
committed
it
capital
bombing
than hitherto to Harris's greatly strengthened
and on the night of 18-19 November 1943
more than 200
1943-1945
life
opposition to
in Berlin,
and
in
its
Hitler.
in Britain to
cultural
elegant 'Missie'
of
a close friend
found pre-war
principal conspirators in the Jul) Plot,
by 'enemy action' (the phrase used
too, did
life
Adam
scarcely
denote the cause of
bombing deaths) until late 1943. She continued to dine, dance and absent herself from work in Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry on such pretexts as attending the last great German aristocratic wedding of the war years at Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen right up until the moment when the Battle of Berlin began. Then the clouds of war drew in fast. Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, persuaded one million of its four and a half million inhabitants to leave before Bomber Command's main attacks began.
of
who remained
Those
undergone by any
air attack
city
then began to undergo the most sustained experience population throughout the Second World War. Berlin
did not suffer firestorm; having been built largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with its
wide
streets
and many open spaces,
it
resulted in devastation. Although only 6000 Berliners
were made homeless and 2000 acres of the the battle was then called
were needed that, in
his
city
between the
crews, Berlin had suffered
however,
attrition
less.
six
times in January alone,
killed in the battle, thanks to 'flak
towers', 1.5 million
were ruined by the end of March it
to help in the preparation for D-Day.
the 'exchange ratio'
bomber
off,
were
enormous concrete
the solid construction of shelters in eleven
When
resisted conflagration. Nevertheless
drenching with high explosive and incendiaries,
relentless
was not only because
1944.
Harris's aircraft
Even he had been brought
to accept
of Berlin's fabric and defences and that of
Though by March 1944 he disposed of a daily on raids had risen above the 'acceptable'
average of 1000 serviceable bombers, losses
maximum
of 5 per cent and had sometimes touched 10 per cent (on the most costly of all
raids, ironically
not against Berlin but against Nuremberg on 30 March 1944,
per cent). Since rest,
bomber crews were
each faced the probability, in
completed. In practice, crews
obliged to
statistical
fly thirty
terms, of being shot
down
who had flown more than five missions who figured disproportionately among
higher survival rate than novices,
per cent
lost.
crews were
When
killed.
it
exceeded
11
missions before qualifying for before a tour was
achieved a
much
the 'acceptable' 5
the attrition rate rose towards 10 per cent, however, even experienced
The
morale, indicated by
survivors sensed
bombing
'short'
doom, and
there was a corresponding decline in
and premature return
428
to base.
STRATEGIC BOMBING
The
German
flak
had found
German
as
and
aircraft
it
'blitz'
RAF
difficulty in intercepting the
in the control
of fighters,
badly frightened the
its
German their
defensive
exposure
RAF had had
in
combating the
armament and equipment. means of destruction.
crews, was a lesser
gunfire could not touch the Mosquitoes of the Pathfinder Force flying at a
range of 400
once they had been guided
feet,
to
of night bombing the Luftwaffe
success rose sharply as a result of
as well as in their
bomber
Germany,
into
as the
of 1940-1. During 1942, however,
but fighters attacked
feet;
more deeply
fighter attack increased. In the early days
much
night
improvements though
the short-term success of
rise in the attrition rate testified to
measures. As the bombers penetrated
at
Flak,
Anti-
30,000
to the target.
Bomber Command's natural approach deploy, on the so-called Kammhuber Line, a
From October
1940 onwards in Holland,
route to
the Reich, the
Germans began
force of
to
radar-equipped night-fighters which were guided to the intruders by ground radar 'Wurzburg' stations. The
RAF
by equipping
retaliated
devices, by increasing the density of their
bomber
their aircraft with radar detection
streams to present fighters with a
smaller target, and eventually (July 1943) by dropping metallic chafT, 'Window' -
Hamburg
in the
raids - to cause radar interference. Eventually
all
used
first
these expedients were
Bomber Command's electronic emissions as target indicators, at refining their radar sets to overcome Window, and at increasing the density of their own fighter formations to match that of the bomber streams. At the end of overcome: the Germans became adept
1943,
using
at
'Tame Boar' squadrons of radar-equipped
by strong forces of 'Wild Boar' day-fighters
were being supplemented
night-fighters
flying as night-fighters; lacking radar, they
guided towards the bombers by radio and
light
beacons and then attacked
were
in
the
illumination provided by flak and searchlights.
The
battle of material
Had Bomber Command been Germany's only
airborne
enemy
would have been close to still committed
it
admitting defeat in the spring of 1944. However, the Eighth Air Force was to a
campaign of daylight precision bombing, had
show
B-24 Liberators in Britain and was ready to real
battle
of material'. So
far,
apart
from
its
now
the
assembled
a force
of 1000 B-17s and
Germans what 'Americans meant by
costly forays to Schweinfurt
had ventured few mass attacks deep into Germany. Beginning
in
and Regensburg,
February 1944 (the
Week' of 20-26 February) under new commanders, Spaatz and James
a it
'Big
Doolittle, the latter
Tokyo raid of April 1942, it started to penetrate to targets which the Luftwaffe was bound to defend: aircraft factories and then the twelve synthetic-oil production plants. Speer, Hitler's able Armaments Minister, had robbed the enemy air
the hero of the
forces of
much
of their target system
dispersing the fragments to aircraft
factories
and
new
small
particularly oil
in
1943 by separating manufacturing processes and
sites, particularly in
southern Germany. However,
plants defied dispersion,
'Mighty Eighth' with prime targets.
429
and they provided the
THE WAR
The Eighth
IN
THE WEST
Air Force had, moreover,
bombing required abandoned it in 1941, since the Daylight
fighter
been provided with the means
escorts;
Spitfire
1943-1^45
consequently
to reach
them.
Bomber Command had
lacked the range to reach Germany. During 1943 the
range of American fighters had also largely confined the Eighth Air Force to attacks in
France and the Lovett,
US
Low
Countries. After August, however,
Assistant Secretary for War, the P-47
were equipped with drop
the prompting of Robert A.
at
Thunderbolt and
tanks, external auxiliary fuel tanks
P-31 Lightning fighters
which could be jettisoned
in
an emergency; these gave them the endurance to reach beyond the Ruhr. In March 1944
new
there appeared in
numbers
which could
and even beyond
fly
to
new phenomenon: interceptor.
without
a
a
a
Berlin,
in
600 miles from
production because
strong sponsor. Into an
inserted the
equipped with drop its
tanks, the P-51 Mustang,
The
British bases.
heavy long-range fighter with the performance of
had been delayed
It
fighter
it
a
P-51
was
a
short-range
was an Anglo-American hybrid
underpowered American airframe the British had its improved performance was recognised by
famous Merlin engine; once
Spaatz and Doolittle, they
March
altogether. By
it
demanded
was present
its
production
in the
in
German
volume and
14,000
skies in great
were
to
be
built
numbers and already
beginning to break the strength of the Luftwaffe.
demands imposed by preparation for Overlord ceased, and despite a temporary diversion of effort against the German secret-weapons sites in northern France, Pointblank resumed with redoubled force. The Eighth Air Force had continued its attack on German synthetic oil plants even during the Normandy battle and by September its results were even greater than anticipated. Between March and September oil production declined from 316,000 to 17,000 tons; aviation fuel output declined to 5000 tons. The Luftwaffe thereafter lived on its reserves, which by early 1945 were all but exhausted. Meanwhile the two bomber forces co-ordinated a round-the-clock campaign against German cities, with particular concentration on transport centres. By the end of October the number of rail wagons available weekly had fallen from the normal total of 900,000 to 700,000, and by December the figure was 214.000. Under day and night attack by the USAAF and RAF, each deploying over 1000 aircraft during the autumn, winter and spring of 1944-5, German economic life was paralysed by strategic bombing. With enemy armies on its eastern and western frontiers, the Reich was no longer protected by a cordon sanitaire of occupied territory. The Luftwaffe was overwhelmed as well as outclassed by the daylight bombers' escorts and eventually could As soon
not get
its
as the
few surviving
two million men and
fighters off the
women
ground. Although the
chief justification - flak dwindled into ineffectiveness as the
A
stricken
falling
from
anti-aircraft
system drained
out of other services - perhaps the
B-17 of 94th Bombardment Group over aircraft higher in the formation.
of 17
Berlin,
its
The 94th flew on
August 1943.
430
bombing campaign's night-bomber streams became
tailplane
mangled by bombs
the ill-fated Regensburg raid
THE WAR
IK
1943-1945
more than
too dense and fast-moving to engage for
grew over Germany
THE WEST
a
few minutes. As bomber numbers
in 1945, the attrition rate conversely declined to as
as
little
one per
cent per mission.
The sudden
reversal of advantage
between defence and
from the appearance of the Mustang
directly
undoubtedly derived
attack
an escort to the Eighth Air Force's
as
Fortresses and Liberators and later as a unit of aggressive fighter patrols, seeking out the
enemy.
In late 1943 the
American campaign had been defeated by the Luftwaffe's day-
1944 the British campaign by
fighters, in early
Eighth Air Force's ability to penetrate
of its it
fuel
had
German
its
supply and thereby drastically undercut
Command
on Bomber
inflicted
match the Americans' and so ensured
that
German
its
come
it
starved the Luftwaffe
it
the high attrition rate
opened the way
for the British to
round-the-clock campaign of late 1944
in the
industrial production,
or by the strangulation of supply, should
The Mustang restored the
doing
ability to sustain
Thus
in 1943—4.
of destructiveness
level
night fighters.
airspace. In so
whether
as a result
of physical damage
to a halt in early 1945.
Because the peak of the bombers' success coincided with the defeat of the
Wehrmacht
in the field
and the progressive occupation of Reich
by the Allied
territory
armies, the claims of the strategic-bombing advocates that they possessed the secret of victor)'
have not and can never be proved. Such claims are better supported by the
results
of the USAAF's bombing campaign against Japan mounted by General Curtis LeMay's XXI
Bomber Command: between May and August two-thirds incendiaries,
on
construction, destroyed 60 per cent of their destitution
and
despair.
1945 the dropping of 158,000 tons of bombs,
to the fifty-eight largest Japanese cities,
all
ground area and brought
largely
wooden
in
their populations to
Even before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and the unleashing of the Red Army's
Blitzkrieg
decision to surrender
the
variously
is
ascribed,
into Manchuria, to
home
islanders'
will
which Japan's to resist had
unquestionably been brought to breaking-point by the American bombers.
German populations
civilian
morale, by contrast, was never broken by
of individual
cities
bomber
were severely distressed by heavy
attack.
raids.
The
Dresden,
overwhelmed on the night of 14 February 1945, did not begin to function again until after the war was over; but in Berlin public transport and services were maintained throughout and were
still
functioning during the ground battle for the
city in April 1945. In
Hamburg
the 50,000 deaths from bombing, largely concentrated into the period in July 1943, almost
equalled those suffered in Britain throughout the war (60,000), yet industrial production
returned to 80 per cent of normal within
German
men and women under so
five
months. Nothing better vindicated the
people's reputation for discipline and hardihood than the resilience of their urban
many were The
Allied air attack in 1943-5 - perhaps the
women
most of all, since
forced by the war to act as heads of families.
cost of strategic
bombing on Germany's
civilian
87,000 people were killed in the towns of the Ruhr, Berlin, 20,000 in
Cologne, 15,000
in the
population was tragically high:
at least
50,000 in Hamburg, 50,000 in
comparatively small
432
city
of Magdeburg, 4,000
in
STRATEGIC BOMBING
that tiny
baroque gem, Wiirzburg. Altogether some 600,000 German
bombing
and 800,000 were seriously
attack
cent of the dead and female deaths exceeded male by as
and 80 per cent
added
privation
at
Darmstadt, both
to the suffering caused
output of up to 30 per cent of
where
cities
steel,
with the effect of a nearly
some 20 per 40 per cent at Hamburg
much
as
firestorms occurred. In the aftermath,
by bereavement and homelessness: reductions
in
25 per cent of motor engineering, 15 per cent of
power, 15 per cent of chemicals and
electrical
died under
civilians
injured. Children represented
effectively 100
May
total transport standstill in
per cent of
oil,
combined
1945, deprived the surviving
population of the means to begin reconstruction; the breakdown of transport also
imposed
fuel shortages
which reduced consumption
t.o
barest subsistence level.
Because the whole of Germany was occupied by the time of the capitulation,
however, no part of the population starved,
November
the wartime blockade after
made themselves
food and
happened during the
as
1918.
responsible for
Allies'
sustainment of
The armies, even the Red Army, collected its
distribution.
devoted themselves to Germany's economic devastation
The
in
air
which had
forces
1943-5 found themselves
engaged, almost as soon as the war was over, in transporting essential supplies to the
cities
they had recently been overflying with high explosive and incendiaries in their bomb-bays. In the course of their
campaign the Allied bombing forces had suffered grievously
themselves: in 1944 alone the Eighth Air Force lost 2400 bombers; throughout the war
Bomber Command killed
the First
in
more than the number of British army officers World War. The dead aircrew were not, however, accorded the suffered 55,000 dead,
memorialisation given to the satisfaction to the majority
'lost
never
commanded
in the
House of Commons by the Labour
by Bishop
though
generation'. Their campaign,
it
gave a dour
of the British people in the depths of their war against
the support of the whole
nation.
Its
Hitler,
morality was publicly questioned
MP Richard Stokes, more
insistently in the
Lords
of Chichester and in private correspondence by the Marquess of Salisbury,
Bell
head of the leading Conservative family Salisbury, 'that
made we do
in Britain. All
of course the Germans began
it,
but
the point, to quote Lord
not take the devil as our
example.' This accorded with a nagging self-reproach to the national conscience which,
when
the war was over, denied 'Bomber' Harris the peerage given to
British
With
commanders and
their backs to the wall the British
had descended to the enemy's play. Strategic fair play.
Over
Overleaf:
course and outcome
A
other major
people had chosen not to acknowledge
level. In victory
they
remembered
bombing, which may not even have been sound its
all
refused his aircrew a distinctive campaign medal of their own.
Halifax of Bomber
its
most consistent
Command
Bordeaux
in
strategy,
practitioners
was
certainly not
drew
a veil.
overflies a blazing storage depot north of
June 1944.
433
that they
that they believed in fair
...
-
'
-•—•«
•"
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
THE ARDENNES AND THE RHINE The Germanbetween
army, adept as always
distance
itself
and the
at
surmounting
disaster
crisis,
lost
no time
in putting
of Normandy. Hitler had been forced to
accept the result of the Falaise battle, yet previously he had refused to allow any
on the line of the Somme and Marne rivers, tentatively Arm) Group B as an intermediate position between the Atlantic and West Walls. In consequence, once the Westheer crossed the Seine between 19 and 29 August it could and did not pause in its retreat until it reached defensible positions on the great construction of defences
designated by
northern European waterways - the Schelde, the Meuse, the tributaries of the Rhine the
first
week of September. The
rejoicing,
British
and Antwerp, Europe's
captured Brussels on
largest port, the next day.
3
September, to
in Allied hands, together with a fragment
on
American
September
patrols of the
Army
First
ecstatic civic
By 14 September the whole of
Belgium and Luxembourg was 11
in
actually crossed the
of Holland, and
German border
near Aachen. The vanguard of the Franco-American force which had landed in Provence
on
15 August linked
as the 6th
up with
Army Group,
September there was of the Schelde
in
a
it
Patton's Third
went
Army
near Dijon on
into the line in Alsace.
11
September. Thereafter,
By the end of the second week
in
continuous battlefront in northern Europe running from the banks
Belgium
to the
headwaters of the Rhine
at
Basle
on the Swiss
frontier.
However, Patton and Montgomery, Eisenhower's two most thrusting subordinates, arrived strategy
at
the approaches of the
and
a
against the
frontier
both believing
The
roots of this dispute, subsequently
Strategy', lay far
back
French railway system was
at last
at its
broke out of the bridgehead
known as when
Overlord campaign,
in the
height.
The
successful in destroying French railway bridges, lines
armies
that a
more
more calculated allocation of supplies would have resulted
Wall's being breached.
Narrow Front
German
in
Allied forces
and
clear-cut
in the
West
the 'Broad versus the
air
campaign
had then been so
rolling stock that
when
the
August the means to supply their advance
436
THE RHINE AND THE ARDENNES
could be provided only by truck and by road. the truck route
would be shortened by
It
was hoped
that, as
the armies advanced,
the progressive capture of ports along the Channel
coast (also desirable because Hitler's flying-bomb launch sites lay in the
on Army Group
Hitler's insistence
B's leaving garrisons to
Dunkirk and the mouth of the Schelde
on
vitiated that
Boulogne on 22 September and
12 September,
out until the end of the war, while,
Schelde estuary were In retrospect
it
German hands
in
still
more
area); but Calais,
hope. Although Le Havre was captured Calais
critically for at
same
hold Le Havre, Boulogne,
on 30 September, Dunkirk held the Allies, the defences of the
the beginning of
November.
can be seen that the failure to clear the Schelde estuary, and thus to
open the way for the Allies' fleet of cross-Channel supply vessels to deliver directly to Antwerp in the immediate rear of the Canadian First, British Second and American First Armies, was the most calamitous flaw in the post-Normandy campaign. It was, moreover, barely excusable, since Ultra was supplying Montgomery's headquarters from 5 September onwards with
intelligence of Hitler's decision (of 3
of the Channel ports and waterways; and
Army Group
intelligence section at 21st as
September)
as early as 12
to
deny the
Allies the
September Montgomery's
use
own
reported that the Germans intended to 'hold out
long as possible astride the approaches to Antwerp, without which the installations of
the port, though
little
Montgomery -
damaged, can be of no service
which was acute - refused estuary. Instead
he determined upon using the
lower Rhine, establish
a
Allied
military
good
sense,
101st
First Allied
Army
Airborne
(the British 1st
Airborne Divisions) to leap across the Meuse and the
German plain and capture the Ruhr, September - the day on which formal
foothold on the North
On
heartland of Germany's war economy.
he became
own
to turn his troops back in their tracks to clear the Schelde
and the American 82nd and
command
to us.'
despite every warning, and contrary to his
10
of ground forces in north-west Europe passed from himself to Eisenhower, and marshal in recognition of his achievements - he secured the Supreme
a field
Commander's
assent to the plan
and on
17
September the operation, codenamed
Market Garden, began. Market, the seizure of the bridges airborne divisions, proved
a
at
Eindhoven and Nijmegen by the American Garden, the descent of the British
success.
brilliant
Airborne Division on the more distant Rhine bridges
German
experience of the
7th Parachute Division in
while dropping directly into
its
objective, the Allied airborne forces
made
doctrine that airborne descents should be
which the parachutists should concentrate only equipment. The
Arnhem
bridges
1st it
Airborne Division got
found
tracks; but
after
on
having assembled and collected their
when
it
advanced on the
remnants of the 9th and
were refitting in the district after their ordeal in
even the remnants of a
had established the
distance from the chosen target,
safely to earth; but
their vicinity held by the
which them the two divisions mustered only Divisions,
at a
1st
Arnhem, did not. Because of the Crete, where it had been massacred at
10th SS
Panzer
Normandy. Between
company of tanks, some armoured cars and halfPanzer division deployed more firepower than the 1st a
437
THE WAR
Airborne,
whose
own gunner
support was provided by
artillery
officers
arrival
75-mm
pack howitzers which one of its
described as 'quite unlethal'. The British parachutists,
of Arnhem's two bridges
and holding the
THE WEST l
IN
fall
other. The) held
of British tanks to their
advancing to join them found
Rhine
into the it
as the)
approached
steadfastly until 20
but the Guards
relief,
itself confined to a single
it,
after
seeing one
succeeded
in seizing
September, hourly expecting the
Armoured
Division which was
road between inundated
fields
and
move forward at its planned speed. German reinforcements had now gathered around the Arnhem perimeter, constricting ever more closely, and on 24 September the British received orders to withdraw Some managed to do so by improvised ferry, many swam the Rhine back to the southern bank. Just over 2000 men succeeded in escaping; could not
it
.
1000 were killed in the course of the battle, and 6000
became
The
prisoners.
1st
Airborne
Division had effectively ceased to exist.
Arnhem was Normandy.
had
It
German army's
the
also,
however, fought
and was meanwhile busily reinforcing unobserved and
since
decamping from
a little-noticed but successful
defence of Aachen
its
overt
first
position along the Schelde estuary apparently
unhindered by Montgomery's
certainly
success
21st
Army Group. During
its
pell-
Army Group had bypassed the unmechanised elements of the German Fifteenth Army left in northern France and along the south Belgian coast. Its new commander, General Gustav von Zangen, took advantage of the distraction of Arnhem to evacuate these remnants, amounting to 65,000 men of nine divisions, across the mouth of the Schelde on to the island of Walcheren and the coastal area of South Beveland, leaving a bridgehead on the south bank at Breskens. The reconstituted Fifteenth Army was left undisturbed by Montgomery until 6 October, when, at last alerted to the precariousness of mell drive to Brussels 21st
the liberation armies' logistic position as long as outlet to the sea in
German hands - he
Schelde's waterlogged banks in what
set his
Antwerp remained unusable - with
would become the most
difficult
operation fought by any of the Allied armies in the winter of 1944.
concluded on
8
November, two
river minefields
29 November, eighty-five days after
its
its
Canadian troops to capture and clear the
and unpleasant
When
the battle was
had to be cleared and it was not until Antwerp was at last open to shipping.
still
capture, that
Logistic improvisation, including a high-speed truck route carrying 20,000 tons of
supplies daily over the 400 miles separating the
operations, was front.
On
rehabilitated.
Eisenhower hoped
that a
the zone of
up and down the 12th Army Group was
offensives
the American front, next to Montgomery's, Bradley's
confronted by the West Wall, which had
a
Normandy beaches from
meanwhile permitting the resumption of
fallen into disrepair in 1939
but had been hastily
concerted drive either side of Aachen would allow
breakthrough to Cologne before the winter brought campaigning to an end. The West
Wall, however,
attacked
on
16
proved
a
still
formidable obstacle
November, and, although
it
when
the First and Ninth Armies
was penetrated, the
terrain
beyond, particularly
the dense thickets of the Hiirtgen forest, defied their efforts to break out. At the southern
end of the
front, Patton,
still
annoyed about Eisenhower's
438
refusal to
support his 'Narrow
THE RHINE AND THE ARDENNES
Front' advance
from the Seine the previous August, was
Arm) Group
Lorraine against Balck's
from the south of France and
more mobile
fighting a
G, consisting of the divisions
hastily raised
reinforcements from the
The Germans benefited from the defensive advantages offered by lines, the
Moselle, Meurthe and
Seille,
and
b) the old
French
battle in
which had escaped
German Home Army. a
succession of river
fortification
zone
built in
1870-1914, and the) conducted a step-by-step withdrawal, denying Patton's Third
possession of Metz in until 15
a bitter battle that lasted
December was
it
full)'
followed the line of the Saar
bridgeheads across the Saar
in contact
18
November
Army
December. Not
until 13
with the lower reaches of the West Wall which
river. Patton's
as the first
from
spearheads succeeded
heavy snow of the winter
Group, consisting of the American Seventh and French
First
in seizing
set in.
some
small
Army had been more
Devers's 6th
Armies,
Germans out of Alsace to the south, despite having to fight mountainous sector of the Vosges. American troops entered
successful in clearing the
through the
difficult
Strasbourg on 23 November, but
Upper Rhine and in
the
a
pocket of resistance around Colmar, protecting the
West Wall behind
it,
still
resisted the
French army's
efforts to take
it
mid-December.
Germany The deceleration of the and
Allied drive against the outer defences of
early winter of 1944
campaigned enhanced by tons a day as the
opposed
German arm).
gains a respite
to
was caused
largely
by the
their far greater divisional
200 tons
In earl)
a day.
September
Home Arm) (now commanded
Germany
logistic difficulties
in the
autumn
under which they
needs than those of the Germans, 700
There was also the improved fighting power of
Hitler
had charged Goebbels
to raise within the
by Himmler since the dismissal and execution of
its
commander, Fromm, after the July Plot) twenty-five new Volkscjrenadier divisions to man the western defences. The manpower was found by 'combing through' headquarters, bases and static units inside Germany, a process which also yielded replacements for the broken divisions which had struggled back to the West Wall from Normandy. Between 1 September and 15 October an additional 150,000 men were found in this way - though losses in the west in that period exactly equalled that figure -
and another 90,000 from
within the resources of OB West (to which post Rundstedt had again been appointed on 2
September). Moreover, despite the
bombing
full
resumption of the Anglo-American Pointblank
Normandy, German industry had achieved higher levels of output of war material in September than in any month of the war, thanks to the success of Speer's policy of dispersal of production and assembly away from the traditional centres. As
offensive after
a result,
tank and assault-gun production during 1944 approached that of the Soviet
Union during the same period. The
11,000
medium
tank and assault guns, 16,000 tank
destroyers and 5200 heavy tanks produced were sufficient to keep existing Panzer divisions in the field (despite their appalling losses in
Normandy and White
439
Russia)
and
to provide
THE WAR
new Panzer
the material for thirteen
weak Panzer
reconstituted as
Much
art
of clutching
of ground
loss
Hitler,
however, was
represent
to
suffered
losses
this
the
in
master of self-delusion and also of the allow any of his
occurred by asserting that the
inevitably
damage done and recover
November
abandoned
the
mechanism had allowed him
commanders
a counter-strike
enemy had
thereby
which would repay
the
all
territory into the bargain. This self-defence
denying permission to Paulus to break out of
to justify
Arnim
1942, refusing
while time allowed in March
Tunisia
a
the
lor
in his refusal to
overreached himself and exposed himself to
Stalingrad in
be
to
whatever reason, nevertheless he always reconciled himself to the
for
that
headquarters
Hitler's
at
genuine reparation
as
Although adamant
straws.
at
ground
to surrender
which were subsequently
brigades, nine of
necessary
re-equipment
summer of 1944.
catastrophic
1943-1945
divisions.
was
self-delusion
rebuilding and
THE WEST
IN
Army Group
leave to evacuate
and
1943,
driving
the
Panzer
Fifth
from
Africa
Army
to
destruction in the Mortain counter-attack of the August just past. In the aftermath of
Normandy, indeed before the
was
battle
surface in Hitler's strategic appreciation.
Armies were
told
planned to launch
a
them
to begin preparing the restoration
major counter-offensive
snow', he predicted on
announced
on
Lair
outline plan. Rhein,
announced.
shall
for
still
he
that
go over
first
beyond Antwerp, would be lay
the British
effect
and
and thus
staff at
the
more
.
.
.
made
momentous
a
decision,'
am
Hitler
out of the Ardennes, with the objective,
detail as
planning progressed: Antwerp, in mid-
on
its
If
taken by the Germans
his
its
loss
would
set that offensive
sites for which lay just damage on London, with a course of the drive on Antwerp, in the Ardennes, he would cut off
V-2 rockets, the main launching
inflicting increasingly serious
population. Further, in the
Second and Canadian
First
Armies from the Americans positioned further
to the
and destroy them. The balance of force on the Western Front would thus
south, encircle
be equalised,
if
not actually reversed, and the growing power of his secret-weapons
campaign would allow him at
occupation of intrinsic
have
'I
only sixty miles from the Westheer's positions
turn to strike
'night, fog
forces
unavailable for use by the Allies, was potentially their major port of supply
back man)- months. Meanwhile
which
air
revealed both the location and objective of Wacht
to the offensive
an offensive into Germany.
demoralising
west in November;
undertake the offensive to his operations
was codenamed.
Antwerp.' His reasoning emerged in
September
Keitel,
September, having briefed Jodl some days previously to prepare an
16
attack
'I
in the
summoned
a victory.
his decision to
was then
It
the
as
to
of the Westheer because he
September, would ground the Allied
1
inaugurate the conditions for
Wolfs
same pattern of deception began
the
August, while the Seventh and Fifth Panzer
19
struggling out of the neck of the Falaise pocket, he
still
Jodl and Speer and
Hitler
fully over,
On
a
to regain the strategic initiative.
the Russians central
on
postion between
advantage and strike for
It
would then be
the Ostheer's
the eastern borders, so that German)', profiting by its
victor)'.
440
enemies, could recoup
its
its
theoretically
THE RHINE ANT) THE ARDENNES
Hitler's belief in the fantasy fact that
For
for himself
was strengthened by the
the natural point of departure for his forthcoming offensive lay in the Ardennes.
was on the German
it
he had constructed
side of the Ardennes, the Eifel, that
which had broken the French divisions
had then advanced
to
make
he had gathered the army
and through the Ardennes
front in 1940,
that his
Panzer
their surprise attack. In 1944, as in 1940, the Eifel
and
the Ardennes offered his soldiers the protection of thick forest and narrow valleys almost
impenetrable to
minimum
Moreover,
command
maze of broken ground and dense
move forward
Panzer divisions could assemble and
positions with the intentions.
inside that
air surveillance;
new army of
his
of anxiety
vegetation
to their attack
any premature discovery of their presence and
at
made by
of the strategic errors
in a feckless repetition
the French
Supreme Allied Headquarters had deemed the Ardennes a secondary front during the autumn of 1944 and, by keeping the bulk of their forces, British and American, concentrated to the north and south, had allowed it to become for high
four years earlier,
the second time precisely the
May
able to exploit in
For Rhein did
all
that,
did not have
the generals with
'a
forces opposite the
of
First
'unalterable',
November
all
had entrusted the execution of Wacht am
Together they devised an
from
Ardennes rather than
aimed
at
that the plan
which they
called the
damaging the enemy
trying to destroy them. Hitler
called
main headquarters
his
October
late
alternative,
Hitler's 'Big Solution',
and on 2 December he
would have none
November with word that the plan was Model and Rundstedt to the Reich Chancellery 3
after
he had
Rastenburg for good on 20
left
- to impress the point on them in person. His only concessions to them were
to set back the
opening date of the offensive
from 25 November) and
to give
it
a
further
still
(it
had already been postponed
new codename, Autumn
chosen by
Mist, originally
for the 'Small Solution'.
'All
Hitler
wants
me
to do',
complained Sepp
armies earmarked for the operation,
and take Antwerp. And the
Hitler
he sent Jodl to see Model on
now
-
in Berlin
Model
whom
agreed between themselves in
B,
leg to stand on'.
'Small Solution' in distinction
it.
and Guderian had been
that Kleist
not share his confidence in the plan. Rundstedt and Model, Kluge's successor as
commander of Army Group
of
same sector of weakness
1940.
snow
armoured
is
waist
divisions.
all
this in the
deep and there
When
with reformed divisions
it
'is
Dietrich,
commander of one of the two
to cross a river, capture Brussels,
isn't
room
to
deploy four tanks abreast
doesn't get light until eight and
made up
and then go on
worst time of the year through the Ardennes
chiefly of kids
and
sick old
it's
dark again
men
- and
This analysis by one of Hitler's most loyal supporters was closely exact.
German order of battle armies, the Fifth
German
Autumn Mist appeared impressive. It and Sixth, commanded by Manteuffel, one of for
tank generals, and Dietrich; between
at
at
On
let
when alone
four and
Christmas.'
paper the
consisted of two Panzer the best of the younger
them they deployed
eight Panzer,
Panzergrenadier and two parachute divisions, most of which had fought the
one
Normandy
campaign, therefore enjoyed experienced leadership and had been brought up to strength
441
THE WAR
again since the retreat
from
IN
THE WEST
1943-
They included the
Falaise.
ms 2nd, 9th and 12th SS Panzer and
1st,
the 2nd, 9th, 116th and Lehr Panzer Divisions, the 3rd and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions
Army) and
(the latter belonging to the supporting Seventh
Divisions.
made
However, appearance and
to find
men and equipment
for these divisions, so that the
example, were well up to strength, even such Panzer deployed only
hundred tanks
a
out with 'ethnic' Germans
and
1st
12th SS Panzer, for
as the
2nd and
each, while the Volksgrenadier divisions
provided support for the armoured spearheads were filled
had been
ever)' effort
formations
first-line
and 5th Parachute
the 3rd
Although
reality diverged.
who owed
116th
which
equipped, under strength and
ill
The 62nd
their nationality to frontier changes.
regions annexed to the
many Czech and Polish conscripts from Reich who spoke no German at all and belonged in sympathy to
the Allied armies they
were committed
Volksgrenadier Division, for example, contained
on the
rebuilt filled
ruins of
with airmen and
352nd Volksgrenadier
to attack; the
predecessor which had fought so stoutly
its
Omaha
at
Division,
beach, was
and the 79th Volksgrenadier Division had been formed out
sailors;
of soldiers 'combed out' of rear headquarters.
Another deficiency
in the
when
requirement was on hand
plan was lack of
Only
fuel.
the offensive opened,
a
minimum
quarter of the
much of
it
held east of the Rhine,
while the leading attack elements were expected to capture supplies from the Americans
Autumn
advanced. Hitler nevertheless clung to the conviction that
as they
succeed. Speaking to the generals
Rundstedt's
at
command
on
post
12
Mist
would
December, he
painted a picture of an alliance ol 'heterogeneous elements with divergent aims, capitalist states
Britain ... a
on the one hand, an
colony bent on inheritance, the United
more heavy blows, then suddenly collapse with
Thanks
its
own
offensive as
D-Day
for
4th, 28th
at
Autumn
operations
Mist, at
were emitted
Autumn
and
in
States.
this artificially
the other
.
.
.
If
... a
now we
bolstered
a
Ardennes
can deliver a few
common
front
Supreme
Allied Headquarters' close attention
the Saar and Alsace, such warning signs of the
failed to alert Allied anxieties.
On
the
morning of 16 December,
was held by only four American
space of nearly ninety miles.
Fifth
Panzer Armies
Two
divisions, the
was
entirely
Division,
of the three infantry divisions had
casualties in the Hiirtgen forest battle
to rest; the third, 106th,
to these ill-fitted
may
measures observed by Army Group B during the
Mist, the front of attack
On
ultra-
dying empire,
of thunder.'
partly to
Aachen,
between them suffered 9000
and
moment
on
and 106th Divisions supported by the inexperienced 9th Armoured
disposed across
the
any
a gigantic clap
partly to the careful security
preparations for
on
ultra-Marxist state
new
and had been sent
to
to battle.
and unprepared American defenders of the Ardennes, the Sixth fell
like a
whirlwind on the morning of 16 December.
In the
centre the American 28th Division was quickly overrun and in the north the 106th
The
situation in
December 1944 last
as Hitler launched the
Ardennes
gambler's throw in the West.
442
offensive,
Autumn
Mist, his
THE WESTERN FRONT, AUTUMN
443
1944
THE WAR
Advanced
THE WEST 1943-ms
Division's forward elements
is
the
During
day,
headquarters, in which the Ardennes sector
its
was developing.
airfields,
to the
that the attack
developing
Eisenhower,
Bradley's
was
local
less
12th
to appreciate the
intelligence because of strict
progress than
Army Group
magnitude of the
weather 'closed
German
and diversionary and did not
whom
in'
radio security,
react with
it
urgency
Bradley was by chance visiting during the day, fortunately took a
view.
He decided
to bring
down two armoured
neighbouring formations, the 7th from the Ninth
on the
Germans make
moreoever, lay, failed
where the 4th Division
crisis.
more precautionary stand
in the south,
Bereft of air reconnaissance because winter
and denied intercept
formed the view
Schwimmwagen.
Division, did the
troubled
this
amphibious
were surrounded; only
was supported by the 9th Armoured
attack that
17 December 1944.
units of 1st SS Panzer Division at a critical road crossing,
Their vehicle
anticipated.
IN
flanks of the
German
attack lest
it
Army and
divisions
from the
the 10th from the Third, to
develop into a full-blown offensive. Patton,
444
THE RHINE AND THE ARDENNES
and
battling into the Saar
imbued with
still
on the point of
the belief that he was
breakthrough, automatically protested; but Eisenhower's caution was to be justified by events. at
On
the second day of the offensive, 17 December, the
the key road junction of Saint Vith, from
breakthrough by the appearance thereafter
found
oi the
US
it
to
Antwerp.
It
to
for resupply -
While the Sixth Panzer Arm)' was being diverted from the
in 1940.
The key
to
its
east,
denied
a
by one American
direct
the Fifth Panzer
Montherme, where
better progress in the southern sector towards
Meuse
Meuse and so
to be
Armoured Division's spearheads and open country - and to the vast American
had counted
route to Antwerp, and forced progressively due
crossed the
was
7th
away from access
itself turned
dumps near Stavelot on which blocking move after another. fuel
SS Panzer Division arrived
1st
a valley route led to the
Belgium and the approaches
plains of
into the
which
north-westward
Arm) was making
Kleist's
Panzers had
breakthrough was the road centre of Bastogne,
a
junction for the sparse network of highways that runs from the Eifel into the Ardennes and essential to the successful development of Autumn December Panzer Lehr Division was only two miles from the town; but during the night the US 101st Airborne Division had arrived by truck, having driven 100 miles from Reims at breakneck speed, and was positioned to den) the Germans
onward. The capture of Bastogne was Mist. At
dawn on
possession.
The
19
were quite unequipped
parachutists
to
combat
tanks; but
by their resolute
defence of the small town's streets the) prevented Panzer Lehr's infantry from gaining
more
entry and so turned Bastogne into an even
effective
road block than Saint Vith
on 23 December) on the Sixth Panzer Army's axis of advance. By Christmas Day Bastogne was completely surrounded by German troops and the
(which
Fifth
fell
Panzer Arm)' had
moved
on; Panzer Lehr had
beyond Saint-Hubert, only twenty miles from
the
worked around Meuse.
On
appear
a flank to
Christmas Da)'
itself,
however, the pace of the German advance across the whole front of attack began to slow
and the nose of the
which the Panzer armies had driven
salient
attenuating. Allied counter-measures
Bradley's strident objections, Dietrich's Sixth Panzer
Eisenhower had
Army, on the northern
Montgomery; while the intervention of
to
face
divisions
commander
set
in
tram.
was
face
tell.
of
against
of the 'bulge' closest to Antwerp, to
from Patton's Third Army against the
southern face during 17-21 December matched the British
into Allied lines
On 20 December, in the confided command of operations
had begun
effect
of the counter-attacks that the
Montgomery, who was copiously informed from 20
December by Ultra decrypts of both Sixth and Fifth Panzer Armies' intentions, took prompt steps to guard the bridges across the Meuse, towards which Dietrich's spearheads were advancing, with took the view
British
troops brought
that the attackers,
down from
now opposed
northern Belgium.
by nineteen
American and
He
thereafter
British divisions,
seasoned formations as the US 82nd Airborne and 2nd Armoured would simply wear themselves out by their effort to make progress. Montgomery's analysis proved exactly correct. Indeed, unrecognised though was at
including such Divisions,
it
445
THE WAR
IN
THE WEST
1943-1945
the time, the American divisions, particularly the 28th and 106th,
path of the
of their
had through the dedicated and
initial attack,
rifle
platoons and anti-tank teams done
in the
of many
wear down the impetus of
great deal to
a
which had stood
self-sacrificing resistance
German Panzer divisions on the first day of attack. They had damaged il not always destroyed equipment, and delayed the the
inflicted
heavy
timetable
casualties,
on which the
success of the offensive too narrowly depended.
On
December Eisenhower's headquarters received the first evidence that Autumn its vital impetus. The weather cleared, allowing the Allied air forces to effectively for the first time. Patton's 4th Armoured Division broke through the
26
Mist had lost intervene
southern face of the 'bulge' to bring relief to the
Armoured
Bastogne, and the 2nd
Airborne Division surrounded
101st
from Hodges's
Division,
Panzer Division immobilised for lack of fuel near Celles, Dinant, and destroyed
with the 2nd
its
Armoured
2nd Panzer Division
Division, the
tanks and twenty-eight assault guns with which
By 28 December Montgomery was sure expected the Germans to persist
when
it
Arm) Group
G
attack,
triangle
came,
fell
five
it
Autumn
and even
almost
all
the eighty-eight
offensive.
Mist had
failed,
though he
to launch a further attack. That
where Blaskowitz's
outside the Ardennes 'bulge', in the Saar,
struck against Patch's Seventh
Army and managed
to take
and
briefly
of territory on the west bank of the Rhine. This brief success reinforced
view that his aggressive strategy had been correctly conceived, even though
moment when
at
one-sided encounter
its
had begun the
that
in the offensive
lost
Meuse
miles from the
leading tanks. Indeed, in the course of
in
Army, found the 2nd
First
it
hold
a
Hitler's
had been
more than the Western Front cried out for defensive reinforcement. In fact, however, North Wind (as this second offensive was codenamed) caused mild political but little military alarm and contributed to Autumn Mist not at all. On 3 January 1945 Montgomery launched a convergent counter-attack against the northern and western faces of the 'bulge', which obliged Hitler on 8 January to order the launched
at a
the Eastern even
withdrawal of the four leading Panzer divisions from their exposed situation. January the American 82nd and British
what had been the Ardennes
Between
some
19,000
16
prisoner. In the
casualties
first
Airborne Divisions
and by
salient,
December and
fatal
1st
12th
small clandestine units
among
'a
and Sixth Panzer Armies had
lines.
The German
offensive
inflicted
15,000 Americans
He
away
infiltrated (in practice
had
also
He
is
situation
.
with
little
success) in
of the war. Hitler spoke to his .
severely criticised
446
- where
shaken the optimism prevailing
.
the
enemy had had He has had
has been obliged to regroup his forces.
again units which were fatigued.
as Paris
was feared would be mounted by the
early conclusion
tremendous easing of the
his plans for attack.
the military as far
it
which Otto Skorzeny
Washington and London over the
all
was restored.
Arm) Group and taken
precautions were taken against sabotage raids
subordinates of
13
days of their offensive the) had spread panic throughout the civilian
population of Belgium and caused alarm
behind the Allied
On
contact in the centre of
16 January the front
16 January the Fifth
on the US
made
at
home.
.
.
.
to
abandon
to
throw
in
Already he has had
THE RHINE AND THE ARDENNES
to admit that there
the
end of next
is
no chance of the war being ended before August, perhaps not before means a transformation of the situation such as nobody would
year. This
have believed possible
a fortnight ago.'
he also grossly misinterpreted the true significance of the
exaggerated;
Hitler
on the enemy, but those losses army had come to the end of its manpower resources, but the American army had not. Since September it had shipped twenty-one divisions to France including six armoured; between January and February it was to land another seven, including three armoured, all fully equipped and up to strength. The Ardennes campaign. could be borne and
Westheer,
It
had, of course, inflicted losses
made good. The
by contrast, had
800 tanks and 1000
lost 100,000
aircraft
British
men
wounded
killed,
many thrown away
-
Belgium on
launched against Allied
airfields in
or material, could be
made good. The Wehrmacht's
German war
industry's output could
1
or captured in the Ardennes,
in the Luftwaffe's last offensive, Bodenplatte,
January 1944.
None of these
losses,
human
resources were exhausted, while
no longer keep pace with everyday
attrition, let
alone
the surges of destruction caused by indulgence in heavy offensive activity. Steel production alone, fundamental to
weapons manufacture, had been reduced from 700,000 to 400,000 bombing between October and December, and it continued
tons monthly in the Ruhr by
to decline; while the disruption of the transport system difficult to
meant
that
it
was increasingly
move weapon components from point of production to point of assembly. Autumn Mist achieved was to impose a brief delay on the Western Allied
All that
armies' preparations to break into
denying to the Eastern Front of the Red
Army
December 2299
Germany,
at
the expense of transferring from or
men and equipment needed and the
into southern Poland
tanks and assault guns and eighteen
Baltic
new
to
stem the continued advance
states.
divisions
During November and
had been committed
the Western Front but only 921 tanks and five divisions to the Eastern, infantry divisions,
confronted
133
twenty-two tank corps and twenty-nine other armoured formations
German
encirclement in the
divisions,
Baltic
states.
object of destroying
of which
thirty
Hitler's
described, was extremely short-sighted.
It
'last
were
already
threatened
gamble', as the Ardennes
bought
a little
time
at
on the German
Autumn
side,
triangle north
be its
at all.
Mist and succeeded in making advances as creditable, given the
Roermond
with to
who
fought in
the Western armies recovered quickly from the shock of
nature of the terrain west of the Rhine, as the
Hungary and Yugoslavia.
came
great cost, failed in
Montgomery's army and won back no ground
Indeed, despite the intervention of Generals January and February, 1945
to
where 225 Soviet
In January the
Red Army was
two German
more
defensible
currently achieving in Poland,
salients
west of the West Wall, the
of Aachen and the Colmar pocket south of Strasbourg, were
reduced. In February and March Eisenhower's armies advanced along the whole front, to reach the Rhine between Wesel and Koblenz and to seize the north bank of the Moselle
between Koblenz and Trier. By the end of the first week of March which stood between the Allies and the German hinterland.
447
it
was the Rhine alone
/*
J-
rortNfffiJ
— PARTV — THE WAR IN THE EAST 1943-1945
?3$
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1^43-1945
24 STALIN'S
STRATEGIC
DILEMMA Hitler's
commit Germany's
decision to
1944, rather than to use
the
the
Red Arm)
in
Second World War.
man-made
it
last
army
to a winter offensive in the
as a counter-attack force against the
west in
encroachments of
seem with hindsight one of the most perverse of Germany was defended by neither geography nor
the east, might In the east,
fortifications. In the west,
both the Siegfried Line (West Wall) and the Rhine
stood between the Anglo-American armies and the interior of Germany. Comparatively
weak
forces
troops last
at
committed
to
hold those obstacles would have sufficed to hold Eisenhower's
bay for months, while the Sixth SS and Fifth Panzer Armies, under which Hitler's
tank reserve was concentrated, might have
been deployed away
in the
to fight
on the
line
Ardennes adventure.
won
an equal amount of time had they
of the Vistula and the Carpathians instead of being cast
Hitler's rationalisation
of his decision
is
well
known:
in
the west the Allied armies were exposed to a counterstroke towards Antwerp, the success
of which would have freed
designed to destabilise the Red Army. In short, he chose to
strike for the
rather than settle for postponing the onset of defeat. Events
launching of the Rhine crossing, actually offensive in the east
Previous page: Russian
were
chance of victory
to rob
him of both
may have set back a little the thereby ensured the unimpeded advance of the
outcomes. The choice of the Ardennes offensive, though
Red Army's
subsequent offensive
his forces to unleash in the east a
whenever
Stalin
it
chose to launch
it.
firepower in the Kursk cauldron, July 1943, the decisive battle of the
war on
the Eastern Front.
450
STALIN'S STRATEGIC
Yet
remains generally unperceived that
it
determined by
with not
his confrontation
a
DILEMMA
Hitler's
double but
plunge into double jeopardy was the west he faced
a triple threat. In
Red Army menaced the Greater Reich on two large and widely separated fronts: from Poland through Silesia towards Berlin; and also from eastern Hungary towards Budapest, Vienna and Prague. Since Hitler had no means of knowing on which of these two axes Stalin would make his
on the Rhine.
the danger of an Allied assault
major
sense positively argued for disposing of the danger in the west
effort, strategic
and then transferring shock of
battle - to
Carpathians, that
it
his striking force
appeared
in greater strength.
two minds about whether
power of
fighting
eastward - always supposing
oppose the Red Army on whichever
though Hitler could only guess in
In the east the
at
it,
was
first
had survived the
it
south of the
sector, north or
The ultimate
validation of this judgement,
November
1944 Stalin himself had been
that until
to strike directly for Berlin or to distract
and destroy the
the Ostheer by a thrust elsewhere, the Budapest-Vienna axis being the
most obvious choice. Since the
moment when
the
Red Army had been
able to
go over
to the offensive at
Stalingrad in 1942, the sheer size of the Eastern Front, the ratio of force to space, the erratic
flow of supplies and the paucity of road and forced Stalin into
summer months come their
abreast of it
communications had time and again
choice between fronts. Even the
of Barbarossa
Centre's front for six
rail
German army, during the down Army Group weeks while Army Groups North and South made up ground to
a similar
on the roads
had been obliged
in 1941,
to Leningrad
to close
and Kiev. Those were armies
at
the height of
powers, led by commanders flushed with victory, spearheaded by superbly
armoured
forces
and backed by
still
efficient
ample reserves of manpower. The Red Army which
went over
to the offensive for the first time at Stalingrad, by contrast, had been ravaged by months of losses on a scale never experienced before in history, was led by generals whose self-confidence had been shaken by a succession of disasters and was fed from a pool of recruits in which the very young and the over-mature were now disproportionately represented. It was an army which had yet to learn how to manoeuvre;
eighteen
until
it
taking
did so,
its
operations were perforce limited to responding to
up ground by
frontal
German
thrusts
and
to
advance on the sectors where the Germans had weakened
themselves by over-extension.
The
deficiencies of the
from the bottom to the civilian
and
under the scratch.
Red Army, moreover, permeated the
military subordinates
strain
who
of war, and served by
Stalin
a
command
armed
structure he had to improvise
own
forces
from
devious character,
could not mobilise and focus upon himself the popular support which so
strengthened Churchill's hand, for example,
peoples of the Soviet Union did not form collectivisation
surrounded by
lacked the experience of directing
Because of the nature of the Soviet system and of his
moreover,
Soviet military structure
top. Stalin himself was an uncertain military leader,
a
crisis.
The
nation, the experience of industrialisation
and
in rallying
had alienated millions from the
451
the nation to cope with
rule of the
Communist
Party, the party
was
THE WAR
further tainted by
commanded more
THE EAST
1943- 194S
methods of government, while Stalin himself his comrades which was made all the maintenance of the fiction that he was no more than first among
exclusive and repressive
its
by the use of selective terror against
it
by
distasteful
equals in
IN
his
a collective leadership.
The
some
of patriotism could to
spirit
extent be
The
revived.
artificially
epics of
Russian history could be recalled, Russian heroes of the past - Ivan the Terrible, Alexander
Nevsky,
-
Great
the
Peter
commemorated
could
be
decorations
rehabilitated,
created, distinctions of rank
and
dress, abolished at the Revolution,
Orthodox Church, an object of contempt to
be allowed
to elect
its
first
could be revived. The could even be
in a professedly atheist state,
enlisted to preach the crusade of the Great Patriotic War;
was
and orders which
victorious generals of the imperial era (Kutuzov and Suvorov) could be
synod since the
reward, in September 1943,
its
institution
was suppressed
after the
mere expedients. The) were no substitute command, which Stalin must provide or else fail as a war
Revolution. These, however, were effective
organ of strategic
an
for
leader,
consigning Russia to defeat and himself to extinction.
does indeed seem to have come close to breakdown
Stalin
Barbarossa. 'For
it
was
a
clamour of organisation, and the
committed irrevocably
to
war
emerged, he was, according to an .
.
.
[He] put in
no more than
military
administration
main
the
officer
rare
rattle
appearances for
disorganised and the General
Staff,
commands, functioned with
tantalisingly
with
its
all
.
.
.
'locked himself in his
When
catastrophic week-end.
first,
who saw him
was,
of Party exhortations.
of himself,
in spite
quarters' for three days at least after the
nervy'.
weeks of
the anonymity of 'the Soviet government', the 'Central Committee' and
all
'Sovnarkom', the Stalin,
in the first
week', describes Professor John Erickson,
at first
hand, 'low in
spirit
he and
the Stavka in these early days;
at
practical
purposes,
seriously
specialists dispatched to the front
persistent
slowness.
.
.
.
The
Stavka
discussions ground into an operational-administrative bog; while trying to formulate
and
strategic-operational assignments, Stalin
his
officers
minutiae which devoured valuable time - the type of units (standard or cavalary models), or
rifle
busied themselves with to
be issued to infantry
whether bayonets were needed, and
if
so
should they be triple-edged?
In fairness as
it
must be
said that Hitler also took refuge in the discussion of military minutiae
an escape from the pressure of crisis and often,
anything
else, as
if the crisis
protracted, refused to discuss
the surviving fragments of his Stalingrad Fiihrer conference records re-
by contrast, returned quickly to realities. On 3 July 1941, the eleventh day of the war, he broadcast to the Soviet people - an almost unprecedented event - and addressed veal. Stalin,
the 'comrades, citizens, brothers and to put the
sisters' as his 'friends'.
government of the Soviet Union on
a
452
war
footing.
Moreover, he moved
The way
in
at
once
which he did so
is
STALIN'S STRATEGIC
DILEMMA
almost incomprehensible to Westerners, attuned as they are to organs of state and political parties,
commanders. a State
war;
Defence Committee
membership,
its
man
his r'ght-hand
On
police (NKVD).
to oversee the political,
later slightly
for
and -
in the party organisation,
and
(though he continued to be identified only
saw both the General
GKO
of which
Staff
Defence from 1925 to 1940, Malenkov, significantly - Beria,
Commissar
as
for
and the operational commands or
was head, and
Defence) he controlled the
fronts.
as
he could
Zhukov and
As the
acts
also detach officers
had been used
of 3
in his broadcast
Generalissimo and 'the great
as Marshal,
had been secured,
Stalin
and de-
Commis-
of the General
Staff,
Vasilevsky, to run fronts or direct specified
War from
July).
disguised from the Soviet people his ultimate responsibility for
stantial victories
Supreme Commander
as
operations, Stalin dominated the direction of the Great Patriotic (the designation 'patriotic'
secret
Defence and
for
organ of the State Defence Committee (GKO), which over-
notably and most frequently
would emerge
head of the
automatically carried the authority of the council of People's
Stalin
to create
military aspects of the
he nominated himself as People's Commissar
19 July
Stacka, in effect the executive
sars,
move, on 30 June, was
first
economic and
August secretly assumed the post of Supreme Commander;
cisions of the
separation between
broadened, consisted of himself, Molotov, the Foreign
who had been Commissar
Minister, Voroshilov,
8
a strict
military authority, bureaucrats
In peacetime the Soviet system blurred such distinctions; Stalin heightened
ambiguity in the structure he erected for war. His
this
on
power and
civil
was
Stalin'
top to bottom
Though he
command only when
cautiously
decision, a roll
and
of sub-
commander-in-chief from the
effectively
He was implacable in that role. When Army Group Centre Moscow in October, his confidence was shaken almost as severely
beginning of July 1941 onwards.
resumed as
it
its
advance on
had been
in June, but
General Ismay, Churchill's military assistant effect: 'as [Stalin]
his subfailures.
who
visited
fear in
Moscow
room every Russian froze into showed all too plainly the constant
entered the
the eyes of the generals
nauseating to see brave
A few
which he held
were the penalties which awaited
he never relaxed the grip of
ordinates: dismissal, disgrace, even execution
men
reduced
to
such
silence fear in
tage of having successfully
commanded
naturally tough, able to accept dismissal
proceed to an operational
abilities,
which he knew
by
Stalin
command
Stalin recognised.
Stalin's difficulties in finding
In the
lived.
It
in
was
down. Zhukov had the advan-
tanks against the Japanese in a brief and un-
more
important, he was
from the post of Chief of the General
without diminished confidence
in his
Staff
own
Others of Zhukov's stamp were to appear,
notably Rokossovsky and Konev. By the time
Patriotic
and the hunted look
which they
servility.'
declared Russo-Japanese border war in Mongolia in 1939;
to
October, noted the
held out. Zhukov was notably robust, appearing not be frightened by Mekhlis,
the chief political commissar used by Stalin to bring others
and
in
all
three were
commanding
fronts in 1944,
able subordinates were largely solved.
meantime, however, he had to do most of the work of directing the Great
War and running
the
Red Army
himself; to a greater extent than
453
was true of the
THE WAR
command
high
1943-194S
Stalin
less
and
dominated
Russia's
war
of tension. Churchill imposed
his generals coexisted in a constant state
by argument, which prevailed
his will
THE EAST
of any other of the combatant powers,
and
effort. Hitler
IN
Americans took over an ever
less as the
greater share of the fighting. Roosevelt largely presided over rather than directed his chiefs
of
staff. Stalin,
however, dictated.
found during the day or
night,
All
information flowed to him, wherever he was to be
whether
while
German bombs threatened Moscow,
of the
Moscow underground
conference three times at
noon, then
railway;
country dacha
in the Kremlin, at his in
at
Kuntsevo
an improvised headquarters on a platform
from him
all
orders flowed back.
He
held a situation
routine curiously similar to Hitler's, hearing reports
a day, in a
or,
first
four in the afternoon, and finally dictating orders directly to officers of the
at
General Staff but
in the
presence of the Politburo between midnight and three or four
in
the morning. Vasilevsky, in effect Stalin's operations officer, playing a role equivalent to that of Jodl in Hitler's headquarters, perceptively
He noted
of command.
year of the war, that
haps because of
Arm) during
to say far
is
observed and
that Stalin established his
more
experience of operations
his previous
was almost wholly responsible for the draw
al
until
it
was too
months he took
as
commissar of the
his
confidence too
in
Vasilevsky
offensive into southern Russia and
who proposed
had reasoned away
the double
on
13
envelopment
the front was at
all
he estimated
as a military
economist
consuming manpower and
Stalingrad
he
at
It
in-
a repetition
was eventually
Stalingrad; they out-
September 1942 and he accepted
it
only
after
his cautious objections.
Zhukov's highly retrospective assessment of Stalin's worth
both
Cavalry
in 1941
committed Timosh-
over 200,000 Russians being taken prisoner - almost
lined the concept to Stalin in his office
he excelled above
First
far:
disaster at Kiev, having refused permission for with-
of the encirclements of the year before. Thereafter he was more cautious.
the)
first
Kharkov counter-offensive, an altogether premature seizure of the
which resulted
Zhukov and
methods
dictator's
the military in the
the defenders to escape encirclement; in 1942 he dismissed
renewed German
enko's fronts to the itiative
late for
recorded the
quickly than Hitler did over the Wehrmacht, per-
the Civil War. In the earl)
the danger of a
later
dominance over
in the
in
two years
who knew how
as a
commander was
to collect reserves
that
even while
gargantuan mouthfuls. Certainly his achievement followed was to have such reserves at hand -
that
Germans of some sixty divisions, whenever the Ostheer gave him the opportunity to profit by a He deployed such a reserve in a counter-attack when the Germans had
to the British a consistent surplus over the
probably an overestimate strategic mistake.
exhausted themselves in the offensive phase of the Kursk operation
Kursk by using
at
fought-over
the Soviet Union. By October his
he held
city in
in reserve,
had retaken
all
his reserve in
the
most valuable
advance into Russia in the two previous years - an
from north
to south, ISO miles in depth,
autumn
offensive, fuelled
territory
won
enormous
beyond which only
454
in July 1943.
He
sus-
August to recapture Kharkov, the most
tained the success
by
tract
by the units
the Ostheer
650 miles
during
in
the Dnieper, the
its
breadth last truly
STALIN'S STRATEGIC
substantial military obstacle
on the
steppe, lay to
DILEMMA
oppose the Red Army's advance. By the
end of November the Red Army had secured three enormous bridgeheads on the European side of the Dnieper, had cut the Crimea off from contact with the poised to open
its
brought
Ironically, victory
defeat; until
Kursk he
Dnieper he
to the
still
fed,
Stalin a
dilemma. Until Stalingrad he had been staving off
no longer
German initiative; until the advance Red Army by wartime improvisation.
manned
supplied and
the
existed, while
won
after
Germany's armoured masse
all'.
he had regained possession of his country's most pro-
now
ductive agricultural and industrial regions. Moreover, he could
much
and stood
faced the risk of a disabling
Thereafter he knew, like Churchill, that he 'had de manoeu\Te
Ostheer
advance into Poland and Romania.
of the burden of destroying the
Tehran on November
1943,
Wehrmacht from
Brooke, Churchill's chief of
staff,
count upon shifting
Red Army
the
noted
to the Allies. At
quick and
that in his
unerring appreciation of opportunity and situation he 'stood out compared to Churchill
and Roosevelt'. By one of the most brutal contrivances of public embarrassment recorded in
diplomatic history, he
lord and to agreeing to
shamed
Churchill into conceding his total
name both
a
commander and
commitment
a date. Thereafter
to Over-
he could be
cer-
would be caught between two fires, and he could let that in the west blaze while he chose where he could most profitably apply the heat elsewhere. As events turned out, he chose to attack on his northern front, destroying Army Group tain that
from mid-1944
Hitler
Centre and driving the Germans back to the Vistula. However, that decision did not commit his hand.
He
still
his strength to a final
Germany and
retained the option of either (like the Western Allies) committing
throw designed
Berlin, or diverting a
Europe, there to build
Union It
to destroy the
against invasion for decades to
was
a tantalising choice. Stalin
the twenty-one
of Hitler's Tripartite Pact and so assure the Soviet
come.
had not chosen
to enter the
it
about. In sidelines,
it
its
From
unfolding.
turn eastern Poland, then - through the
his alliance with Hitler
northern Bukovina. Barbarossa had engulfed his country
brought on by the Second World War. By the
event.
how
Stalin,
best the Soviet
summer
Union might
even more than
he had gained
in
freedom the non-aggression pact had allowed him
to attack Finland - eastern Karelia, then the Baltic states, finally
cluding stage.
Second World War; but
began, to profit from the tensions that brought
months during which the war had raged while he stood on the
he had greatly profited from
consider again
all
in a final battle for eastern
major part of the Red Army's force into southern
a Soviet equivalent
he had chosen, even before
Wehrmacht
Hitler,
Between Barbarossa and Kursk the
in
Romanian
Bessarabia and
the worst of the fighting
of 1944, however, he could begin to
profit geopolitically
was committed
from the war's con-
war
as a political
had worked
against him.
to a view of
'correlation of forces'
Thereafter they began to operate to his advantage. Even as Hitler was laying the ground-
work
for his last offensive in the west, Stalin
was considering where he might best seize the
opportunities presented by the collapse of Hitler's strategy in the
455
east.
THE RUSSIAN WINTER SWEDEN
OFFENSIVE,
JANUARY-MARCH
ESTO BALTIC SEA
1943
\ On
12 January 1943, even before Paulus had
surrendered in Stalingrad, the Red
massive counter-attack in the
fronts
summer
to
of 1942.
Army
Riga
launched a
wrest back the territories
LATVIA
lost
The Russians attacked on four
s
between Orel and Rostov with the aim of
LITHUANIA recovering
Kharkov and
cutting off the
withdrawal from the Caucasus. Soviet
German forces
(
had
recaptured Kursk by 8 February, and by 16 February
they had recovered Kharkov. However, by the third
week
in
February they had created a salient south-west
of Kharkov, against
which Manstein's Arm)' Group
South launched a determined counter-blow on 20
\ ,
February, taking the Russians by surprise. Within a
week Manstein's Panzer spearheads had fought
way back
to the
the Soviet Third
Pripet Marshes
their
/
four
/
for a
Voronezh Front. Punching through the
which was retaken three days
street fighting.
On
Belgorod. The Red
bank of
the 18th the
Army was
V
later after bitter
Germans
retook
HUNGARY
driven back to the east
the Donetz, but the onset of the spring
huge Soviet
much Red
to restore the
Army
German
position
was trapped
Army
to the
in the
south Kleist's
Taman
peninsula.
-^
'-\
\
had done
German
First
Panzer
to the
Red
striven to
Army on 14
keep open to Rostov, which
fell
February.
456
J
.1
A
• Bucharest
\
\ BULGARIA
Manstein had
\
\
ROMANIA
/'
escaped to safety through the corridor which
V
/BE!
\ YUGOSLAVIA
Army Group A Only
----
\
a salutary lesson in the dangers of
army. However,
T\VC> J
.y
salient
and had given the
underestimating the fighting qualities of the
/
s
TRANSYLVAN ,A
based on Kursk and held by the Central and Voronezh Fronts. Manstein's brilliant counter-stroke
\
-<
thaw
prevented Manstein from implementing the third phase of his plan, the reduction of the
/
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Voronezh Front, Manstein had reached Kharkov by the 12th,
'
Donetz. Having trapped and destroyed
Tank Army, Manstein massed
Panzer corps south-west of Kharkov on 3 March drive against the
Pinsk \
250 Miles
V
\
Leningrad
MANSTEIN'S COUNTER-ATTACK • Orel Bryansk Front
Voronezh Front
O South-West Front
*D,onec?
Stalingrad
Don Front (Central Front from March)
% South Front February)
CASPIAN SEA Transcaucasus Front
Key German
front
line,
Russian advance
BLACK SEA
Russian front
line.
German advance
457
30
line,
December
2 February
20 February
line,
18
March
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1943-1945
25
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA The
disastrous Stalingrad
Guderian, visiting him
campaign of 1942-3 at his
unexpected reappointment greatly
changed since
back was bent,
their last
his gaze
was
prone
to angry outbursts
make
His will to
Stalingrad Hitler
generals
who
Hitler a debilitated
and shaken man.
as
Chief of Panzer Troops, found him
December
hand trembled,
1941: 'His left
protruded but lacked their former excitable, easily lost his
his
lustre, his
composure and was
decisions.'
decisions had also been weakened. In the year between the onset of the Russian encirclement and destruction of the Sixth
or displeased
and Bock had been sacked precisely the problem.
Fuhrerprinzip at its fullest.
him and held
Apart from the failure
his orders.
in
He was more
had exercised the
failed
command
and ill-considered
Moscow and
the Battle of
to
meeting
fixed, his eyes
cheeks were flecked with red.
left
Ukrainian headquarters on 21 February 1943 on his
He had
Army
at
peremptorily dismissed
obedient to to advance boldly southward from Voronezh in July the rest of the
for that - his generals
had done
Generalittit strictly
his will to the letter; that
The triumphs of the 1942 campaign belonged
was
exclusively to Hitler,
but so too did the disasters, both the over-extension into the Caucasus and the defeat of Stalingrad.
The consequent
so that even nights
the
were
German
two filled
still
Ostheer's divisions lay
on
his conscience,
would confess to one of his doctors that his sleepless map marked with the positions occupied by moment the) were destroyed. The unspoken reproaches of
with visions of the situation
divisions
more
of twenty of the
years afterwards he
his military intimates
was
loss
at
the
- Jodl and Keitel - were hard enough to bear; his self-recrimination
painful.
4S8
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
During the spring of 1943, therefore, a
freedom of action
command
in 1940
and were
policy he continued to
American armies from
in
planning the
North
his
first
conceded
exercises in
know again - although in other areas of Rommel lacked both 'optimism' and
Believing that
conduct of the
in the
battle against the
Africa in the spring of 1943, releasing precious
and requiring Goering
his central reserve
Ostheer's strategy Hitler
had not known since
certainly never to
make demands.
he intervened heavily
'staying power,'
in
to his subordinates they
to transfer air
Anglo-
armoured
squadrons from
units
Sicily to
airfields. He meanwhile hectored Goering's subordinates about the worsening of war over Germany - Allied 'round the clock' bombing began on 25 February and
Tunisian the
air
heavy
British
or American raids
Mohne-Eder dams followed
on
Nuremberg, Essen, Bremen,
weeks.
in the next
He demanded and
commissioned Guderian
retaliation against Britain,
and approved Goebbels's programme at a
Berlin,
meeting with the Nazi
for the
Party's Gauleiters at
to multiply
first
got a measure of
German
tank production
promulgation of 'total war', outlined to him Rastenburg on 7 February. However, in the
immediate direction of operations on the Eastern Front, making, during the
and the
Kiel
his principal theatre
half of 1943 he took a curiously tentative
and indecisive
of warpart.
This was not to prove wholly to the Ostheer's disadvantage. In Field Marshal Erich von
Manstein,
commander of Army Group
South,
it
had
a
battlefield
commander of
highest quality, acutely sensitive to the tactical opportunities offered by the
lumbering
which
style
Hitler
of manoeuvre, yet strongly
overcame the
intellectual
resistant to the psychological intimidation
independence of
his
the
Red Army's by
lesser generals.
During
own
aborted
February, however, in the aftermath of the Stalingrad surrender and his
attempt to relieve Paulus's Sixth Army, Manstein was discountenanced by an unexpectedly
on the key city of Kharkov, west of the Don. The Red Army's victory at Stalingrad, and the subsequent disorder caused to the whole of the German southern front, had presented the Stavka for the first time with the successful Soviet attack
and throwing the
prospect of seizing the
initiative
Germany's most valuable
territorial acquisition in the Soviet
Ostheer clean
out of the Ukraine,
Union. By the end of January
plan had been conceived for the Southern and South-West Fronts to advance as line
far as
a
the
Don and Donetz, by the spring would advance and swing north-westward to
of the Dnieper, the third great river line beyond the
thaw. Thereafter their neighbouring fronts
Army Group Centre from the northern Ukraine and roll back to Smolensk. The first and crucial move in the great offensive would be played by a Front Mobile Group, commanded by General M. M. Popov and consisting of four tank corps, which was to unseat
attack in the
it
vanguard of Vatutin's South-West Front and drive on Kharkov.
The Stavka plan was
superficially well judged, for the Russian victor)
at
Stalingrad had
The Red Army's advance from Stalingrad had thrown Manstein's Army Group Don (renamed South on 12 February) back on to Rostov, the created three crises for the Germans.
'gateway' of the southern front.
the Caucasus
had carried
it
The enforced withdrawal of Kleist's Army Group A from of Azov, leaving a gap a hundred miles
to the shore of the Sea
459
THE WAR
Field
Marshal Erich von Manstein
IN
THE EAST
(right) studies the
most accomplished of
wide between
his front
1^43-1^45
map. He
is
generally regarded as the
Hitler's field generals.
and Manstein's. Moreover, the continuation of Vatutin's
attack
on
the Hungarians defending Voronezh, north-west of Stalingrad, threatened after 14 January
from contact with Kluge's Army Group B (Centre
to detach Manstein's northern flank
after
12 February). The opening stages of the Stavka's offensive augured well for its success. Between 2 and 5 February Russian pressure on the lower Don was so intense that Hitler, at
Manstein's insistence, was forced to agree to the
abandonment of Rostov, while
simultaneous advance from Voronezh on the upper
Don
A
Front to Kharkov on 14 February.
population took Adolf Hitler
and Das
part,
bitter battle for the city erupted,
and, despite the efforts of the
elite
a
brought Vatutin's South-West
I
in
which the
SS Panzer Corps (Leibstandarte
Germans were defeated and forced to abandon it on 200 miles wide yawned between Army Groups South
Reich divisions), the
16 February. As a result a gap nearly
and Centre. the
The Stavka had, however, made two fatal miscalculations. One was to overestimate Red Army's capabilities. The other was to underestimate Manstein. 'Both the Voronezh
and South-West of the Great
Fronts',
Patriotic
comments
Professor John Erickson, the leading Western historian
War, 'had done some prodigious fighting and covered great stretches
460
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
of ground, following nothing
as
much
as possible.'
than
less
blew up bridges, buildings and
fielded),
could put only
Voronezh Front could
find only
on
Stavka's general directive,
than
'operational' level of
would therefore have been incautious even
command
before the height of the
France to his
front,
division normally
Army of the
six.
who
crisis
against a normally
modicum of tank German and the Russian
retained a
supreme master of what both the
a
German Panzer
a single
while the so-called Third Tank
12 February to 'broaden' the offensive, in accordance with the
competent opposing commander Manstein -
more
fifty-three into action,
Vatutin's decision
as retreating
tangled railway lines and
However, by mid-February the
the offensive with only 137 tanks (no
German units damaged the few roads Popov spearhead, which had begun
of destruction
a trail
airfields,
reserves. Against
armies called the
- the broadening of the offensive was foolhardy. Even
had been reached,
where he himself arrived
Hitler
had ordered seven divisions from
to confer with
Manstein on
17 February.
The
Army Group South and to rally the Ostheer to the concept of 'total war', which Goebbels proclaimed to the German people in an inflammatory speech at the Berlin Sports Palace the next day. The outcome pretext was to oversee the unleashing of a counterstroke by
of a crucial battle depends on you,' Hitler wrote
from the Reich's
frontiers the fate of
German homeland
in
an order of the day. 'A thousand miles
Germany's present and future
is
in the balance.
.
.
.
Our youth are manning the antiaircraft defences around Germany's cities and workplaces. More and more divisions are on their way. Weapons unique and hitherto unknown are on the way to your front. That is why I have flown to you, to exhaust every means of alleviating your defensive battle and to The
entire
has been mobilised.
.
.
.
.
convert
it
into ultimate victory.' In reality the counterstroke
was not
but Manstein's. Not only had he extracted permission to launch urgent
visit
to
striking force -
it
Hitler's
from
.
.
conception
Hitler during an
He had also found the necessary armoured make Popov's look insignificant - by concentrating all under his reconstituted Fourth Panzer Army and positioning
Rastenburg on 6 February. of
a
strength to
available Panzer reserves
it
alongside the First Panzer Army, in the neck of ground between the Donetz and the
way
into the
did to cut off Army
Group A
Dnieper across which Vatutin's South-West Front was seeking to break
German
So dangerous was Vatutin's manoeuvre, threatening in its
its
rear.
as
it
bridgehead on the Asiatic shore of the Sea of Azov, that Hitler had actually granted
permission for troops to be
airlifted
from
it
to join Manstein.
Over 100,000 were
to
be sent
in that
way; but before they or any of the divisions alerted in the west arrived Manstein had
struck.
On
20 February his two Panzer armies
Popov's Front Mobile Group, fifty
miles away.
changed
still
mounted convergent
The Russian higher command
situation.
It
attacks
on the
advancing to the crossings over the Dnieper failed altogether to
urged Popov onward and on
21
flanks of less
February the General Staff even
ordered Malinovsky's Southern Front on Vatutin's flank to join more actively offensive: 'Vatutin's troops are speeding
on
at
an extraordinary pace
461
than
grasp the gravity of the
.
.
.
the hold-up
in
the
on
his
THE WAR
left is
due
IN
THE EAST
to the absence of active operations
already threatened with encirclement, had
1943-1945
on the
begun
to
part of your front.' In fact
By 24 February, when despite reinforcements he had only
tracks.
German
tanks were operating against his
left
fifty
tanks
much
of the
rest
left,
over 400
when German
flank alone. By 28 February,
tanks reached the banks of the Donetz, his group and
West Front were surrounded, and such
Popov was
run out of fuel and was stopped in his
of Vatutin's South-
units as escaped did so only because the river
was
frozen.
still
Manstein renews the The
collapse of Popov's offensive
now
offensive
allowed Manstein to unleash the second phase of
Army had now begun
of Kharkov. The Fourth Panzer
his plan, for the recapture
to receive
the reinforcements sent from the west, including the SS Totenkopf Division (originally
formed from concentration camp guards) which went SS Panzer Corps. Their loss of
to join Leibstandarte
and Das
Reich in
I
Kharkov the previous month rankled savagely with these
who, in formidable strength, opened their attack to retake the city on March the northern suburbs were the scene of savage fighting, and two the city was effectively surrounded, together with numbers of Soviet units to sustain the defence. Now the Germans threatened the Red Army's centre
ideological warriors 7 March. By 10
days later struggling
with
envelopment
encirclement of Hitler's.
from which
spot
the
exactly
at
the)'
had hoped
to
begin the
So dangerous did the situation suddenly appear to the Stavka that
rather than send reinforcements to help their beleaguered formations
Kharkov they
at
rushed them instead to the neighbouring Voronezh Front, south of Kursk, where they
succeeded
in
holding
be called the Kursk
a sector
salient.
which was
to
become
the southern face of what
With the commitment of these troops
than the offensive, the Soviet spring offensive of 1943 could be seen to have
which followed
victor)
the Battle of
in
Moscow the year commander
before.
to
the
Dnieper and
at
the height of the
the
to
spring
Red Army's there
rasputitsa
are
failed, like that
Some
Russians had
of the Voronezh Front, had
already foreseen that outcome. As Golikov, the signalled to a subordinate
would soon
to the defensive rather
effort:
There
are 200-230 miles
30-35 days. Draw your
own
conclusions.'
The
rasputitsa,
the twice-yearly wet season caused by the
autum
rains
and the spring
thaw, which turns the dirt roads to quagmires and the surrounding steppe to swamp, had
worked
to
Germany's disadvantage
into the Ukraine
and on
Stalingrad.
in 1941
and
Now
brought
it
1942, delaying the
the Ostheer's reserves concentrated in the south, the
route to Leningrad and to
Mud, armour and
move
against the force isolated since the Battle of
endless spaces, three constant factors in the spring
fought on the Eastern Front.
advance on Moscow,
welcome breathing space. With all Red Army was able to reopen a land a
A German
Stug
III
462
self-propelled
Moscow
and autumn campaigns
gun negotiates
the mire.
in
THE WAR
THE EAST
IN"
1943-1945
Demyansk pocket - though not to prevent its escape. It was also able sufficient pressure on the Vyazma salient west of Moscow to persuade Hitler
the northern sustain
sanction an uncharacteristic withdrawal to
a
to to
short front, prepared in advance and called
the 'Buffalo Line'. However, while the wet season lasted, and despite the
had
on
inflicted
250,000 million
major
the
enemy
- 185,000
among
the Italians, 140,000
immense losses it among the Hungarians,
among the Romanians and, by the Wehrmacht's own reckoning, nearly half a among the Germans - it could not find the strength to resume the offensive on any
sector.
Operation CitadeJDespite the hair's breadth by which the Ostheer had escaped disaster on the southern front
during the Stalingrad winter, Hitler and his generals were nevertheless turning to
resumption of the offensive defeat. 'The real struggle
is
and
moment
He
1943.
that until the
and the Stavka
knew
that
a
Red Army was admitting
that the
only beginning', Stalin warned in his message to his soldiers
Red Arm) Day, 23 February strength,
precisely the
at
had exhausted
it
its
on
current
awaited donations of Lend-Lease aid and output from the
relocated Urals factories had been received, until the next inflow of young conscripts and
older 'comb-outs' had been trained, Russia could not form the reserve of force which
would
German
allow her generals to go over to the attack. The
safely
Ostheer a breathing space,
it
must
calculation
was
and the Red Army's exhaustion had granted the
precisely contrary. Because the rasputitsa
soon
attack as
as possible, or suffer the
consequences of
inactivity.
The question was: where?
It
generals were largely to settle
was an
issue which, for the last time during the war, the
between themselves.
confidence, his sense of
Hitler's
personal credibility in the eyes of his commanders, had been so shaken by the outcome of his insistence
on holding
dictate strategic
Stalingrad as a 'fortress' that he
terms to his subordinates. During his
had temporarily
visit
lost the will to
to Manstein's headquarters
on
17-19 February, before the Kharkov counterstroke, he had listened to a review of the
opportunities which might flow from
Group
A), Jodl, Zeitzler, the
ranging than any he permitted three-day meeting, conducted decisively to
quash
a typically
its
new arm) on home
at
success.
chief of
The discussion between Kleist (Army and Manstein was far more free-
staff,
territory at Rastenburg.
Towards the end of the
times to the sound of Russian gunfire, he had intervened
bold proposition by Manstein for
a 'one step
backward, two
manoeuvre north of the Crimea, since it entailed the temporary surrender of ground, something to which he was temperamentally opposed. The alternative
steps forward'
proposition, for a concentric attack
but
left
to Zeitzler
During the
on the developing
and the generals of the
lull
imposed by the
salient
of Kursk, he did not
reject
Ostheer to put into executive form.
rasputitsa in
March and
April, the longest the soldiers
of both sides on the Eastern Front were to enjoy throughout the war, the
464
staffs
of both the
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
German and
the
Red armies busied themselves with
which summer must
detailed planning for the great battle
bring, while their overlords, in an
uncanny convergence of mutual
doubt, sought to modify their proposals, even to temporise with the inevitability of action.
seemed unable
Stalin
whole
Soviet front
to follow the logic
of his generals' strategic analysis, believing that the
was threatened but
argued for using available strength
Moscow, and
particularly the sector opposite
in a 'spoiling' attack
which would
at least
ensure that
Germans did not win a third summer victory in 1943. In a meeting with commanders on 12 April he agreed that the construction of deep defences in
the
salient
should be given
priority, but also insisted that
main axes of advance open such
now
to the
Germans.
that reserves
provide
to
April, 'An offensive
a
a
masse
up
own
its
It
his tank forces
would be
though committed
Although on
15 April
still
that
account. As
better
if
we
Zhukov put
grind
all
his
to
Kursk but
Red Army might
the
down
at
it
to Stalin
on
3
8
forestalling the
the
reserves,
enemy
in
our
go over to
a
main concentrations.' concept of an attack on the Kursk
oddly indecisive about the form of the
attack.
he signed the order committing Army Groups South and Centre
an attack on the Kursk bulge on
proposed
with which
in principle to the
was changeable about date and
salient,
who had concluded
and then, introducing fresh
general offensive to pulverise once and for
the
attack, that the correct Soviet
our troops in the near future aimed
part of
all
possible to absorb the Panzer offensive, but
manoeuvre
de
counterstroke on
on the
consider to be pointless.
defences, break
Hitler,
would
accumulated by the Stavka should not be committed exclusively
subsequently unleash
I
Ostheer
fortify that front as strongly as
be apportioned
enemy
defences be constructed on
highly experienced generals as Vatutin and Zhukov,
response was to
the Kursk
outlook diverged from the opinion of
Stalin's
Kursk was certainly the sector on which the
his senior
to
May, he almost immediately had second thoughts and
to Zeitzler that the attack
be launched against the nose of the
salient.
suggestion was in defiance of all military orthodoxy - which holds that troops in
The
a salient
frontally - and Zeitzler was able to talk him out Then Model, who was to command one of the two armies consigned to the convergent attacks, persuaded him that the observed strength of the Russian defences would require more time for penetration than the plan allowed unless he got extra tanks. Hitler accordingly approved a postponement of some days while Guderian, his new
must always be cut off rather than attacked of
it
on
21 April.
Inspector of Panzer Troops, found the extra tanks. With the involvement of Guderian (by title
a
mere administrator)
in operational planning, delays
was well informed about both the quantity and the it
was
Hitler
purpose to
his a
raise
Germany's production
to
match
it.
On
2
May he
and
outlined to
made postponement look advisable. He month on a rising scale, ten times Germany's including the new Panther Mark V and the 'family'
schedule of tank deliveries which
promised not only more tanks - over 1000 annual output in 1939 - but better tanks,
of
began to lengthen. Guderian
quality of Soviet tank production,
88-mm
invincible
gun-carriers,
on the
a
Hornets, Tigers and Ferdinands, which were believed to be
battlefield; but
he - not Speer - warned
465
that the Panther,
on which
THE WAR
counted heavily
Hitler
May,
postponed the Kursk
of Kursk, had not yet shed development
for the success
now condenamed
attack,
Soviet industry, however,
'bugs'.
On 4
Munich, Hitler accordingly
to turn out tanks at twice the
now
outstanding T-34 was
producing heavier models,
85-mm
gun, the first mark of the super-heavy Joseph Stalin, 122-mm gun, and various equivalents of the turretless Germans favoured. Russian production of anti-tank weapons was
which would eventually mount guns which the
at
Citadel, until mid-June.
was not only continuing
rate but in addition to the
including the KV-85, with an
assault
THE EAST 194M945
another conference with his leading generals
after yet
German
IN
a
even more impressive. Over 200 reserve anti-tank regiments, equipped with powerful
76-mm
guns, had been formed, while 21,000 lighter anti-tank guns had been issued to
summer of
'By the
infantry units.
1943',
Professor John Erickson judges, 'the Soviet
infantryman [was] equipped as no other for anti-tank
anti-armoured resources the Red is
god of war,'
the
Stalin
had
fighting.'
Army now had enormous
said.
As well
armoured and
as
quantities of artillery. 'Artillery
had always been the leading arm of Russian armies,
It
and by the summer of 1943 the Red Army's
artillery
was the strongest
in the world, in
both
and quantity of equipment. During 1942 whole divisions of artillery had been formed - an entirely novel military concept - and equipped with the new 152-mm and quality
203-mm
They included four
guns.
revolutionary single salvo.
weapon each
divisions
of Katyusha rocket-launchers; with
The Katyusha, which the Germans were
battlefront, dazing
who were
tremendous
not directly disabled by
its
became one of the
hastily to copy,
most feared weapons of the eastern
and disorientating infantrymen
blast effect.
re-equipment of the Red Army, made possible by the regeneration of
This
production
in the factories transported
eastward behind the Urals during the terrible
Barbarossa months, spelt great danger to the the appreciation
made by
the Stavka
into the Kursk salient during April
rocket launchers.
was mobilised mines
this
division could fire 3840 projectiles weighing 230 tons in a
The
civilian
to dig
in a density
on
More ominously,
Ostheer.
12 April,
huge
in
accordance with
quantities of material
were poured
and May, including 10,000 guns, anti-tank guns and
population of the salient - about 60 by 120 miles
in area
entrenchments and anti-tank ditches, while army engineers
of over 3000 to each kilometre of
front.
The troops defending
Centre Front (Rokossovsky) and the Voronezh Front (Vatutin),
laid
laid
it,
out their
-
the
own
defensive positions, each consisting of a forward line three miles deep and two rearward positions. Eventually, with 300,000 civilians labouring in the rear, the
contain eight defensive
been seen on
lines,
a battlefield,
Hitler's prevarication
about the out, like
feasibility
echeloned
to a
not even on the Western Front
over choosing
a date for
it
was
to
had ever
the height of trench warfare.
of the operation - and those of commanders committed to carrying
Model of the Ninth Army. Model had at
at
salient
like
Operation Citadel reflected his doubts
originally
days for his armour to penetrate the northern face of the arrived
Kursk
depth of 100 miles. Nothing
it
asked for the plan to allow two
salient.
On
27 April, however, he
Berchtesgaden, where Hitler was holidaying from the forest dankness of
466
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
Rastenburg, with tanks and
more
air
photographs of the Russian defences
'When Model
time.
need three days -
that
is
when
got cold
I
at
Kursk and
a
Cold
feet.'
feet or not, Hitler
more
request for
told me,' Hitler recalled a year later, 'that
he would
took no decisive
action to cancel Citadel. His self-confidence remained weakened, while Zeitzler's was strong.
The
infantry
fighting
World War was bent on doing
subaltern of the First
'something' during 1943, and for him that meant fighting a battle on the Eastern Front, his sole area of responsibility. Hitler also agreed that
Army was
something had
be done,
to
if
Red
the
not to grow unchecked in strength for a major offensive in 1944. However,
besides the persisting depression caused by Stalingrad, he had other things
on
his
mind:
not only the worsening situation in Tunisia, ended by the surrender of the German-Italian
army
in
May, but the increasingly precarious position of Mussolini, the uncertainty over
where the crisis in
Allies
would
strike
Germany, where the
making heavier and deeper
next in the Mediterranean, and the growing
civil
defence
British
Bomber Command and
strikes
each week. Three times during June he postponed
the
US Army
Air Force
were
on 6 June, when Guderian demanded more time to accumulate tank and again on 25 June, when Model raised more objections. Finally on 29 June he announced that he would return to Rastenburg and that Citadel would begin on S July. As he explained to his staff when he arrived on July, 'The Russians are biding Citadel again:
reserves,
on
18 June,
1
their time.
They
are using their time replenishing for the winter.
there will be fresh crises. ... So
we have
got to
disrupt
We
must not allow
that or
them.'
The demand for 'disruption' was a far cry from the trumpet call to Blitzkrieg uttered in summers of 1941 and 1942. It revealed how much Hitler had narrowed his horizons during the two years of the Russian war, how strong the Red Army remained despite the devastation he had inflicted on it and how weakened the Ostheer was by the relentless programme of offensives and 'standfasts' to which he had committed it in the previous two years. The Red Army numbered 6.5 million at the beginning of July 1943, an actual
the
increase since the outbreak of the war, despite the loss of over 3 million
men
as prisoners
alone; the Ostheer, by contrast, fielded 3,100,000, a net decrease of 200,000 since 22 June 1941.
The number of
men and equipment Army
its
divisions
was
static at
about
180, but
all
establishments, of both
(except in the favoured SS divisions), were below strength. In the
divisional establishments
divisions equalled the
were
German, was
also low, about 5000 rising,
men
each, but the
and was complemented by
'non-divisional' units, including the specialised artillery formations.
German army was dependent needs, the Russians were including vast
exclusively
now
numbers of
vital
Red
number of its
large
numbers of
Moreover, while the
on the output of home industry
to supply
its
the beneficiaries of a growing tide of Lend-Lease aid,
motor supply
vehicles;
no
less
than 183,000
modern
American trucks had arrived by mid-1943 alone. Meanwhile war was destroying the Ostheer's
means of
transport, the horse; by the spring of 1942
million horses, half those with
which
it
it
had
lost a
quarter of a
had entered Russia, and losses had continued
equivalent rate ever since.
467
at
an
THE WAR
The
issue
IN"
THE EAST
1943-1945
of manoeuvre, however, was not central to Citadel, where battering power
German
alone was to count.
battering
power was
considerable.
It
was distributed between
Model's Ninth Army, which was to attack the northern face of the Kursk
and
salient,
Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army, which was to attack the southern. Together they disposed of
some 2700 a
tanks supported by 1800
aircraft,
the largest concentration of force against such
confined area yet seen on the Eastern Front. Model controlled eight Panzer and
Panzergrenadier divisions, with seven infantry divisions in support, Hoth eleven Panzer,
one Panzergrenadier and seven and Hoth were
infantry divisions.
of the Kursk
to cut into the 'neck'
The plan was
straightforward.
Model
between Orel and Kharkov,
salient,
join
hands, and then envelop and destroy Vatutin's and Rokossovsky's sixty divisions.
Into the furnace The
attack
began
apparently given
at
4.30
him
am on
5 Jul)', a date
of which
Stalin's
warning. Erickson has described the
'Lucy ring' in Switzerland had battle:
Within twelve hours both sides were furiously stoking the great glowing furnace of
The armour continued
the battle for Kursk.
anything seen anywhere else in the war. escalation with grim,
Soviet
numbed
formidable massing of
mass and move on
German commanders
satisfaction:
while the Soviet
aircraft,
to
German
.
tanks,
all
.
officers .
unlike
a scale
commands watched
Both
fiery
this
had never seen so
many
had never before seen such
blotched in their green and yellow
camouflage. These were tank armadas on the move, coming on in great squadrons of 100 and 200 machines or more, a score of Tigers and Ferdinand assault guns in the first
screened by the armour.
main defensive
fields,
Now
tanks in the second and then the infantry
that the Soviet tank armies
were moving up
almost 4000 Soviet tanks and nearly 3000
guns were being steadily drawn into
assault after
medium
echelon, groups of 50-60
this gigantic battle,
German
into the
tanks and
which roared on hour
hour, leaving ever greater heaps of the dead and the dying, clumps of blazing or
disabled armour, shattered personnel carriers and lorries, and thickening columns of
smoke
coiling over the steppe.
Rokossovsky counter-attacked Model on 6
on the
first
day, but his troops
July the 18th, 19th,
were
rolled back
start-line,
from which they would be able
Kursk from the north and dominate Soviet
their prize.
recapture the ground lost divisions.
2nd and 20th Panzer Divisions approached the high ground
hovatka, thirty miles from the
Soviet defenders
July, trying to
by the advancing German
were wiped
lines
to
look
of communication within the
out, but reserves arrived just in time to
On
at
7
Olk-
down on
salient.
The
deny the Germans
Meanwhile on the southern sector Hoth, who had three SS Panzer divisions Leibstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf, as well as the 3rd and 11th Panzer Divi-
under command,
468
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
was
sions and the powerful GrossdeutschJand Panzergrenadier Division, progress. Vatutin contemplated launching a counter-attack
on 6
July but, in
Germans deployed, decided to remain on the defensive. By 'fist' had smashed through the Soviet defensive crust
strength the
making dogged
also
view of the
the evening of 7 to within twelve
July Hoth's Panzer
The junction of the northern and
miles of Oboyan, which defended Kursk from the south.
now seemed
southern Panzer thrusts, on which the logic of Citadel depended,
near to
realisation.
The Russian defences, however, were proving extremely whole
were
anti-tank batteries
organised as single units, which discharged concentrated salvoes of shot
German
The
costly to penetrate.
was crisscrossed by earthworks, while the Soviet
front
at
single tanks in
Hoth was obliged to bring up his armoured reserve, the 10th and SS Viking Divisions, to sustain progress on the southern sector, but the pace of advance began to slow none the less. Moreover, Zhukov and Vasilevsky, who assumed direct control of the battle from Stalin and the Stavka on 11 July, were now about to unleash the Soviet reserves in a general counter-attack. During 11 July they committed the Bryansk Front (Popov), on Rokossovsky's right, to a drive into Model's flank. More importantly, on 12 July they brought forward the tank reserves held under Konev's Steppe the
spearheads. During 10 July
Front to engage Hoth's Fourth Panzer cipitate
Army south of
Kursk. This decision was to pre-
perhaps the greatest tank battle of the Second World War. Erickson writes:
area of Prokhorovka
two
great bodies of armour, Soviet
.
.
.
mustered some 600 and 300 tanks respectively; Rotmistrov's about 100 Tigers.' The battle blazed
fielding
at
all
whose
Tigers stood
immobile
Germans
day
point-blank range as the Soviet T-34s and a few KVs raced into the
tion,
the
huge
Guards Army
Fifth
[from Konev's reserve] just under 900 tanks - approximate parity, except that the
were
a
The two groups of German
swirling tank battle with well over a thousand tanks in action.
armour
'In
and German, rushed into
once
to deliver their fire;
at
German forma-
close range with
armour ammunition would explode, hurling tur-
scores of machines churning about in individual engagements, front and side
was more rets
the
easily penetrated,
when
the tank
yards away from the shattered hulls or sending
coming of the deep
gunfire slackened
night,
when thunderclouds
and the tanks slewed
up
great spurts
piled
to a halt. Silence
fell
and the dead, over which the lightning flickered and the Prokhorovskoe poboische, the 'slaughter at
more
than 300
steppe
.
.
.
German
more than
tanks
of
up over the
on
rain
fire.
.
.
With
the tanks, the guns
began
to rustle.
The
Prokhorovka', was momentarily done, with
(among them 70
Tigers)
half the Soviet Fifth Guards
.
.
.
lying
Tank Army
wrecked on the
lay shattered in the
same
area.
attack
from the south and west, however, had been held. At Oboyan the
been
.
battlefield, the
Both sides had taken and delivered
halted.
469
fearful
punishment. The German attack
had
"
OPERATION CITADEL EASTERN FRONT SUMMER
# Kirov
1943
Fiftieth
Army
Western Front (Sokolovsky) Eleventh Guards
Leningrad
Army Belev
« Zhukovka
MOSCOW •
Vyazma Bryan
BLACK SEA
THE GERMAN PLAN
Army Group South
G.id
Key
Kotel'vt
Limit of
German advances
before Russian offensives
German
counter-attacks
~
Front
• • •
23
—
German withdrawals Russian offensives
Front
line
on
12 July
on
Fifty-Seventh
19 July
Army
July
August
5 1
line
1
August
^— -—
18
^^^^~
23 August
South-Western Front
August
(Malinovsky)
470
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
It
was not only on Hoth's southern sector
that
Operation Citadel
failed to
the attack
on Kursk from
the north [by Model's Ninth Army]
Rokossovsky had considerable reserves
armoured
on
reserve
suaded him
in hand.'
del flickered
on
of the Kursk
been very
fleet
used
in the battle
I
will
heed the
Manstein and Kluge
only he were given the
if
and they had been proved wrong.
had gone
last
per-
unparalleled depth and
salient, despite their
assault,
Cita-
to the Russians, if at terrible cost;
was gone. The cost
to the
and 19th Panzer Divisions,
high: the 3rd, 17th
for
Germans, however,
now had
example,
hundred tanks between them, instead of the 450 with which they began. Moreover,
a
German
did not approach the thousand per tanks than that
had been
lost
Panzers having simply broken reserve
on which
sipated
and could not be
industry
month
on
tank output, for
beyond the
losses.
in 1944, far greater
Guderian's - and Speer's -
for 1943;
down on
the battlefield. As a result, the central
been able
efforts,
averaged only 330.
it
several days during Citadel, 160 out of Fourth
rebuilt out
Urals,
all
month scheduled
the Ostheer had always thitherto
replacement of normal
to call in a crisis
More
Army's
armoured
was
now
dis-
of current production, which was committed to the
The Red Army, thanks
was producing tanks than the rate
at
burgeoning output of heavy
to the
at a rate
which would approach 2500
which tanks were
lost,
and so
a
sufficient to in-
complement of armoured formations. The main significance of Kursk, therewas that it deprived Germany of the means to seize the initiative in the future and so,
crease
by
time
would have none of it. His generals had
until 15 July but the decision
these were strategic losses.
fore,
cut off the salient,
be penetrated by armoured
over half their tank
only
still
the Eastern Front. Hitler
that the defences
strength, could
also
and
also,
decide the future of the operation, and he ordered Citadel to be closed down.
13 July to
Manstein was sure that he could
had
objec-
its
had been halted
No one was readier to admit defeat than Hitler. 'That's the last advice of my General Staff,' he told his adjutants after a meeting with on
reach
'On the broad slopes of the Sredne-Russki heights on Rokossovsky's Central Front
tives.
its
net
default, transferred
The Russian
it
to the Soviet
Union.
exploitation of the Kursk victory was
at first
clumsy and
tentative.
A
Russian attack towards Orel, north of the Kursk salient, involved Soviet armour in a heavy battle
with four Panzer divisions which tried to block
A
suffered losses. cently arrived
its
advance, although the Germans
simultaneous drive on Belgorod, south of the
salient,
organised by
commander, Tolbukhin, was counter-attacked and the troops committed on 1 August. However, these Russian attacks, by drawing off Kluge's and
forced to retire
The
Battle of Kursk, July 1943.
prospect offensive
Kursk
made
aimed
'a
a re-
his
stomach turn
Contemplating over.
this titanic battle,
Codenamed
Citadel, this
Hitler confessed that the
was
the last great
at regaining the initiative after the disaster at Stalingrad.
decisive defeat'.
The armoured
divisions
committed
action for a considerable time.
471
lo the battle
German
Guderian considered remained
unfit for
THE WAR
THE EAST
IN
1943-1945
Manstein's remaining reserves, had exposed Kharkov to a renewed offensive which Stalin
had approved on 22
July.
was launched on
It
German
infantry division, the 167th,
artillery
of the Soviet Sixth Guards
when
several hours,
On
5 August
sector
Army which
first
August, with devastating
3
Army belonging
led directly
effect.
bombardment by
subjected to
A
single
the massed
Voronezh Front. After column broke through. August had opened up a gap on the flank of the to the crossings of the Dnieper a hundred miles
had been pulverised,
took Belgorod and by 8
it
Fourth Panzer
its
was
to Vatutin's
a Russian tank
away.
Manstein divisions
now
informed Hitler
from the west or
he must either receive
that
Donetz
yield the
sources which were so valuable to the
sponded
to this
German and
from being able
which was increasingly under
now conceded
from Russia
However
threat.
Azov northward of the it
rivers
Zaporozhe,
to
Army Group
Dnieper and Desna
reached the
effort.
Hitler re-
was not
in
he was
view of the deepening
this line,
to retreat, to
sources to construct
it
via
It
withdrawing
crisis in
the east,
was
to run
Ostheer
from the shore of the Sea of
South's headquarters, and then along the
Kiev and Chernigov, north to Pskov and Lake Pei-
were
which was
begin
at
also to
once. In
lacking, while the
be
fact
a 'stop' position
in the
Kursk
'bulge'.
During the
re-
Red Army would not concede the time
battle the
tanks and 10,000 guns.
472
behind which
both the manpower and the
necessary to undertake the work. Mounting simultaneous drives
Russian armour
actually
to Italy to protect his position there
Baltic at Narva.
He ordered work on the Ostheer
the Russian war
match the West Wall along the Rhine, behind which the
could defend the territory captured in 1941-2.
until
reinforcement of twenty
the desirability (which hitherto he had consistently rejected) of con-
structing an 'East Wall' to
pus
a
the mineral and industrial re-
to offer reinforcements,
divisions, including the elite Leibstandarte,
lines
all
ultimatum not by conceding one or the other condition but by proposing
a third option. Far
he
basin, with
Red
Army
all
along the southern
deployed some
2600
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OE WESTERN RUSSIA
Red Army took Kharkov, the most fought-over city in the Soviet to remain in Russian hands thereafter) and crossed the Donetz the Mius at the same time. These drives threatened to envelop
sector of the front, the
Union, on 23 August
and
its
Kleist's
was
(it
short tributary
Army Group
A,
holding
still
its
bridgehead beyond the Crimea, and compromised
the position of the Sixth Army, the southernmost formation of Manstein's
South, above the Crimea south. But
Army Group
On
itself.
31
Centre's defences had
and the whole lower sector of the
Army Group
August Hitler sanctioned further withdrawals in the
now
Ostheer's front
been penetrated
also
in three places,
was crumbling under the weight of the
Red Army's might. By 8 September the Russian vanguard was within thirty miles of the Dnieper and by 14 September was threatening Kiev. Kluge's Army Group Centre was unable to sustain 'East Wall',
in
Army Group
of the
its
defence of the Desna, designated only
month
a
and on the same day Sokolovsky's West Front began
the Dnieper, Sozh and Pronya
came too
but the instruction
for the river positions
Red Army had
of the
Smolensk
Centre's sector, focus of the great encirclement battle of 1941 in the heyday
Russian triumphs. Next day Hitler gave permission for
Ostheer's
earlier as part
a drive against
five
rivers,
late to
a retreat to
roughly that reached in the great
permit an ordered withdrawal.
which many German formations
bridgeheads over the Dnieper -
the line of
of July
developed into
1941;
a race
so that by 30 September the
lost,
some
It
Blitzkrieg
seized by parachute assault - in-
cluding a large lodgement to the immediate south of the Pripet Marshes.
For the
was
Ostheer this
Dnieper, with
its
a disastrous
outcome of
fighting, since the
high western scarp slope, was the strongest defensive position in south-
ern Russia. During
five
weeks of continuous combat
it
had been forced back 150 miles
along a 650-mile front and, although Hitler had decreed that earth' retreat, in
summer's
the
which
factories,
should conduct
it
a
'scorched
mines, power stations, collective farms and railways were
destroyed, his demolition teams had not been able to obliterate the road network along
which the Red Army made had made no progress
formed
at all.
way forward. Moreover, The 'East Wall' remained a
its
the fortification he line
had decreed
on the map, nowhere
trans-
into earthworks, minefields or obstacle belts.
—
The growing strength of
the
Red
Army
—
summer fighting had been a triumph. It had regained down for by Stalin and the Stavka in the aftermath of the Kursk and though its human losses and material expenditures continued to run at a high
For the Red Army, by contrast, the all
the objectives laid
victory rate
July
-
it had expended the astonishing total of 42 million rounds of artillery ammunition in and August - its strength and therefore its offensive capabilities continued to grow. By
October
its
independent
two
it
strength rifle
stood
at
126
rifle
corps
(of
two
to
three
divisions
each),
72
divisions, five tank armies (of three to five divisions), 24 tank corps (of
to three divisions), 13
mechanised corps (of two
to three divisions), 80 tank brigades,
106 independent tank regiments, and a vast array of artillery formations - 6 artillery corps,
473
THE WAR
26
fronts
its
became
Fronts
the
brigades and 7
artillery
Red Army had made, were now renamed. The Voronezh, Steppe, South-West and South
divisions of Katyusha rocket-launchers.
moreover,
1943-1945
of self-propelled guns, 20
divisions, 43 regiments
artillery
THE EAST
IN
First,
To mark
the advances the
Second, Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts in the
week of
first
October, as they paused to regroup for the next stage of their offensive. Those to their
north would shortly be
Second
Winter was
its
favoured time for attack.
was more accustomed and
for
The German infantryman's
were
The Red Arm) man, shod
called.
was
First
and
season to which the Russian soldier
a
equipped than
better
his
feet froze in his 'diceboxes', as the
of which
in felt boots,
to Soviet specifications in the
under Lend-Lease arrangements,
It
which he was
counterpart.
manufactured
and Second White Russian and the
retitled the First
The Red Army was on the march.
Baltic Fronts.
United
resisted
million pairs were
during the war and shipped back
States
he
frostbite;
13
German
army boots
also
knew
the tricks,
learned
by the Wehrmacht, of keeping motor vehicles running at sub-zero temperatures - mixing petrol with lubricating oil was one of them - and of caring for draught animals painfully
when
frost
at last
prepared to admit
formed
icicles
round
their nostrils.
that victory
Not
until this third winter,
was not imminent, did the
supplies of cold-weather clothing (in the
first
men had
winter
when
Hitler
Ostheer receive
was
adequate
stuffed their uniforms with
torn-up newspaper); Soviet soldiers received sheepskins and furs as normal issue.
As the
first
frosts
attacks across the
of winter descended, the newly
material did not suffice for an offensive along the
months
it
was
then on the
to proceed by
left
a
whole
sequence of advances,
the Ostheer was the Seventeenth Arm),
first
front, so for the
next eighteen
on the right or southern sector,
autumn manoeuvre was to be the first By far the most vulnerable formation in
itself.
which occupied the Crimea and
its
approaches.
disproportionate importance to the possession of the Crimea, both
Hitler attached
because he had fought so hard to acquire obsessed by the belief that
When
Ukrainian fronts began their
or northern sector of the front; this
of its left-hand strokes. The target presented
oilfields.
named
lower Dnieper. The Red Army's recent accretion of numbers and
it
it
in the
summer of 1942 and because he was
provided the best point for
the Fourth Ukrainian Front (Tolbukhin)
aerial attack
opened
a
on
the Ploesti
major attack towards
it
on 27 October, his first thought was to request reinforcements from the Romanians, who he believed would share his perception of the developing danger; when the Romanian leader General Ion Antonescu refused to raise his stake in the Eastern Front, Hitler simply
decreed
that the
pressure
its
neck which
Seventeenth
Army must hold on and
fight
it
out.
Under heavy Soviet beyond the land
nearest neighbour, the Sixth Army, was quickly driven back links the
made from the 210,000 German
Crimea
Asiatic
to the
mainland (the Perekop isthmus), while landings were
shore on the Kerch peninsula. By 30
soldiers isolated in the Crimea; they
were
November not only were
also threatened with battle
on
the territory they were defending.
Meanwhile the other three Ukrainian
fronts
474
had gone over
to the offensive along the
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
Deep
lines of
exhaustion are etched on the face
of
in the Kiev salient in
whole length of the lower Dnieper, with
Army Group
a
German infantryman
during the fighting
December 1943.
results
which threatened the
flanks of Manstein's
The Third and Second Ukrainian Fronts first seized a large bridgehead near Krivoy Rog on Manstein's southern flank; then, on 3 November, the First Ukrainian South.
Front broke across the Dnieper below the Pripet to recapture Kiev, in the most spectacular reversal
of fortunes on the Eastern Front since the encirclement of Stalingrad.
During November the White Russian and
Baltic
Fronts also
of the Pripet, advancing from Bryansk to recapture Smolensk -
Army
in 1941
- and threaten Vitebsk. They were
475
now
moved
a place
into action north
of agony for the Red
mobile on Napoleon's route to
THE WAR
Moscow of the
of 1812, but
in the
IN
1943-1945
opposite direction, and giving Hitler cause to fear for the safety
and the approaches
Baltic states
THE EAST
Unseasonably mild weather
in
to the 1939 frontier
December, which
waterways and small lakes above the
of eastern Poland.
unfrozen the network of
left
temporarily spared the Ostheer from the
Pripet,
of defending the Smolensk-Minsk route westward across the upper Dnieper.
difficulty
However,
Hitler
had announced
in
Fuhrer Directive No.
imminently expected an Anglo-American invasion take responsibility for further
weakening
in the
51
of other theatres of war'.
defences'; the decision
its
meant
could no longer count on reinforcements from the quieter, so-called
Ostheer
- France,
Italy
and Scandinavia - but must
and such replacements
as the
'The vast extent of territory in the
'makes
fight
Home Army
battles
could
east',
possible for us to lose ground, even
it
its
with the strength
it
that the
OKW sectors had
available
find.
Hitler
on
he
that
west and that he could 'no longer
in the west, in favour
Indeed, he had 'therefore decided to reinforce
November)
(3
conceded
in
a large scale,
Fuhrer Directive No.
without
a fatal
51,
blow being
struck to the nervous system of German).' This admission implied that he might be ready to accept the submissions of his eastern marshals,
the
most
from
Manstein foremost among them,
that
way of fighting the Red Army was to employ a strategy of withdrawing before mounting a further attack. The implication was not to be borne out
profitable
territory
in practice.
During the winter of 1943—4 the Red Army came on
in
even greater strength
than before; but Hitler's reluctance to concede territory proved as fixed as ever - nowhere
more mines
so than at
Crimea
on
the southern front. Hitler not only clung to the
hope of
retaining the
Nikopol and Krivoy Rog but constantly emphasised the danger of allowing the
become
to
a Soviet air
obsession - argued that
its
base for attack on the Romanian
would encourage Turkey
loss
oilfields
to enter the
and -
a particular
war on the Allied
side.
— Manstein,
who had withdrawn
Hitler orders retreat his
command
—
post to Hitler's old
summer
headquarters
at
Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, travelled to Rastenburg twice during January to argue the case for
withdrawal, but on both occasions fought stoutly to hold
Ukrainian Fronts,
its
it
was refused. His Army Group South, moreover, by the First and Second
front together against relentless attacks
now under
Zhukov's direct command, and
Army Group A. Assaulted by Army Group A was nearly encircled
at first
gave ground less
slowly than Kleist's
the Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts
10 January,
in
its
efforts to retain
Rog, and after Hitler issued formal permission for a retreat which could be
avoided
it
transport. its
eventually escaped,
at
the expense of abandoning
most of
By mid-February, however, Army Group South was also
on
Nikopol and Krivoy
its
no longer
artillery
in severe straits;
and
two of
corps were encircled by Vatutin between the Dnieper and Vinnitsa west of Cherkassy
and were rescued on
17
February only by concentrating
476
all
the available
armour
to help
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
them break
This operation by the First and Fourth Panzer Armies, which had
out.
previously halted a menacing thrust by Konev's Second Ukrainian Front towards
caused Manstein's tanks to be wrongly placed to check Ukrainian Front south of Pripet. By frontier of Poland,
1
March
subsequent onset by the
a
commanded by
a
was menacing Lvov and was
than 100 miles from the Carpathians,
less
General Georg von
advance three Soviet
and by
assault
widened the narrow corridor connecting Leningrad
to the rest
was formally declared
at
an end on 26 January,
whirlwind
had moved
to the
in three places,
of Russia and liberated the
thousand days of siege; the blockade, which had starved
city after a
to death,
Baltic,
had breached Army Group North's defences
now
North,
15 January. In a
Volkhov and Second
fronts, the Leningrad,
19 January
was attacked on
Kiichler,
east.
Army Group
too on the northern front, where
crisis
First
the First Ukrainian Front had crossed the 1939
southern Europe's only mountain barrier against an invasion from the
There was
Uman,
when
a
million Leningraders
the city's entire artillery
twenty-four-gun salute. Behind Leningrad, however, ran the only length of the
fired a
projected 'East Wall' which had been brought to
a state
of completion. During the early
stages of the Leningrad offensive Hitler withheld permission for a withdrawal into
demanding should
that Kiichler,
fortify
whom
he reproached with having the strongest army
an intermediate position on the Luga
river.
As
it
became
clear that time
resources lacked, however, on 13 February he was obliged to sanction
from Narva
'Panther' line, as the East Wall along the line
was denominated. The
to
now been
reserve;
in
fed
in late
wrong. The Red
move
Hitler it
him would encourage
a
separate peace.
however, not
political.
Zeitzler, his
February that 18 million Russians of military
manpower
mid-October Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Foreign Armies contrast, that the
terms of manpower, equipment and the
which
military,
it
eliminated and that Stalin disposed of only 2 million in his
had warned, by
section,
remained
him with assurances
staff,
age had
Red Army would field
Army had now assembled
had allowed
about the front
OKH
as
the
prospect of abandoning the Crimea, caused
retreat, like the
Finland to open secret negotiations with the Russians for
chief of
a retreat to
and
Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov
acute political misgivings, since he believed - with reason - that
Hitler's current difficulties
it,
in the east,
to cast
in future 'surpass
of propaganda'. Gehlen was
exactly the sort of central
away
in the
East
Germany
in
right, Zeitzler
armoured reserve
cauldron of Kursk and was able to
opportunity for breakthrough offered. By mid-February the
Stavka had concentrated five of
its
On
tank armies opposite
Army Group
South; the sixth
them to attack at the beginning of March: the First Ukrainian Front was to open the offensive on 4 March; the Second and Third were to join it on 5 and 6 March. Between them they outnumbered the Germans opposite by two to one in infantry and more than two to one in armour. There was a last-minute impediment. Vatutin, commanding the First Ukrainian Front, fell into an ambush mounted by Ukrainian separatist partisans - combatants in a shadow war between Russians, Germans and Poles for local dominance over the Pripet arrived
at
the
end of the month.
18
February
477
Stalin issued
orders for
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
Army was now making
borderlands which the onset of the Red
He was
mortally
wounded on
his place
was immediately taken by Zhukov, who,
29 February.
1943-1945
irrelevant -
a grave loss to the Soviet
and was
command; but
high
as at Stalingrad, exercised direct control
opened with one of the devastating bombardments which had Red Army's operational methods ever since the enormous wartime expansion of the artillery. The First Ukrainian Front quickly opened a gap between the flanks of the First and Fourth Panzer Armies and rolled forward; the Fourth Panzer Army was encircled at Kamenets near Lake Ilmen and forced to break out. The Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts made even faster progress against the weaker forces of Army Group A. By 15 April the) had broken and crossed all three of the river lines on which the Germans might have hoped to stand, the Bug, the Dniester and the Prut, had of the coming offensive.
become
It
the signature of the
retaken Odessa and had
left
Army
the Seventeenth
isolated in the
Crimea
to their rear.
8 April moreover, Tolbukhin's Fourth Ukrainian Front suddenly enlarged
on
its
On
bridgehead
the Crimean Kerch peninsula, rolled forward, and surrounded the survivors of the
Seventeenth
had done
Army
in a small
pocket around Sevastopol, exactly
to the Russians in 1854
- and Rundstedt to the Red
French and
as the
Army
defenders of Sevastopol had held out heroically in the eight-month siege 1941 to July 1942. In early Ma)- 1944 Hitler
defence and soldiers
it
was evacuated
conceded
in four nights
that
he could not
between 4 and
British
The Russian from November
in 1941.
sustain the city's
8 May; over 30,000
German
were nevertheless abandoned within the perimeter and made captive when the
Russians liberated the city
The spring
offensive
on 9 May. on the southern
Between March and mid-April defensive positions, recovered,
it
front
had been
had advanced 165
if in
a
triumph
miles,
overrun
devastated condition,
gravel)
for the
Red Army.
three
potential
some of
the most
productive territory in the Soviet Union, deprived Hitler of his cherished strategic outpost
and
inflicted irreparable
damage on Army Groups
Army, the garrison of the Crimea, had disappeared
German and
allied
The debacle
on
Romanian
in the
the Ostheer there.
told
them
that
commander
On
A, South
and Centre. The Seventeenth
altogether, with the loss of over 100,000
troops.
south had already prompted Hitler to impose
30 March he had
summoned
what the southern front needed was
Manstein and 'a
new name,
a
cosmetic change
Kleist to Rastenburg, a
new
slogan and a
announced that they were relieved. Manstein was to be replaced by Model, the general who had stabilised the Leningrad front on the 'Panther Line', and Kleist by General Ferdinand Schorner, an even more fanatical devotee of the Nazi regime and a consummate promoter of his own reputation. Thus at a stroke the two great Panzer breakthrough experts were removed, to be replaced by men whose capacity
was
expert in defensive strategy' and
for the ruthless subjection
of their soldiers to orders and slavish obedience to
the Fuhrer's authority. Zeitzler, also a disciplinarian, retained
own
resignation
at
In a wholly
the news. Hitler refused
empty
it,
enough
integrity to offer his
with the warning, 'A general cannot
gesture, Hitler also ordered a few days later that
478
resign'.
Army Groups
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
A were
South and
to
be renamed North and South Ukraine respectively,
stated determination to recapture that territory, of
possession. However, not only did he lack the
up
find the reserves to shore threat of
seaborne invasion in France and the it
was
Stalin
who
means
to
mount any
a defensive battle; in the spring
the east
reality
in
token of
which none now remained
his
in his
offensive or even to
of 1944 he was faced with the
of an Allied breakthrough
retained the strategic initiative and
in Italy. In
who, on the heels of
his
Ukrainian triumph, was planning a further offensive which would clear the Ostheer from the soil of Russia once and for
During May General
Stalin
all.
commissioned two of
his senior staff officers,
on
possibilities.
Carpathians, Bulgaria,
M. Shtemenko,
of operations, and Timoshenko, representing the Stavka, to examine
Staff chief
each sector of the Soviet front - 2000 miles long between the report
S.
despite
Baltic
and Black Seas - and
Their analysis was as follows: to persist in the advance towards the the
political
advantages of heightening the threat to Romania,
it would lengthen the To advance from Leningrad down the Baltic coast but not the German heartland, and would also risk a
Hungary and ultimately Yugoslavia, was dangerous because
flank presented to
would menace
Army Group
East
Prussia
Centre.
Army Group Centre. By elimination, therefore, the desirable strategy was Army Group Centre itself, which still occupied the most important sector of
counterstroke by to
wipe out
historically Russian territory Berlin.
To do so would
division of the
and
also
guarded the route to Warsaw, on the high road to
require organisational changes, notably the reinforcement and
White Russian and
Army's new-found
ability
redeployment was
feasible.
Baltic
Fronts which opposed
to concentrate strength rapidly
it.
However, given the Red
on an
altered axis, such a
Operation Bagration During April the 'western' theatre of operations was reorganised. The two White Russian
became three. New generals were appointed, and senior Zhukov - were nominated to supervisory roles. Tank reinforcements and artillery reserves were concentrated on the White Russian fronts. Diversionary moves were co-ordinated at the extreme southern and northern ends of the whole theatre of operations - the latter not merely diversionary, since a subsidiary component of the summer offensive was intended to be a surprise attack designed to drive
and
Baltic
Fronts
commanders -
each
Vasilevsky and
Finland out of the war. Finally, the
by the experienced Konev, was fronts to
mount
a
First
filled
Ukrainian Front, south of the Pripet,
commanded
out with tank armies drawn from the other Ukrainian
long-range encircling manoeuvre round the Pripet Marshes into the
Army Group North and eventually against that of Army Group Centre The operation was to be the most ambitious the Red Army had ever staged. All it lacked was a name; on 20 May, when Stalin received the detailed plan from the General
flank of Model's itself.
Staff,
he announced
that
it
would be
called Bagration, after the general mortally
479
wounded
THE WAR IN THE EAST
at
of
1943-194S
Borodino on the route between White Russia and Moscow during Napoleon's invasion 1812.
The
on Finland by the Leningrad Front began on 9 June and, though mounted
attack
only with marginal force, soon
consumed
On
the tiny Finnish army's reserves.
28 July the
Finnish President asked leave to transfer his office to the national leader,
Mannerheim, who to
be answered
the
at
Meanwhile
once began negotiations
at
Stalin
November he had
for a separate peace. His
Marshal
approaches were
end of August. had
opening of Bagration. At Tehran the previous
set a date for the
assured Churchill and Roosevelt that the operation would be timed to
coincide with D-Day. The date he chose was 22 June, the third anniversary of Hitler's
unprovoked and
surprise attack
on the Soviet Union. Group Centre's
In the three preceding nights the
Russian partisan groups based in Arm)-
demolition charges on the
were exploded on
19,
rail
which supplied
lines
OKH
20 and 21 June. Both
possibility that these attacks supplied
rear area busied themselves laying
needs; over 40,000 charges
logistic
its
OKW
and
nevertheless discounted the
evidence of an offensive
in preparation. Since early
May
the Eastern Front had been quiet, and Gehlen's Foreign Armies East section insisted
that
such signs
as there
Group North Ukraine; had
Stavka
flights,
through
Luftwaffe,
took a contrary view;
it
too large for any attack to be effective, and stand behind At 4
when
Army Group
had established
4500
that
and
service
Soviet aircraft
am on
However, the Russian concentration was
was
it
now
too
22 June Bagration opened with a short
should not waste
late to
move ground
forces to
Centre's front.
moved
infantry reconnaissance units
assault
intelligence
against
force in the east, to undertake spoiling attacks.
which
own
its
Army Group Centre. Warning of this, which came to Hitler on alarmed him and prompted him to order IV Air Corps, his last intact air striking
were concentrated June,
were indicated the preparation of a new offensive against Army was what Gehlen called 'the Balkans solution', precisely what the
The
rejected.
reconnaissance
17
it
itself
on empty
positions.
The
bombardment, behind Zhukov was anxious that the
artillery
to the attack.
real offensive
developed next day,
heavier infantry waves supported by dense formations of aircraft pressed
main German defences, opening the way
for the tanks in their rear.
up
to the
They were the
vanguard of 166 divisions, supported by 2700 tanks and 1300 assault guns, against which
Army Group
Centre,
on an 800-mile
front,
could oppose only thirty-seven divisions,
weakly supported by armour.
The
first
German formation
to suffer disaster
southern sector of the army group's
front.
It
was the Ninth Army, holding the
was threatened with encirclement by the
and Second White Russian Fronts on the second day of the June, Hitler gave
it
permission to
fall
June,
it
was trapped
in a
suffer.
First
and when, on 26
back east of Minsk to the river Berezina (on which
Napoleon's Grand Army had been savaged Fourth Army, was the next to
offensive,
in 1812)
it
was too
late.
Its
neighbour, the
Although also granted permission to withdraw on 26
wider encirclement by the
480
First
and Third White Russian Fronts
KURSK AND THE RECAPTURE OF WESTERN RUSSIA
and devastated 200,000
men and
week of Bagration the three lost between them nearly Third Panzer Army were shadows,
of Minsk by 29 June. At the end of the
east
German armies which had stood
in
900 tanks; the Ninth
first
immediate path had
its
Army and
the
each with only three or four operational divisions, and the Fourth Hitler
now
was
France had secured
crises, great
and
saved the situation in northern
German
Norway
had been
in 1940,
Army Group
at
The
Allied landing in
Centre, also leaving
killed in
an
On
on 22 June.
position in the Arctic
air
crash
28 June he
who was emerging
replaced Field Marshal Ernst von Busch with the general
Model,
small.
foothold, Finland was crumbling, and his favourite general, Dietl,
a
while flying back to secure the
'fireman',
in full retreat.
confronted with the prospect of a vast gap opening on the Eastern Front,
and he was troubled simultaneously by other
who had
Army was
as
his
him Army Group North Ukraine
as a
source of reserves.
However, not even Model's was destroying the Fourth
his
Army back
intact to
could quell the conflagration which
firefighting abilities
army group. By 2
July he concluded
Minsk, since
it
was
now pinned
the Second White Russian Front had already crossed his efforts
on
that there
at
against the Berezina,
Lepel.
open escape routes on each
trying to hold
was no hope of getting
He
side of the city, but the rapid
advance of Soviet armour - Rotmistrov's Fifth Tank Army made thirty miles in a day the Minsk-Moscow highway on 2 July - quickly quashed that plan. Minsk fell on while the Fourth
Army stood
encircled to the east; 40,000 of its
to break out. After a last attempt to airdrop supplies
surrender; the July there
commander of XII Corps
was no further resistance
through
silent
in
the streets of
effectively
for
made
Moscow
prisoner.
On
itself lay
under
threat.
Prussia.
on
and by
8 July;
11
to
For the
first
of White
Battle
57,000 captives were
marched
the prison camps. By then the
far to
the west of the
4 July the Stavka had designated
each of them, on an arc which ran from Riga
touched the frontier of East
began to
July, the survivors
concluded the
when
17 July,
spearheads of the Soviet attacking fronts were already the captives had been
3 July
in the pocket.
was formally celebrated on
crowds
on 5
down
105,000 troops died trying
offered a formal surrender
The encirclement of the Fourth Army Russia; the victory
which
therefore concentrated
in Latvia to
ground where
new
objectives
Lublin in southern Poland and
time in the war the territory of the Reich
During the second week of July they drove on; by 10 July
Vilna, the
on German soil. On 13 July Konev's First Ukrainian Front, with 1000 tanks and 3000 artillery pieces, opened its offensive by attacking Lvov, the old Austro-Hungarian bastion of eastern Galicia. A difficult objective, and strongly defended, Lvov fell on 27 July; by then Rokossovsky's First White Russian Front had swung southward round the edge of the Pripet Marshes to reach out towards it. At the end of the first week in August the two capital
fronts
of Lithuania, was in Soviet hands and the Third White Russian Front had
had reached the
while the
First Baltic
line
of the river Vistula and
its
tributary, the San,
set foot
south of Warsaw,
and the other White Russian Fronts had crossed the Niemen and the
Bug, the Vistula's northern tributary, to
menace Warsaw from
481
the other flank.
THE WAR
A
IN
THE EAST
sense of treachery oppressed Hitler
remained
loyal to
throw up
him, but his
The
traitors.
at
common German
every hand. The
whom he had never trusted as a class, who had
group, formed from those
'Seydlitz'
and gone over
Stalingrad
officers,
1943-1945
had been
to the 'anti-fascist cause',
soldiers
had begun
to
surrendered
at
active with radio
and
leaflet
propaganda against Army Group Centre on the eve of Bagration; sixteen of the generals captured in
course were prevailed
its
which alleged
that
its
upon by
days earlier Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had tried to as the
a
opening move
in a
government acceptable
his post as chief
Then on
1
him
bank of the
for the
Home Army Polish Home
for the failure
insisted the Polish
Army, currently
Army's
rising in
Army - by
1
to the patriots' rescue.
dilemma: according to Erickson, 'not
Warsaw was complex; so too August close at hand on the
On
to act
with the Nazis or else being written off as
underground fighting
known
Polish border city
29 July Radio Kosciuszko
in
West
in the
where
was.' Stalin
it
had
own
his
Operation Bagration.
satellite
He
also
Polish army, the People's
had an
alternative
itself.
On
3
August
met
Stalin
rising,
between the 'London' and the
Stanislaw
who had come
for talks about future relationships with the Soviet regime. Stalin at
be uninformed about the
Polish
Committee', from the recently captured
as the 'Lublin
had proclaimed
at hand. The Home Army meant being stigmatised a the nonenity which Stalin
Mikolajczyk, the Polish Prime Minister of the government in exile,
to
clarified.
seized the centre of Warsaw.
of the Red
come
Vistula - to
a
virtual collaborator
Moscow
headquarters,
Union, run by Polish communists under Soviet control, had broadcast an
caught in
government,
own
of that day Zeitzler disappeared from
to the West. In the course
appeal for an uprising and promised that Russian help was close itself was
in his
of staff; whether he was dismissed or simply fled has never been
The motivation
in the Soviet
kill
a
conspiracy designed to replace the National Socialist regime with
August the Polish
was the explanation eastern
on 22 July game of chance'. Two
the Russians to issue an 'appeal'
350,000 lost soldiers had been 'sacrificed in
first
to
professed
then warned that he could not tolerate disunity
'Lublin' Poles, consistently refused facilities for British-
based planes to supply arms to the insurgents, regretted that German counter-attacks near
Warsaw made continue
its
it
impossible for the
advance, but
finally
First
White Russian Front (nearest
assured Mikolajczyk,
on
to the city) to
9 August, that 'we shall
do
everything possible to help'.
By then a
it
was too
late.
Model had indeed scraped together enough armour
holding attack on 29 July against Rokossovsky's
White Russian Front near
mount
Praga, the
Then Himmler, whom Hitler had entrusted with Warsaw rising, brought up troops, including the Dirlewanger
Warsaw suburb
across the Vistula.
authority to put
down
the
First
to
brigade of German criminals and the Kaminski brigade of Russian turncoats, both recently
formed by the SS
for internal security operations
judged to demand particular ruthlessness.
Within twenty-four hours of the outbreak they opened a reign of terror against the city's inhabitants - combatant or not - which, through fighting, massacre or area bombardment,
would bring death
to 200,000
of them before the
482
rising
was over.
AND
RESISTANCE
ESPIONAGE Now
set
Europe
ablaze'
was Winston Churchill's instruction
him to direct the express wish on 22 July 1940,
occupied Europe.
matched
exactly
Warsaw it
threw
No
likewise;
it
to
foment and sponsor resistance
up
at
Churchill's
to Hitler's rule of
event in the history of occupied Europe's defiance of Hitler
Churchill's expectation of
uprising of August 1944.
down
Hugh Dalton on
to
Special Operations Executive set
appointing
a challenge to
It
what
a 'setting ablaze'
confronted Hitler with an acute internal military
oppressed peoples elsewhere within
endorsed the message Churchill had proclaimed
to
his
by the
offered;
British
and
it
validated the 'parallel'
and American
conventional war against
So
it
its
'special'
the English-speaking
when
and
Hitler's security
Historically,
a
at large
Army
it
seriously
in the Battle
many
undermine
far side
of the Vistula
the contrary: the rising was precipitated by the
of seizing Poland's capital
must be recognised
as
of White Russia presented
city for the
government
led to the installation of Stalin's
in turn,
all
200,000 civilians killed
brutality
of occupation.
Hitler's ability to
at
the
Home
maintain
it
moment
found the means
to fight
the rising broke
Army's calculation
that the
with a not to be repeated chance
in exile before the arrival
puppet Polish regime; but
its
invalidated by the failure of the Russians to maintain military pressure
who,
that for
seven weeks of combat against
while continuing to sustain an effective defence against the
Red Army, which had halted on the Germans' defeat
it
in
spontaneous reaction to the
Nor, by any objective valuation, did
On
however,
Home Army
troops - 10,000 fighters killed, perhaps as
also - the Warsaw rising was not
out.
war of subversion and sabotage sponsored
agencies inside occupied Europe during four years of
suffering of the Polish
order within Poland
the
periphery.
appeared on the surface.
the bravery
crisis;
empire to do
nations throughout the war - that the defeated were ready to rise against tyranny
moment
more
might mean than the
of the Red
calculation
was
on the Germans,
- and eventually defeat - the insurgents without
483
THE WAR
drawing on
THE EAST
IK
1943-1945
their front-line strength.
Far from demonstrating what an earlier uprising in a series of similar insurrections
might have contributed to the defeat of
warning of how dangerous
it
was, even
therefore,
Hitler,
at that late
Warsaw stood
as
an awful
stage of the war, for any of his subject
peoples to take up arms against him on territory which remained under the Wehrmacht's control. If Warsaw
were not
sufficient proof, the point
was reinforced by the experience of
on D-Day up the standard of revolt on the plateau of German troops using the Rhone valley route; by July
the Maquis in southern France in June and of the Slovaks in July. In France, the Maquis of the Grenoble region set
itself,
Vercors, from there
were
which
several
labour programme. its
it
began to
raid
thousand Maquisards
Army Group
G,
between
18
cordoned the
and 23 July
anticipated the action
most of them
on
a
Slovak rebels in eastern Czechoslovakia. Elements of the
satellite
imminent Russian
over
small scale
were simultaneously taking
security troops
all
summit and
the
On
everyone they found there.
the occupation forces in the expectation of
attacks
and vulnerable
isolated
plateau, landed SS troops by glider
brutally killed
German
from the forced
fugitives
make an example of this
area of responsibility, then decided to
resistance base,
Vercors,
at
which was being troubled by pinprick
it
against the
Slovak army rose against
intervention, but
were not
rescued and were put to the sword. Hitler had to deal with no further uprising - except the carefully timed outbreak of insurrection in Paris during the week of its liberation while his armies
What made
still
stood on conquered
the Vercors massacre
Churchill's policy of 'setting
Europe
all
territory.
the
ablaze'
more
was
and supplied by the Special Operations Executive; one of SOE's 'Jedburghs') had July
had received
been parachuted a
to the
committed
dispiriting for those
that the resistance
liaison
teams (codenamed
support of the Vercors Maquisards,
drop of 1000 loads of weapons and ammunition
by the USAAF. This supply had availed them not
at all.
to
had been supported
who on
14
flown to the plateau
Although led by
a
French regular
the resistance fighters wholly lacked the experience and training to engage
officer,
professional troops -
who were
in
any case indoctrinated to put
down
resistance with
pitiless brutality.
Warsaw, Slovakia and Vercors, coming so War, were key events
and subversion wars behind
in the history
to his rule
German
of
Hitler's
late in
Europe
against
between 1939 and 1945 must be
lines in Russia
and Yugoslavia
consideration.) If the three uprisings typify in their
programme of
the course of the Second
which
all
other resistance
set in the balance.
are exceptions
outcome
World
(The partisan
and require separate
the unintended effect of the
subversion, sabotage and resistance which Churchill, later abetted by
Roosevelt, and the European governments in exile so ardently supported after June 1940, the
programme must be adjudged
a costly
and misguided
very great suffering to the brave patriots involved but
cost to the
the price of
German
forces
them down; as a result, all the lesser and preliminary activities of the resistance which they crowned must be seen, by any objective reckoning, as irrelevant and
that put
forces
failure. All failed at
at trifling
484
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
Members
of the Polish
Home Army man
August 1944, crushed
pointless acts of bravado. If that efforts to plan
and support
it,
is
what
a machine-gun during the after seven
a fair verdict is
weeks of
on European
the explanation for
Warsaw
uprising of
fighting.
its
resistance
and the Allied
failure?
At the root of Churchill's misapprehension of what resistance could achieve against ideological tyranny, a misapprehension shared by
men and women among
his fellow
of public opinion in the politics of conquest.
and by resistance had been East, in
greatly
to
it.
hundreds of
countrymen, was
In Churchill's
extended by military
own
a total
Britain's history
lifetime the
force, in South,
intelligent
and energetic
misunderstanding of the role is
suffused both by conquest British
Empire
East Africa, in the
Middle
boundaries of the
West and
Arabia and in south-east Asia. However, the tide of British imperialism had always
been tempered by extraneous
factors:
the continuing influence of anti-imperialism,
485
THE WAR
and the
domestic and foreign, trusteeship.
THE EAST
IN
1
empire. 'Eventual
founded
of equity and
ethos
atrocity in India during the Great
from which
1857-8, the mid-Victorians reacted with a ruthlessness
could have learned
own
empire-builders'
British
Confronted by rebellion and
Mutiny of
Hitler's security forces
more equitable philosophy of on which colonial governments were
Their successors were raised in a
little.
self-rule'
became the
principle
and post-Edwardian
in Africa in the late-Victorian
'trusteeship'
era;
was the
concept on which Britain administered the African and Arabian mandates granted by the
League of Nations;
'self-rule
as
soon
imposed on the Afrikaner republics
possible'
as
in the
informed the regime which
wake of
transfused British rule in India in the years after the First
Britain
same
the Boer War; and the
spirit
World War.
At the heart of Britain's self-imposed moderation of
right
its
to
rule
over
its
enormous twentieth-century empire lay deference to its own democratic beliefs and concern for the good opinion of other peoples, particularly Americans, who shared those though he had isolated himself from
beliefs. Churchill,
his
own
party in the 1930s by his
opposition to the devolution of government in India, was emotionally, as
committed
to
Moreover, through learned
in
experience in fighting the Afrikaners
his
how deep
the urge to
occupying power to right to
if
persist in
freedom could
drive,
and
in the
how
Boer War, he had
difficult
history,
which abounded
in
was
it
imposing alien rule on any people inspired by
independence. Churchill's personal experience was reinforced by
modern
not intellectually,
the principle of self-determination as the most doctrinaire liberal.
his
for
an
faith in their
wide reading
examples of the success of popular resistance
to
foreign conquest and domination - for instance, resistance by the Spaniards and Prussians against
Napoleon, and by the American colonists against George
III.
Hitler's philosophy of empire
A wider mismatch between
the philosophies of empire held by Churchill and Hitler could
scarcely be imagined. Imperialistic
man;
Hitler held 'the dignity of
the Anglo-Saxon world
though he was, Churchill believed
man'
who had
to
be
a
read Mein Kampf - they were
1940 - he rejected with contempt the idea of self-rule for those
Germanic
the Japanese; out of loyalty he included Mussolini Italians in the
Greeks,
Germanic
whom
and esteemed he yearned
still
who
confraternity;
did not belong to the
('a
common
dogged
soft
spot for the
Finns and Baits
who
among
modern
Asiatic
hordes
warriors; the Scandinavians he recognised as racial cousins, a
for the British to accept,
Belgian Flemings
cause with
descendant of the Caesars') and the
he had an ideologically
he identified with the defenders of Thermopylae against the as
and which he
identified with his cause; his
of
only a tiny handful in
For purposes of expediency he was prepared to make
race.
in the dignity
bourgeois vacuity. As recognised by those in
also
extended
he was prepared
approved minorities; and,
as
at a
title
Dutchmen and
pinch to include the
long as they fought on his side, he
excepted the Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks or Bulgarians from
486
to those
racial stigma.
For the
rest
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
who
of the inhabitants of Europe
by the end of 1941 had
tainted by their subjugation to
Roman
Slavonic
Czechs and above
'riff-raff,
Poles, Serbs,
under
fallen
nothing but contempt. They belonged either to those groups, rule (Hitler's political
French, which were
memory was
Russians,
all
sway he reserved
his
like the
whose
long) or to the
was one of
history
subjection to superior empires. In easily
consequence
Hitler
touched Anglo-Saxon
was not
He
positively exulted in the ease with
which he had extinguished autonomous governments Yugoslavia;
Poland, Czechoslovakia and
in
and he measured the rectitude of the authority with which he had replaced
these legitimate regimes purely in terms of expediency:
worked, with the
them
moral reservations which so
affected by the
at all
attitudes to empire.
in office
minimum
the successor administrations
if
of vexation to his occupying forces, he was content to leave
Norway
undisturbed. Thus he devolved authority in
from February 1942 (Vidkun Quisling was the
continuing rights of parliamentary government to the Danes, election as late as 1943, in left
Petain to
even
after
November
embody
who conducted
a
which 97 per cent of the candidates returned were
the appearance
if
not the
reality
regime
to the Quisling
Nordic authoritarian), conceded
local
democratic
patriots,
and
of sovereign French head of
state
he had extended German military occupation to the whole of France
in
1942.
The complexity of Hitler's occupation
policies
was reflected
in the
complex pattern
of resistance to his occupation regimes in both western and eastern Europe. However, the pattern of resistance
impose
in
attitude
of the
December third
was determined not only by the nature of the regime
any particular occupied left;
territory.
Three other
Hitler chose to
factors operated: the
first
was the
the second was the degree of assistance which the British (and, after
Americans) were able to bring to local resistance organisations; the
1941, the
was geography. Geography, being
movement of
the terrain in which desert or
a constant,
resistance to
swamp,
is
is
best dealt with
enemy occupation
operates - with
it
is
first.
directly
The degree of success of any
determined by the
this proviso: difficult terrain,
difficulty
mountain,
of
forest,
bereft of the resources necessary to support an irregular military force,
and external supplies are therefore required. Most of German-occupied Europe, however, was either topographically unsuited
to irregular operations or too distant
from Allied bases
of support for irregular forces operating there to be easily and regularly supplied. For
example, Denmark, military itself
and
in
political
which the
spirit
of resistance was strong (despite the existence of
groups sympathetic to
badly to partisan
activity,
being
flat,
Hitler's anti-Bolshevik
treeless
propaganda), lends
and densely inhabited; the same
conditions characterise most of Holland, Belgium and northern France. In
all
those areas
clandestine activity was readily monitored by the police - and throughout occupied
Europe the domestic police forces accepted the authority and direction of the conqueror from the outset - and ruthlessness with
which
reprisal
reprisals
punishments were
were carried
487
as
readily
The ease and Germans or by their
inflicted.
out, either by the
THE WAR IN THE EAST
such
satellite security forces,
as the
Vichy
the war. Moreover, fear of reprisal - on
Milice,
1^43-1945
proved
a sufficient
deterrent for
much
which ran from curfew through
a scale
of
arrest,
hostage-taking and transportation to exemplary execution - encouraged informing, which in turn directly
when
heightened the efficiency of German control. Most resistance organisations,
they began to form, were obliged to devote
a
high proportion of their energy to
combating informers, nowhere with complete success.
The only activity
part of
occupied western Europe
of German occupation troops was so high outside the country. in
in
which the
terrain favoured resistance
was Norway, north of Oslo; but there the population was so sparse and the density
The
infiltration
that
all
guerrilla activity
February 1943 destroyed the heavy-water plant
German
had the highly desirable
military outstations,
grossly to over-garrison
to
be organised
Vermork, thus crippling the German
at
atomic weapons programme), reinforced by the programme of against
had
of Norwegian resistance fighters from Scotland (who
Norway throughout
British
effect
commando
raids
of persuading Hitler
the war; but the internal resistance itself was
of negligible strategic significance. Certain regions of eastern and south-eastern Europe were topographically favourable
Bohemian Forest
to partisan activity, notably Carpathian Poland, the
much
in
of Yugoslavia, the mountainous parts of the Greek mainland and
and the
Italian
await the
Alps and Apennines. The growth of resistance in
of Mussolini
fall
in July 1943,
its
larger islands,
however, had to
while Czechoslovakia was too distant from bases of
external support for resistance to take root. efficient
Italy,
Czechoslovakia,
The Czech government
in exile ran the
most
of Allied-oriented intelligence organisations to operate inside Europe during the
war, but SOE's only serious sponsorship of resistance activity inside the country, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, SS 'Deputy Protector of Bohemia-Moravia', in 1942,
provoked so
terrible a reprisal (the extinction
Lidice) that the effort
was not repeated;
it
reveals
of the population of the
much
about the efficiency of
occupation policies that the assassins were betrayed by one of their
May
village
of
Hitler's
own number, who
made himself known to the Gestapo as soon as he was parachuted into his homeland. In Greece, where SOE set up an extensive network of agents as early as the autumn of 1942, many of them Oxford- and Cambridge-educated classical scholars inspired by the Philhellenes (Byron foremost among them) who had aided the Greeks in their struggle against the Turks in the 1820s, the pitiless cruelty that activists
In its
from
the British officers
initiating attacks against the occupiers.
Poland - again partitioned
eastern Russian and only
administered entity - the
its
after
Warsaw
rising
1939 so that
its
western province became German,
centre, the 'General-Government',
'Home Army', under
London, abstained from provocative the
Germans responded to partisan activity with such soon found themselves obliged actually to dissuade
remained
a separately
the direction of the government in exile in
military action against the occupier until
it
unleashed
of August 1944. Though the Poles ran an intelligence network second
efficiency only to that of the
Czechs (one of
488
its
triumphs was to supply the
in
British
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
government with key
parts
of crashed German
pilotless
weapons which had made rogue
they decided from the outset that the national interest lay in preserving the
flights),
Home Army
moment when
Germany would Home Army were also restricted, however, by its difficulty in acquiring arms. Its lack of weapons was a factor in its non-intervention against the Germans during their destruction of the Warsaw strength of the
allow
ghetto in April
overwhelmed
command
when
1943,
its
lengthy and dangerous.
The
forces refuelling facilities for
dropping missions
and the
Soviet Union,
bombing
Home
It
SOE
lacked
of bases
East. Stalin
arms
to the
political differences
Army, which persisted even
had
were
in Italy in 1943, flights
Germany, refused
also refused to supply its
under the
militia
with sufficient range still
which occasionally granted the Western
raids against
was determined by
aircraft
politically identified the
after the signing
Home Army
do so
to
air
for arms-
Home Army
itself.
with the government in
of the agreement
August 1941 which released Polish prisoners held in Russia to join the
Middle
of the
conducted by SS troops and
after the acquisition
to Poland.
Russia's attitude
efforts
heroic Jewish resistance groups were systematically
of SS General Jiirgen Stroop. Until 1944
even
the collapse of
of independence. The military
in a street-by-street battle
to reach central Poland;
exile
against the
to strike for the recovery
it
British
as a potential
in
armies in the
opponent of the
Communist Party, through which he began to sponsor his own army in exile in the Union after June 1941. This was the only negative effect of Barbarossa on the development of resistance to German occupation inside Hitler's Europe. Almost everywhere else the efforts were positive. The European communist parties, through the Polish
Soviet
persisting control of the Comintern,
occupation
as
long
as the
had been restrained from joining
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact remained
European communist
were ordered
in force.
in resistance to
As soon
as
it
was
broken,
all
marked
increase in the efficiency of resistance groups of whatever political colour. This
effect
was due either
superior to those
parties
to collaboration
to initiate subversive activity, with a
by the communists, whose habits of secrecy were
of recently formed clandestine groups, with the non-communist
resistance, as notably in Holland, or to creative
competition between
left
and
France: there de Gaulle, alarmed by the prospect that 'Free France' might
communist leadership on home Army',
far
commanded by
territory,
succeeded
a National Resistance
right, as in fall
under
in creating a pan-resistance 'Secret
Council under his authority. The marriage
it
imposed between communist and non-communist groups was one of convenience. The French Communist Party privately reserved the intention advantage as soon as opportunity offered, and against
its
it
to operate to
its
own
political
did indeed institute local reigns of terror
committed opponents during the interregnum which followed
liberation in
August 1944; but from June 1941 to July 1944 the marriage worked to unify and strengthen the resistance as a whole. Objectively,
however,
resistance in western
it
must be recognised
that
the principal achievement of
Europe during the years of Hitler's strength was psychological
rather
than material. The most visible symbol of resistance was the underground newspaper (120
489
THE WAR
separate imprints
were
circulating in
IN
THE EAST
Holland
1943-1^45
in 1941)
and the most seditious
activity the
transmission of intelligence, of varied value, via clandestine networks to London. these networks
example, was
fell
'run'
enemy hands and were
into
Some of
North Pole network,
'turned'; the
by the Germans between March 1942 and April
1944.
for
Such setbacks did
numbers of brave men and women (SOE judged that women made better agents than men) being parachuted straight into the hands of the Gestapo. The publication of underground newspapers and the running of intelligence networks, whose subsidiary activities included the smuggling of crashed little
harm
to the Allied
war
effort but resulted in
aircrew out of occupied territory, occasional acts of sabotage and sporadic assassinations,
did a great deal to sustain national pride during the occupation years, but none of the
shook the German system of control, which was both
activities
economic. Historians of the resistance are naturally reluctant the
German
security forces (civilian Sicherheitsdienst, military Feldgendarmerie)
resistance groups' enemies, but
exceed 6500 largest city
The
1943.
part
at
it
is
probable that their
of
which were the
total strength in
France did not
any stage during the war; the German police garrison of Lyon, the second
divisions of the
German army
stationed in France (sixty in June 1944) took
in security duties, and, since they
were not
coastal districts, they
the resistance deployed
at
in a position to
do
were almost exclusively stationed
so. Against the
most 116,000 armed men,
a figure
occupation proper, the
number and
consonantly limited; in the security officers
five (interference
first
was
size
in
security forces
its
when maximum. During the
of armed groups were small and their
nine months of 1942 the
150,
German
no
established in July 1944
the arrival of the Allied liberation armies raised their strength to
exceed
and remarkably
of France, comprised about 100 secret policemen and 400 security troops in
whatsoever
German
efficient
to put figures to the size
total
activities
number of assassinations of
while major acts of sabotage throughout the war did not
with the railway network was extensive, but was largely confined
months before and during the D-Day landings). The popular idea of western Europe 'ablaze' under German occupation,
to the
first
John Steinbeck's inspirational novel The Moon is Down (1942) and fed by an army of authors since, must therefore be recognised as a romantic, if understandable, promulgated
in
myth. Western Europe's urban and pastoral regions, where the population was so vulnerable to reprisals, were quite unsuited to the sort of sustained partisan activity which,
when
supplied and supported by external regular forces,
is
the only form of guerrilla
warfare which constrains a conqueror to divert appreciable military effort from the battlefront.
During the whole course of Hitler's war, he was confronted with such
guerrilla resistance in Stalin, after
an
effective
only two areas of operations: in the rear of the Eastern Front, where
initial hesitation,
supported, supplied and eventually reinforced partisan
formations centred on the impenetrable Pripet Marshes; and in Yugoslavia.
The isolated
Soviet partisan formations
were
initially
based on fragments of regular divisions
by the German advance through White Russia and the Ukraine
1941, survivors
who
retained the will and
some of
490
the
means
to fight
in the
on
summer of
after
they had
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
The bodies of Soviet
been cut off from
civilians are cut
down from
their higher headquarters
the gallows by
German
security forces.
and sources of supply. For recruitment,
however, they depended upon volunteers from the White Russian and Ukrainian populations, both suspect in Stalin's eyes as undependable minorities and as potential collaborators with the occupation authorities.
NKVD
From
the outset he
put the partisan
command structures, infiltrated through German lines to the partisan bands, were known as orgtroika (tripartite organisations) consisting of state, party and NKVD officers. As late as the summer of 1943, their members in the Ukraine did not exceed 17,000. In January 1944, when the partisans formations under
were returned 35,000;
to
(secret
Red Army
police)
control;
the
control, thirteen partisan brigades in the Ukraine
on the eve of Operation Bagration
in
June 1944,
when
numbered
partisans carried out 40,000
numbers were 140,000. They had grown as a result of Soviet German repression. From the spring of 1944 onwards, specialist which German formations 'resting' from operations at the front
railway demolitions, their
support, despite ferocious SS anti-partisan units, to
were killing
were
regularly attached, carried out
without
pity; 'kills'
sweeps through 'band-infested'
of up to 2000, including
women
areas,
and children
burning and
as well as
men,
regularly reported for each operation. Post-war investigations by historians with
491
THE WAR
German
access to
THE EAST
IN
1943-1945
records suggest that such sweeps were extremely effective, that Soviet
were wildly exaggerated, and
estimates of the achievements of partisans
that the losses
whether on the personnel or the material of the Wehrmacht, were
inflicted
by
fraction
of those claimed by the Soviet authorities. The Soviet estimate that 147,835
German
soldiers
partisans,
were
been challenged by killed
by partisans
killed
Western scholar,
a
in the Orel region,
J.
west of the River Don, has
who
Armstrong,
A.
a
suggests a figure of 35,000
and wounded.
The Yugoslavian Partisans It is
to Yugoslavia that historians ultimately turn in arguing for the effectiveness of partisan
warfare and in estimating the contribution of resistance forces to the defeat of the
Wehrmacht case. Its
in
Europe
mountainous
in the
Second World War. Yugoslavia
terrain, intersected
gave easy access to SOE's
by deep
and sea supply
air
valleys
units,
is
unquestionably
and bounded by
a special
a coastline that
ideally suited to irregular warfare.
is
Its
Serbian population was accustomed by resistance to the Turks and by the Austrian invasion of 1914-15 to fighting
on
home
its
outraged the national pride and by
its
territory. Hitler's aggression
of April 1941 had
hundreds of
military units in
suddenness
left
possession of weapons and ground which provided the basis for irregular operations. The first
to raise the standard of revolt
were Serbian monarchists commanded by
regular officer, Draza Mihailovic. His Chetniks, so called
opponents of the Turkish occupation, were Ustashi
who made common
Croatia;
they also
kingdom. Properly, however, puppet government on the partisan warfare as early as
May
occupation forces in Slovenia and
Hungarian,
and Albanian
Bulgarian
eastern frontiers of the
was with the Germans,
of historic Serbia and against
who had imposed
whom
a
they initiated
1941.
Special Operations Executive
and began
Italian
on the northern and
their quarrel
territory
for
odds from the outset with the Croatian
understandably opposed the
appropriations of Yugoslav border areas
The
at
cause with the
a Serbian
from the Serbian word
made
contact with the Chetniks in September 1941
them with weapons and money in the summer of 1942. However, emissary to Mihailovic, Captain D. T. Hudson, had also come across groups
to supply
SOE's original
of anti-monarchist guerrillas
who
formed the impression Mihailovic,
whom
that Tito
was
themselves
called
experienced Comintern agent, Josip Broz a
who
more
'Partisans'
and were led by an
used the nom de guerre Tito.
serious
its
early
opponent of the Axis occupiers than
he suspected of wishing to build the Chetniks into
Army' on the Polish model and preserve
Hudson
a
strength against the day
Serbian
when
'Home external
circumstances would allow him to liberate the country from within. His suspicion did Mihailovic less than justice, for the Chetniks were conducting a guerrilla war against the
Germans
in
1942 and
(as Ultra
revealed) were regarded by
492
them
as
troublesome enemies
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
as late as 1943.
It
was undoubtedly the he refused
nationalist,
that
movement,
that his
in
November
arms
that
for the prosecution
A reprisal
of
he
however,
atrocity at the
was an extreme Serb
fight the Partisans for
control of western Serbia
early entered into local truces with the Italians to acquire
this
burgeoning
civil
principal motive of Mihailovic's policy
and
that Mihailovic
co-operate with Tito in creating a national resistance
to
Chetniks had begun to
and
1941,
case,
war.
was
appalling consequences of the internal war
from
to spare the Serb population
hands of the occupiers - an estimable aim
which none the
less
in
view of the
ensued, costing as
the lives of nearly 10 per cent (1,400,000) of the pre-war population. Tito
did
it
made no such
reservations. In the classic tradition of revolution,
he committed the Partisans to waging
war
1943 he had established himself in the
against the occupier to the bitter end.
eyes of the
SOE (whose
most
effective
British aid officers
their
By
late
Yugoslav section was dominated by officers with left-wing views) as
of the Yugoslav guerrilla leaders. From the spring of 1944 onwards
was sent
to Tito's Partisans
all
and withdrawn from Mihailovic. Although some
of the American Office of Strategic Services remained in contact with the Chetniks,
abandonment by
the British had the effect of driving
with the Germans, with
whom
Mihailovic agreed to
them
into closer co-operation
a local armistice in
November
1943 as
means of continuing the civil war against Tito, thus confirming the Allied prejudice them which Hudson had voiced at the outset. Tito meanwhile had been building up his army and instituting increasingly ambitious attacks against the Germans in central and southern Yugoslavia. When these attacks began to threaten the Germans' exploitation of the country's mineral resources and their line of communication with Greece, Hitler was forced to commit sizeable forces and mount large-scale pacification operations against them. Until the collapse of Italy in September 1943 twenty Italian divisions were permanently stationed in Yugoslavia and Albania (where SOE also sponsored a minor guerrilla movement), together with six German divisions. After the dissolution of the Italian occupying force, the German was reinforced with an a
against
additional seven divisions, together with four at
from the Bulgarian army. A
the Neretva river in Bosnia in February 1943, defeated
Germans, prompted them over 100,000
German and
to
seek rescue
at
Move
satellite
British
in
some
cost to the Italians
launch Operation Schwarz in the following May.
It
and
involved
troops and drove Tito out of Montenegro, where he had
December, while
retreated. Similar offensives cleared western Bosnia in
Operation Knight's
at
Partisan offensive
in
May
1944
southern Bosnia was so successful that Tito was obliged to
hands and
to Bari in Italy -
fly
September armistice he had acquired
large quantities
even though
of
Italian
at
the time of the
weapons which allowed
number of armed men he kept in the field to about 120,000. The Royal Navy quickly returned Tito to Yugoslavia, though only as far as the island of Vis, where it had established a base to support Partisan operations. Meanwhile the
him
to raise the
British
Balkan Air Force,
set
up
Bari
at
American) weapons to the Partisans
in
June, was flying vast quantities of (largely
in the interior
493
of the country.
In
August Tito
left
Vis to
THE WAR
who until Moscow Tito granted Greece
'permission' for Soviet troops to enter the country and they began to
October,
in
transformed
outflanked in the Balkans by the Red
immediately beat
joint force
1943-1945
from Romania on 6 September. Their
cross the border
Italy,
THE EAST
February 1944 had been tepid in his support for Tito's campaign; in
visit Stalin,
evacuate
IN
the
Army and
soon
kept
as
after the
ended the war
and
squad on
in
17 Jul). His plea
of the world swept away
Second World War. which man) of
his
and
his
August meeting
evacuate Yugoslavia
promise was indeed
ascendancy had driven him deeper
his belated efforts to reingratiate
himself with the Allies
having hidden from Tito's troops in the mountains of central Serbia
he was caught
for over a year firing
after
F,
1945.
a tragic figure. Tito's
Germans;
Stalin, at his
Army would
militarily necessary,
German surrender of May
into complicity with the totally failed,
Army Group
a hasty retreat into central Yugoslavia. Belgrade, the capital, fell to a
presence was no longer
Mihailovic
Hitler's decision to
position.
of the Red Arm) and the Partisans on 20 October.
its
and
along the Adriatic coast by Allied Armies
with Tito in Moscow, had given a guarantee that the Red as
arrival,
Partisans'
me
March
1946, tried in Belgrade in
of exculpation,
and
my
he
said,
'I
wanted much,
I
June and executed by
began much, but the gale
work', has entered into the memorabilia of the
had been
'merciless' to him,
and hindsight, by
judgements have been forgiven, accords weight
to that view. His
'Destiny',
tragedy was to have been a nationalist leader in a state
composed of minorities, whose
differences Hitler cynically exploited in order to divide
and
rule.
Hindsight has also greatly diminished Tito's achievement. At the end of the war he
was widely hailed guerrilla effort.
as the
only European resistance leader to have liberated his country by
Man)' strategic commentators further credited him with having diverted
such numbers of German and
Realistically,
arrival
it
is
satellite
troops from the eastern and Mediterranean
have materially influenced the outcome of the war in those theatres.
battlefields as to
now
accepted that the liberation of Yugoslavia was the direct result of the
of Russian troops
in
surprising about the Tito era
the country in September 1944. is
that Stalin
What now seems most
should have so unwisely agreed to remove the
Red Army from Yugoslav territory at the moment of victory - a misjudgement which robbed Soviet post-war control of eastern Europe of consistency from the outset. Strategically, estimates of Tito's diversion of force from Hitler's main centres of operation are now seen to be exaggerated. The principal army of occupation in Yugoslavia was always
Italian. After
German
divisions
the Italian collapse Hitler was indeed obliged to double the
deployed
use against the Red
Army
in Yugoslavia
from
or Allied Armies
Italy.
brought from Russia in the spring of 1943, was
Eugen and Handschar Divisions and the either
six to thirteen;
Only one, the
first class;
104th, 117th
and 118th
of ethnic Germans from central Europe or of
minorities, including a high proportion of Balkan
were quite unsuitable
for
war
rest,
1st
Mountain
Divisions,
locally
Division,
including the SS Prinz
were composed
enlisted
non-German
Muslims from Bosnia and Albania. They
against Russian, British or
494
the
number of
but few were suitable for
American mechanised formations;
AND ESPIONAGE
RESISTANCE
their
presence in Yugoslavia, even their existence, was in
partook more closely of the character of
cunning
Hitler's
rebounded on of
though
became a involvement cost him
party little,
to
but
he had taken the trouble,
Yugoslav
satellite
and monarchist
Croat
against
its
internal
quarrels.
would have
it
after his
objective
In
some of
whirlwind victory of April
policies
which rapidly proved
Special Operations Executive,
were
its
former
1941, to establish a pan-
operations, was ambiguous.
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), set
supporting the
largely fails in
achievement
its
The same
partisans
territory to
a
powerful lobby of historians, claim to have contributed
its
in Yugoslavia,
its
principal theatre of
verdict holds true for the activities of the
up
American
June 1942. Through an agreement allocating
in
between OSS and SOE signed on 26 June Italian
its
ineffectual.
though puffed by
officers,
significantly to Hitler's defeat, since
responsibilities
his
administration, charged with maintaining order within the country,
impose occupation
whom
terms,
military
simplified his politico-military arrangements
rather than cynically bribing Yugoslavia's neighbours with portions of
The
communist
of communication to southern Europe, he
lines
its
against
country lay in the exploitation
his only real interest in the
resources and the free use of
its
eventually
if
Serb
setting
in
itself; for,
evidence that fighting there
itself
rather than international war. In a sense,
civil
OSS took the major
1942,
role in
and the Johnny-come-lately resistance movements
in
Italian resistance activity discommoded the Germans very Romanian and Bulgarian subversives scarcely at all. SOE's and OSS's
Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. little,
the Hungarian,
parallel effort in psychological warfare
(sponsored
in Britain
by SOE's parent organisation,
Economic Warfare, through its Political Warfare Executive) afforded high excitement to the journalists and intellectuals who staffed it; its effect on opinion in the occupied countries was marginal and on German civilian morale negligible. 'Black
the Ministry of
propaganda', transmitted by radio stations purporting to operate within the boundaries of
no German who could German society. The only
the Reich, understandably convinced
daily witness the absolute
control the Gestapo exercised over
non-military manifestation
of internal resistance to Nazi liquidated almost as
soon
as
the Catholic Bavarian White Rose group, was pitilessly
rule, it
appeared
in
February 1943. Allied
efforts at
economic
warfare were equally unavailing; the principal success, the purchase of future production
of Swedish ball-bearings, was negotiated so
won
late in
by conventional military means before
The
'indirect'
offensive encouraged
military assistance to partisans, sabotage
have contributed materially across
Europe on 6 June
little
1944,
it
the war (mid-1944) that victory had been
could take
effect.
and sustained by the
Allies against Hitler -
and subversion - must therefore be judged
to
Among his army of 300 divisions deployed moment in the war when Hitler exercised
to his defeat.
the
last
unchallenged control over the greater part of the territory he had conquered fewer than twenty can be identified
as
committed
Yugoslavia, parts of western Russia far behind the
Wehrmacht's
defiance in mountain Greece, Albania and southern France,
495
in 1939-41,
to internal security duty. Outside central
all
lines
and
tiny pockets
of
peripheral to his conduct of
THE WAR
the larger war, occupied
Europe
lay inert
seductively promised by Churchill,
conquered populations, was
THE EAST
IN
1^43-1945
under the jackboot. The 'dawn
ofliberation', so
Roosevelt and the governments in exile to the only by the flicker of gunfire
signalled
at
the
military
boundaries of the Wehrmacht's zone of operations.
The If
bacillus of espionage
the structure of Hitler's empire was penetrated and fissured by clandestine activity, that
took
a
form quite
demanded
espionage was
campaign
different
from the
1940. Resistance
in Jul)
a bacillus debilitating
its vital
had so
ablaze' Churchill
'setting
may have been
a gnat
system.
The
optimistically
on the hide of the Wehrmacht; triumph of the
real
Allies' indirect
between 1939 and 1945 was won not by the brave and often
against Hitler
foolhardy saboteur or guerrilla warrior but by the
anonymous spy and
the chairborne
cryptographer.
Of
the two, spies were by
'Humint' (human intelligence, than
it
far
of the trade) with
Moreover, governments
penetrated by an 'agent in place' directly to his
master
to
who
and
Hitler
later
on
even greater
'Sigint' (signals
considerable degree conform to popular
of the enemy are
that the inner councils
camp
were
all
is
beguilingly attractive to any
war
leader;
way during the Second Wehrmacht intelligence service,
beguiled in
this
World War. Hitler, for example, was led to believe by the the Abwehr, that it maintained an extensive network of agents report after June 1944
is
given to
transmits their deliberations and decisions swiftly
in the friendly
Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin
a
The notion
estimations of the worth of a spy.
and
a significance
gives to the resistance fighter; certainly far greater than
intelligence).
and
the less important. Popular imagination invests
in the jargon
who were able to on London. Churchill
in Britain
the accuracy of pilotless-weapons strikes
Roosevelt were supplied through the Czech intelligence service with significant
information of
capabilities
and intentions by Agent A-54, probably the Abwehr
officer Paul
Stalin,
who
benefited from the dedication of the international
German Thummel.
communist movement's members for information
of German
to the Soviet cause,
activities in
drew on the Swiss-based 'Lucy
ring'
occupied Europe, on Richard Sorge's network
in
German military intentions, on the 'Red Orchestra' for day-by-day German order of battle and, during 1941-2, on the Schulze-Boysen
Japan for warning of intelligence of the
Luftwaffe
network
(a
Red Orchestra component)
'Cambridge Comintern', composed of Burgess and
Kim
American higher All these
for
technical
data;
the
Guy
Anthony on the pulse of AngloBlunt,
British intelligence officers,
Philby, Stalin also kept his finger intermittently
through
strategy.
sources were, however, to
Agent A-54's transmissions,
for
some degree
unsatisfactory or
example, were too sporadic to provide
a
compromised.
coherent picture
of German strategy. The Red Orchestra was wrongly placed to monitor key German military activity, the
Schulze-Boysen network was insecure and quickly penetrated
496
(117
of
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
its
members were
hanged), Sorge was too detached from the Comintern network to be
always believed (though he undoubtedly influenced Stalin's decision to transfer troops
from
Siberia
to
Moscow
in
the winter of 1941), while the Lucy
supplemented by the Swiss
transmitting information tailored and its
own
purposes; another interpretation
Lucy ring derived
that the
is
ring
information from
its
Bletchley, either directly or through Allied agents in Swiss intelligence.
Comintern was perhaps the most direction; Philby,
influential
of
by deliberately maligning his circle's reliability,
in dissuading the British
The Cambridge
networks, though in
Stalin's
all
was probably
intelligence service for
government from lending support
reverse
a
may have been
decisive
to Stauffenberg's anti-Hitler
conspiracy, which Stalin undoubtedly judged inimical to his long-term plans for the post-
war control of Germany, since the conspirators were avowedly anti-communist. Least satisfactory
of all the networks was the Abwehr's in
the capture of
one of its
was compiled by the
spies,
launched
staff
One
is
it
was turned it
as early as 1939
transmitted to
by
Germany
of the 'Doublecross' organisation which controlled
of the pilotless-weapons force progressively to shorten the range of their
The contribution of 'Humint' the
Britain;
the information
all
of the controllers' achievements was to persuade the
missiles, so that the majority
— all
after that
British officers
subsequently captured agents.
German
and
fell
The
south of London.
role of Ultra
to the direction
of strategy
more marginal and patchy when compared with
in the
that
Second World War looks
of 'Sigint'. Signals intelligence
concerned with the interception, decryption and interpretation of the enemy's secure
messages, however transmitted, and the protection of one's services. In practice the majority
radio
en clair (not in
All five
cipher)
'Y',
was gleaned from messages sent
between
and extensive
seeking to penetrate that of the landlines -
which
carried, for
Italians
enemy
Britain, the
tactical intelligence,
in 'low-grade' ciphers or
United
States, the Soviet
telegraph and telephone
(telex,
example, 71 per cent of use).
major role
in the radio warfare. In particular
Germany's
military
it
even
Union and
all
German
naval
was the
a
and
sent along
traffic in
1943 Poles,
secure), also played a
Poles' early success in attacking
machine cipher (Enigma), subsequently revealed
Enigma on
traffic
Minor combatants, notably the
(whose codes and ciphers were exceptionally
eventually allowed the British to break
War was
was sent by
efforts to protecting their radio signals traffic
proved generally impenetrable, but had limited French and
traffic
of the action.
units in the heat
major combatants, Germany,
Japan, devoted costly
some
from secret codebooks; much
the older system of codes, constructed to the British as
his interception
of material so intercepted in the Second World
protected by elaborate mathematical ciphers, though
traffic
known
own from
regular
and rapid
to the French,
which
basis, thus laying the
foundations for the Ultra organisation, which disclosed information of truly war-winning value to the Allies from late 1940 onwards.
497
THE WAR IN THE EAST
The extent of the
triumph
Ultra
now
is
1943-194S
so well
known
(the equally important
American 'Magic' penetration of the Japanese naval and diplomatic ciphers
less so) that
upon an evaluation of the cryptographic successes of other combatants, which were more significant than received opinion admits. It is consideration of both ought to wait
probable, for example, that the Russians had their
own
success against Enigma; so
own
Professor Harvey Hinsley, the historian of Ultra, guardedly indicates. Russia's
grade ciphers were certainly of the best quality, and
this suggests a capacity to
high-
read others;
some years before 1941 Government Code and Cipher School from making the Russian medium- and low-grade ciphers, however, were much
they had not yielded to foreign intelligence services' attack for (Churchill forbade the British
attempt after 22 June 1941).
read by the Germans in 1941-2 and perhaps intelligence.
in late 1941,
The Germans and
later;
the decrypts yielded valuable tactical
breaking the American military-attache code
in
of messages originating with the US liasion
their decrypts
Rommel
supplied
succeeded
also
with important information about the Eighth
Army
officer in Cairo
in the desert.
The most important German success, however, was in breaking the British naval book ciphers, to which the Admiralty clung long after the army and air force had gone over to
more
secure ciphers. These ciphers (nos.
1,
and
2, 3
4)
were more properly book
codes: the letters of a message were translated into figures by reference to standard tables
and then 'super-enciphered' by mathematical techniques, which were altered intervals.
sufficient
normal calculations of mathematical probability
1;
when
by April 1940 a
it
was reading 30-50 per cent of traffic encoded
change was made
between September
1941
to cipher no. 2
and January 1942;
it
it
had
again broke this less
80 per cent of no.
3,
often in
'real time'. 'Real time', a
at
B-Dienst's success against naval cipher no. 3
code used
to carry information
traffic
on
a large scale
it
was reading
cryptographer's term,
messages sent are intercepted and broken by the enemy received and decrypted (or decoded)
(Beobachtungs- or
in naval cipher no.
success with the replacement, no.
but between February 1942 and June 1943, with short interruptions, as
regular
to break the super-encipherment. This
was exactly the achievement of the German navy's Observation Service B-Dienst);
at
The weakness of the system was that the book itself might be reconstructed if radio traffic was collected and analysed by the enemy, who could then apply
as
4;
much
means
that
same speed as they are the denominated station. What made the so disastrous for the Allies was that it was the at
the
between London and Washington about
transatlantic
convoys; as a result the B-Dienst 'was sometimes obtaining decrypts about convoy
movements between
10
and 20 hours
Hinsley. Such information alerted
convoy
by such in
was the key
intelligence,
numbers
Admiralty accepted a
in advance'
of their departure, according to Harold
to the success
of Donitz's U-boat wolf packs, which,
could be deployed across the track of an
overwhelmed their escorts. combined cipher machine (CCM), employed that
frequently
and Canadian navies and brought into general use
in
1943,
It
east-
also
that
or west-bound
was not the
until
the
by the American
German
navy's
penetration of convoy ciphers in the Battle of the Atlantic was ended. By then, however,
498
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
been
the balance of advantage in the battle had military
In the land to the
shifted to the Allies
by conventional
means.
enemy
and
war, the Allied armies and
air
Admiralty did by
as the British
its
air forces
conceded no such advantage
book
arrogant persistence in the use of
codes; they used machine cipher systems from the outset and in consequence resisted
German a
attack
on
their secure transmissions.
machine cipher system,
but, having
The German
adopted
Americans, found themselves - unwittingly -
Hence
semi-obsolete system.
School (GCCS), located so
much
of
its
at
talent),
at
services
also
committed
to
and
the outbreak of the war equipped with a
Government Code and Cipher it drew
the success of the British
Bletchley,
were
theirs ten years before the British
between Oxford and Cambridge (from which
breaking into the transmissions encrypted on the Enigma
at
machine the Germans used.
The Enigma machine outwardly resembled
a portable typewriter (see p. 79) but the
depression of a key worked an internal system of gears which allotted any alternative letter not logically to
be repeated before 200
The Germans therefore understandably regarded Enigma transmissions 'real time',
indeed in any sort of
human
were deceived; because of the need
letter
input an
subsequent depressions.
trillion
as
unbreakable in
time whatsoever. Unfortunately for them they
to indicate to a receiving station the
way
in
which the
sending Enigma machine had been geared to transmit, the operator was obliged to preface each message with
which
a trained
whole of its
a
repeated sequence of the same
mathematician could use
letters.
This established a pattern
as a 'break' into the
message and so into the
meaning. As the mathematicians recruited by Bletchley included Alan Turing,
the author of universal
operational analysis,
computing theory, Gordon Welchman,
pioneer of
a principal
and Max Norman and Thomas Flowers, designer and builder
first electronic computer ('Colossus', so called at Bletchley because of its enormous size), such 'breaks' were rapidly exploited to yield complete readings of German messages quite quickly after interception - and eventually in 'real time'.
respectively of the
There were important exceptions different
methods of enciphering Enigma
to
Bletchley's
traffic
success.
used by separate German service branches
- proved easier to break than army and naval keys, and
broken;
significantly,
the end of the war.
German
nor was the Gestapo key, though
Enigma
security
depended
senders; mistakes in procedure
heavily
made by
it
the North Atlantic. For
who
some
naval keys
were never
was not changed from 1939
upon
the experience and
skill
until
of the
inexperienced, tired or lazy operators
provided Bletchley with the majority of their 'breaks' into meticulous; so too were the naval officers
Luftwaffe 'keys' - the
traffic.
Gestapo operators were
used the 'Shark' key controlling U-boats
most of 1942, while the B-Dienst was
in
regularly reading naval cipher
all Bletchley's efforts; during those months (FebruaryDecember) the Germans were masters of the radio war in the Battle of the Atlantic. In consequence hundreds of thousands of tons of Allied shipping were sunk. The Shark episode was, however, an exception to the general rule that the British
no. 3 in real time, Shark resisted
499
THE WAR
dominated radio warfare
matched
IN"
THE EAST
1943-1945
Americans did
in the West, as the
in the Pacific,
where they
achievement by breaking both the Japanese naval (JN 25b) and
Bletchley's
diplomatic (Purple) machine ciphers before the outbreak of the war. The joint Allied
triumph, successfully concealed from both enemies throughout the war, naturally prompts the query why,
enemy
examples. The answer
The Japanese, fleet in
secret internal messages
were nevertheless on occasion suprised by
is
for
that there are limits to the usefulness
is
of even the best intelligence
precisely demonstrated in different forms by each of these episodes.
example, disguised their intentions before Pearl Harbor by hiding their
the remoteness of the Pacific and imposing absolute radio silence
which moved
large-scale
- Pearl Harbor, Crete and the Ardennes offensive being the obvious
initiatives
system, and this
most
the Allies enjoyed such direct access to the
if
sent by their opponents, they
by preordained plan;
to their attack positions
alert
on
its
units,
though the Americans
were, they were thereby denied the intelligence which would have allowed them to anticipate attack. Before the
Ardennes the Germans
attack units. Nevertheless, primarily sufficient
warning to the
organisation
have
to
intelligence service
Allies
accordingly
imposed radio
of the attack they planned for
detected
on
silence
danger and
the
to launch an offensive
discounted
they
their
a truly sensitive intelligence
higher
alerted
authority.
Both the
and higher headquarters had, however, persuaded themselves
Germans were too weak 1944;
also
through troop movements, they unwittingly betrayed
the
on
the Ardennes front during
evidence
to
contrary
the
and
that the
December so
were
discountenanced.
The case of Crete
reveals a third
intelligence: the inability to act
German parachute distributed
the
May
and highly
frustrating limitation in the use
1941, Ultra
- the organisation which evaluated and
the
German
There
is
to fly in reinforcements
a fourth
to protect a source.
Coventry to be
(more
ironically) the
initial losses,
seized a
vital airfield
and swamp the defences.
and universal limitation on the usefulness of intelligence: the need
It
bombed
has been widely alleged, for example, that Churchill 'allowed' in
November
1940 because to have taken extraordinary defensive
measures against the attack would have revealed
now known
However, Freyberg, the
to concentrate counter-attack forces swiftly against
points of danger. As a result the Germans, despite heavy
which allowed them
from Enigma
identified
plan.
the island, lacked not only the troops but also
would have enabled him
of
warning because of disabling weakness. Before the
German order of battle and
commander on
transport that
clear
raw decrypts produced by Bletchley - had
intercepts both the British
landings in
on
that this interpretation
is false;
to the
Germans
the 'Ultra secret'.
It
is
although Churchill did indeed have advance
warning via Ultra of the Coventry raid, it was too short to enable defensive measures to be taken - which he would certainly have done, at whatever the risk of compromising Ultra,
had time been
available.
A more
telling accusation
is
that in the
the British did not validate their warnings to the Russians of the attack
by revealing the authenticity of the source. However,
500
weeks before Barbarossa
imminence of the German in
view of
Stalin's
wishful
RESISTANCE AND ESPIONAGE
thinking to the contrary and his desire to placate Hitler
would have plumbed
the Ultra secret
at
any
him of
cost, the betrayal to
the depths of insecurity. In this case, as in every
other where such a calculation had to be made, Churchill was unquestionably right to put the long-term security of the source above current advantage.
Despite the intrinsic and
enemy's secret
traffic,
artificial
limitations to the usefulness of Allied access to the
both Ultra and the American 'Magic' organisation were undoubtedly
responsible for major, even crucial, strategic success in the Second
World War. The
first
and most important was the victory of Midway, where knowledge of Japanese intentions allowed the Americans to position their inferior the
much
enemy
larger
World War, reversed the eventual
triumph.
intelligence of
Alamein and
In
tide
Rommel's strength and
later
whole
at
of carriers in such
in the Pacific
Ultra
theatre,
and
a
way
battle
as to
laid the basis for
supplied
destroy
of the Second America's
Montgomery with
vital
intentions both before and during the battle of
provided Alexander
intention to counter-attack
the
of advantage
European
the
fleet
Midway, the most important naval
force.
in
with timely warnings of the
Italy
German
the Anzio bridgehead - 'one of the most valuable decrypts of
war', according to
Ralph Bennett
in his
account of the role of Ultra in the
Mediterranean. Ultra intelligence also allowed Alexander correctly to time his subsequent break-out from Anzio and enabled General Jacob Devers to undertake his headlong pursuit of Army
Group G up
Rhone valley after the landing in Provence in August 1944, would not be opposed. Ultra's greatest contribution to the war in the West, however, occurred during the Battle of Normandy, when Bletchley provided Montgomery with information of day-today German strengths at the battlefront, of the effect of Allied air-strikes, such as that which destroyed the headquarters of Panzer Group West on 10 June, and eventually of Hitler's
safe in the
knowledge
order to counter-attack disclosure
which led
the
that this
at
Mortain against the flank of Patton's break-out into Brittany -
Army Group
to the destruction of
B's
armoured reserve and
climactic encirclement of the Westheer in the Falaise pocket. certainly the
most important which came
to
a
to the
The Mortain decrypts were
any general on any front throughout the
course of the Second World War.
Whether altered
the
its
Ultra 'shortened the war', as
course,
is
more
difficult to argue.
American codebreakers' success
fleet in
is
sometimes suggested, or even materially
There was no single Ultra triumph
in identifying
Midway
as great as
as the target for the
Japanese
June 1942, a genuinely tide-turning intelligence operation. Although the breaking of
the Shark key in
December 1942
very greatly contributed to the winning of the Battle of the
Atlantic in the following spring, against
it
must be
set the cost
of the B-Dienst's concurrent
success in reading the British naval convoy codes. Ultra did not
of the war
in the air,
much
influence the course
despite the insecurity of the Luftwaffe keys, and in the ground fighting
between the Germans and the Western
Allies
it
can never be said to have given the
advantage consistently to the eavesdropping side. That was because, as Clausewitz's
famous and accurate observation on combat reminds
501
us,
on
the battlefield 'friction' always
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1943-194S
intervenes between the intentions and achievements of even the best-informed general: accident, misunderstanding, delay, disobedience inevitably distort an enemy's plans so that,
whatever advance knowledge
his
opponent may have of them, he can never so
predisposition his troops and responses as to be sure of frustrating the enemy's actions; nor, because of 'frictions'
own
working
against him, can
he count on smoothly carrying out
counter-measures. Ultra reduced friction for the Allied generals; but
it
his
did not abolish
it.
If
we
shift
cryptanalysis
answer
is
the focus and ask whether in the spectrum of clandestine warfare
was more or
less valuable to the Allies
than the activity of the resistance, the
simple. Cryptanalysis was consistently and
The Second World War Ultra: but the costs
significance
was
in the
West could have been
of the former was heavy, and
slight.
The
its
immensely more valuable indeed.
won
without either the resistance or
material, as
cost of Ultra, by contrast,
was
opposed
trivial
to psychological
- the whole apparatus
employed only 10,000 people, including clerks and cryptographers - while its material value was considerable and its psychological significance inestimable. The proof of that comes from the German as well as the Allied side. Ultra sustained the confidence of the very few Western decision-makers who were privy to its secret in a way nothing else could have done. Twenty years after the war was over, when their German opponents discovered that their most secret correspondence had been read daily by the British and
Americans,
the)'
were struck speechless.
502
27 THE VISTULA
AND THE DANUBE destruction of Army
Group Centre had cast Germany's strategic position on the Eastern Front into rums. The military implications were grave enough. The remnants of Army Group Centre now stood on the line of the Vistula less than 400 miles from Berlin, with the great Polish plain at its back and no obstacle but the river Oder between it and the capital. On the Baltic coast Army Group North, now commanded by Ferdinand Schorner, one of Hitler's chosen 'standfast' generals, was threatened by the
The
Baltic
fronts'
thrust to Riga with encirclement in northern Latvia
'Courland pocket' as
it
was
OKH. From
called by
there the
and Estonia - the
army group could be supplied
only by sea, but Hitler would not allow the position to be abandoned because he insisted
on preserving free use of the Baltic to train the crews of his new U-boats. The physical damage the army had suffered in the summer battles was staggering. Between June and September the number of dead on the Eastern Front rose 627,000; total
when
losses in the west
were added
many
rose to nearly 2 million, or as
in
to 215,000
and of missing to
and the number of wounded included, the
casualties as the
army had suffered from the
beginning of the war until February 1943, including those of Stalingrad. By the end of 1944 106 divisions - a third of those in the order of battle - had
than the army had fielded on the eve of
had taken
same number
place, therefore, as the old,
but
was
now
divisions. Despite the rising output
been disbanded or
victory era in
September
to decree the formation of
new
rebuilt,
more
1939.
from the order of battle. His solution
Hitler resisted striking divisions that
its
to the massacre
divisions with the
to be designated 'people's grenadier' (Volksgrenadier)
of the
German arms
S03
industry,
which Speer raised
to
THE WAR
unprecedented heights
in
September
altogether could be
and
formed
on
THE EAST
men
bicycles.
Even so only
sixty-six
to replace the seventy-five infantry divisions lost in the west
the military salute was also abolished; instead 'Heil Hitler' with outstretched arm. Guderian, July,
accepted
from the
The
officer
this
and the
institution
Home
Army,
command
of which Hitler
menacing than the
who
replaced Zeitzler as chief of
of military 'courts of honour' to
alliance
The Russian triumph threatened the Hitler
between August 1940 and March
the river Prut to the delta of the
Danube
On
1941.
20 August the Second and Third
Army Group South Ukraine and
in five days.
The weight of the
burst across
attack
Romanian Third and Fourth Armies and the Romanians were panicked
fell
on
the
into changing
23 August King Michael staged a palace revolution in Bucharest, arrested Ion
Antonescu, 'national
of the
integrity
had so painstakingly constructed through the
Ukrainian Fronts opened an offensive against
On
staff after
strike suspects
of the outcome of Operation Bagration were even more
military ones.
whole complex Balkan
sides.
23 July
Plot. After
servicemen were required to give the
all
corps before the) were tried by the people's courts.
political implications
Tripartite Pact
mounted
Volksgrenadier divisions
had given to the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler. in the aftermath of the Jul)
20
were only 10,000
lacked anti-tank guns and
in 1939),
during 1944. They were raised within the
east
1943-1945
1944, the Volksgrenadier divisions
strong (divisions had contained 17,000 their reconnaissance battalions
IN
Hitler's
unit)',
Romanian
collaborator,
his
government with one of
Hitler
responded by bombing
and replaced
which included communists.
When
Bucharest on 24 August, the King declared war on Germany. In demonstration of the country's change of heart, but also to avenge a national grievance, the surviving elements
of the Romanian army
at
once invaded Hungary,
still
in Hitler's
camp,
to recover the
province of Transylvania which had been transferred to Hungary under the terms of the Tripartite Pact
of August 1940. The Russians would not
co-belligerency. Having already overrun Ploesti
and
its
at first
accept the
oilfields,
move
as
the jewel in the
an
act
of
crown of
economic empire, they entered Bucharest as conquerors on 28 August. Not until September did they concede an armistice, allowing Romania to retain Transylvania but
Hitler's
12
taking back the provinces of Bessarabia
and northern Bukovina which had been
their local
share of the spoils of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
Romania's defection provoked
Bulgaria's.
The
Bulgarians,
traditionally
the most
Russophile of Slavs, had been careful not to allow their accession to the Tripartite Pact
March
1941 to
commit them
basing and transit
facilities;
to
war
against Russia.
They had granted the
in
German army
they had taken their share of Yugoslavia and also sent
occupation troops to Greece; but no Bulgarian soldier had fought against the Red Army.
Indeed the existence since 1943 of country
made
a
a small
change of sides easier
anti-German partisan movement inside the
to arrange.
With the death of King Boris
in
August
1943 Hitler had been robbed of his most dependable Bulgarian supporter; the successor
explored the when itself from the German alliance. On
government, though rebuffed by the Western changing
sides,
knew
it
must disentangle
504
Allies
it
possibility of
the approach
THE VISTULA AND THE DANUBE
of the Red Army, however,
September - and took power. 150,000-strong Bulgarian
On
fiercely
its
October the Red Army marched into
18
army went over
The collapse of the German reconsider
to
its
front in the north
democratic - they had succeeded
Sofia
claim) they
War
had
halted. As early as January 1944 they
to
They were
they had regained at
the
end
had made approaches
to the Allies
that the Russian price for a separate
peace
high: a return to the 1940 frontier, the cession of Petsamo, centre of Finland's
mineral industry and
its
outlet to the Arctic in the Far North,
and
large
a
indemnity. The terms had then seemed too harsh; as Bagration developed they
look more
attractive.
During June the Finnish president, Risto
confronted with conflicting demands from Hitler and a
and the
(together with land east of Lake Ladoga to which they had an historic
through Washington but had been warned
would be
5
parliament even under
Once
one.
a territorial
during the Barbarossa campaign the territory they had been forced to concede
of the Winter
on
had already forced Finland
ideological allies oi Hitler.
in retaining their national
- and their quarrel with Russia was
tsarist rule
a truce
side.
The Finns had never been
position.
on 9
'Fatherland Front' proclaimed a national uprising
a
September, supplanted the government - which had already asked Russia for
separate
with
peace
Russia
(the
Ryti,
financial
came
he must either formally
Stalin:
German ultimatum)
or
to
was personally
capitulate
(the
reject
Russian
Under pressure from Marshal Mannerheim, effectively Finland's leader, Ryti gave Ribbentrop his assurance that Finland would not make a separate peace. However, Mannerheim had privately resolved to use this assurance to fight for time. During July he managed to blunt the Russian attack on Finland's fortified frontier until the retreat of Army Group North had drawn the Russian northern fronts westward into the Baltic states. Then on 4 August he assumed the office of President, revoked Ryti's commitment and opened direct negotiations with Moscow. On 2 September he broke relations with Germany and on 19 September signed a treaty with Russia whose terms were much as they had been in January. The most important differences were a halving of the size of the indemnity, offset by the grant of a naval base on the Porkala peninsula, near Helsinki, and a Finnish undertaking to disarm the German Twentieth Mountain Army in Lapland. As Mannerheim privately recognised, the Finnish army had neither the strength nor the the will to drive ultimatum).
the Twentieth
Army
out of the country into Norway, from which
it
was supplied, and the
operation was not completed until April 1945, and then only with Russian help. Despite the Finns' excellence as soldiers (they were alone allies in
regarding themselves and being regarded,
equals, even superiors, by late 1944 Finland
Hungary, on the
far
southern flank and next
was by contrast central
in
dictator,
for
man,
was peripheral
among as the
the
Wehrmacht's
Germans'
military
to Hitler's strategic crisis.
Romania and Bulgaria, The Hungarians too had a the service of the Habsburg
the firing line after
to the defence of the Reich's outworks.
reputation as excellent soldiers which had been
emperors - and
man
in rebellion
against
won
in
them. However, Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian
had made the mistake of committing them
505
to
Operation Barbarossa against the
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST 194M
Red Army, which they were not equipped to fight once the shield of Wehrmacht protection had been withdrawn from them. The collapse of Army Group South Ukraine (renamed Army Group South
now exposed them
September) and the defection of the Romanians
in early
to a Soviet thrust
which they lacked the power
their strong positions in the Carpathians.
Horthy hoped
that
to repel,
even from
he would be saved from
choosing between the Germans and the Russians by an Anglo-American advance from Yugoslavia.
Italy into
such
Not only had the
been deflected by
Allies
whom
manoeuvre; the Americans, with
a
he was
internal disagreement in
contact
informed him
in
August that he must make his
arrangements with the Russians. As soon
as
the
ambassador
in
Transylvania, he
the
Switzerland,
had no option but
end of September
unilaterally
to station
to
do
so.
soil.
his
delegation arrived in
change of
undermined the chances of doing so
German troops on Hungarian
Romanians attacked
A Hungarian
to negotiate terms for a
sides.
own
army
Moscow
in at
Horthy, however, had
successfully by allowing Hitler in
When
from
through their
March
the Russians heightened their pressure
on Horthy's delegates in Moscow by launching an attack into eastern Hungary towards Debrecen on 6 October, the occupation arm}' - reinforced by three Panzer divisions counter-attacked and blunted the advance. Hitler, moreover, had by
Horthy's impending treachery.
He was aware
and Second Armies, which were retreat;
On
he also suspected
15 October, therefore,
that
still
fighting
that
Army Group
South, to
Horthy was on the point of announcing
he authorised Skorzeny,
now
got
Horthy had issued orders
his expert in
Horthy's son and then confronted the dictator with
a
demand
make a
wind of
to his First a unilateral
change of sides.
such operations, to kidnap that
he transfer power
to a
on 16 October Horthy abdicated as Regent, and German troops took control of the whole o^ Budapest. The Second Ukrainian Front was by then only fifty miles from the Hungarian capital, but it was to remain safe in German hands for pro-German replacement.
several
Early
months.
Revolt in the Balkans Hitler
had meanwhile
satellites.
Slovakia,
also
ruled
quashed another attempt
since
October
1939,
in
the
at
defection
aftermath
among
his
eastern
of Czechoslovakia's
dismemberment, by Joseph Tiso, a signatory of the Tripartite Pact and a co-belligerent in the war against Russia, had been seething with internal discord since the spring. While the 'London' Czechs, legitimately the government in
exile,
looked
to a post-war settlement to
them to power, the dissident Slovaks, through the underground Czechoslovak Communist Party, were in contact with Moscow, which sponsored a small army in exile stationed on Russian territory. Part of the Slovak army of Monsignor Tiso's puppet state remained under German control on the Eastern Front; the rest, stationed at home, fell increasingly under patriot influence. A pro-Soviet partisan movement was also active in eastern Slovakia, towards which Operation Bagration had drawn the Fourth Ukrainian
restore
506
THE VISTULA AND THE DANUBE
Front
the beginning of August. At the
at
action. Liaising directly with the
end of August the pro-Soviet
partisans precipitated
Red Army and bypassing both the London Czechs and the on 25 August they initiated a national uprising, in
dissidents' 'Slovak National Council',
which they were joined by the home-based Slovak army, and looked
for
support to the
beyond the Carpathians. Their response was far more positive than it had been to Polish Home Army in Warsaw. They at once sent liaison officers and initiated an
Russians the
and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts
offensive by the First
also airlifted parts of the rest in the
Czech army
in exile
to
come
to the insurgents' rescue.
from Russia into Slovakia and embodied the
Ukrainian fronts fighting to cross the Slovak passes through the Carpathians.
However, pressure from without and within was not strong enough response Hitler organised to preserve Panzer and
XI,
were sent
to
man
his position in Slovakia.
Corps, was
still
security troops
battering against the pass,
and
for
in
overcome
Czechoslovak
I
to turn their
'free Slovakia'
murderous
was assaulted
at
(exile)
October. Meanwhile the
formed from ethnic
SS divisions
German) and the
14th Galizian (Ukrainian),
German army
divisions;
October the Dirlewanger and Kaminski brigades had also been brought
Warsaw
the
XXIV
corps,
anti-partisan operations in the eastern
counter-offensive, together with five
a
by the
until 6
fall
commitment. Two
minorities, the 18th Horst Wessel (racial
concentrated for
assisted
did not
it
which were so experienced
were being earmarked
theatre
to
Two German
the Carpathian position, including the key Dukla Pass. At
end of September the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army,
the
They
talents against the Slovaks.
Between
eleven points and by the end of the
were by
18
down from
18
and 20 October
month
the insurrection
The Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army and the I Czechoslovak Corps (commanded by General Ludwik Svoboda, whom the Russians would install as Dubcek's successor after the
was
extinct.
'Prague Spring' of 1968) suffered 80,000 casualties in the effort to rescue; almost
all
the insurgents
who
did not escape into the
come
to the insurgents'
died in combat or in
hills
concentration camps. In the
up
a
extreme south of his Balkan
defence than
in
Hungary and
theatre, Hitler
since the capitulation of the Italians in
weapons had
fallen into the
was
to
prove
less successful at
hands of the
resistance.
The Greek
whom SOE
homeland from
the Turks 120 years earlier.
infiltrated into the
Many of the
villages a
War of Liberation
in the 1820s.
who had
However, German
near which the resistance attacks took place were ferocious;
prosecution lawyer was to
British liaison officers
Greek islands and mainland were touched by
afterglow, seeing themselves as successors to the philhellenes patriots' side in the
had been righting done in the war to
partisans
bravely and doggedly against the occupiers, as their forefathers had liberate their
testify that 'in
Greece there are
a
at
their inhabitants forgotten.' Therefore
much SOE
effort
Byronic at
Nuremberg
thousand Lidices
the
[Lidice
trial
was
names unknown
was devoted
rather than encouraging the partisans; but the British liaison officers had not
507
a
fought
reprisals against the
the
the Czech village obliterated after the assassination of Heydrichj, their
and
shoring
The occupation of Greece had been crumbling September 1943, when at least 12,000 of their
Slovakia.
to restraining
been able
to
THE WAR
check violence between the
obeyed
Yugoslavia,
Greek government surrender of the
right
and
IN
left
THE EAST H4M94S
wings of the resistance movement, which,
in exile in Cairo.
whom
-
Italians
ELAS the Greek Communist Part), EDES The Germans restored and maintained order after treated with almost as
the)
partisans the}' caught - but, as their Balkan position
Greek islands (except the
as in
different authorities -
and Rhodes) from
for Crete
whole of Greece. As
the)
left
and the
war between ELAS and EDES broke
otit;
it
began
12
the
any
brutality as
to collapse, the)" evacuated the
September and then on
British
began
was
be quelled,
to
much
the
to arrive, the
first
at a tragic
October
12
round of a
civil
cost in British lives,
by the intervention of the 2nd Parachute Brigade and other formations against ELAS
at
Christmas.
Arm) Group E, which was
salvation,
Army Group F
in
the
German command
to find
its
Yugoslavia.
in
Greece and Albania, had
way through the
Ibar
and Morava
The sudden onset of the Third Ukrainian
supported by the Bulgarian Arm), forced
it
Meanwhile Arm) Group F was confronted by
a Soviet assault
the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade.
on
6 September,
fight
on
its
eastern flank
remarkable exercise
in negotiation
from weakness, Tito persuaded
civil
city.
German
soldiers
were
'Belgrade battalion',
which had fought the in the ranks.
Group ran
E,
rest
still
of Yugoslavia
now
which had incorporated
from the
killed
by
on
opened on
October and ended
14
and 9000 taken prisoner
lay F,
three-} ear partisan
in the
defence
on 22 October; of his war, only two of its original
open
to an extension of the Soviet offensive;
in
Balkans which gave Britain
a
Moscow
a strange division
However,
against
50 per cent share in Yugoslavia.
Horthy
in
in
mid-October
Stalin
of 'spheres of influence' in the
Soviet diplomacy lent this agreement force; but Stalin also
coup
Army
was holding an indefensible north-south flank which
outskirts of Belgrade to the Albanian frontier.
had agreed with Churchill
successful
Stalin
a joint assault
Tito paraded his Partisans through the streets as victors
members were The
at
administration in Tito's hands, once the
operational task was complete. The battle for Belgrade
of the
aimed
fly to Moscow from a British airfield on the Adriatic on which the Red Arm) would operate on Yugoslav
Belgrade but to withdraw them, leaving
15,000
now
to
28 September to agree to lend troops from the Third Ukrainian Front for
on 20 October;
Front,
desperate rearguard action.
a
The Third Ukrainian Front had crossed the Yugoslav border
prompting Tito
island of Vis to discuss the terms territory. In a
to
hope of up with
a single
valleys to link
An odd
streak of legalism in
had other
fish to fry. Hitler's
Budapest had destroyed the chance of making
a
quick
advance, by a negotiated armistice, into the Hungarian plain. The approach to Vienna, up
Danube valley, would now have to be fought for; the force it would require meant that Red Army could not afford to dissipate its strength in the mountains of central Yugoslavia, where conditions would put even the battered formations of Army Groups E and F on equal terms. On 18 October, therefore, the Stavka had ordered Tolbukhin to halt the Third Ukrainian Front west of Belgrade and turn its formations back to the Danube to
the
the
take part in the
coming
battle
of Hungary.
508
THE VISTULA AND THE DANUBE
now been
Hungary, however, had
and Second Armies) hijacked
when
South counter-attacked, and
on 29 October,
at Stalin's
reinforced and parts of the Hungarian army (First
on the German
to fight
side.
On
October Army Group
19
Malinovsky's Second Ukrainian Front began
express orders
'to
its
take Budapest as quickly as possible',
it
assault
found
German divisions in its path. The Russian advance reached the eastern suburbs on 4 November but was then halted; when the assault was resumed on 11 November a sixteenday battle ensued which left much of the city in ruins but still in German hands. By then the German front line, though withdrawn 100 miles since mid-October, rested from west twelve
on the strong defences of the
to east
which
Carpathians. Vienna, the prize
river Drava,
Lake Balaton and the flanks of the
remained secure 150 miles away along
Stalin sought,
the Danube.
The campaign separately
in
Hungary
thereafter took
on
On
advance into German}'.
Danube. By
31
made
a
feint
own and proceeded
city
its
to offer terms for a capitulation.
Stalingrad-style Panzer rescue.
He had
Hitler,
front,
of the Model type, and
Corps from Arm) Group Centre
city
during the next three weeks IV and in
attack
III
centre
was completely
German
however, had decided upon
a
the Sixth Army,
him with Hermann Balck, December had brought IV Panzer
to replace in late
to stage a counter-attack in concert with
which was already on the scene. The
rail,
city
commander of
dismissed the
Maximilian Fretter-Pico, on the Budapest
another by road and
The
inhabitants was intense, and the situation of the
and Hungarian defenders appeared hopeless.
'standfast' general
final
between Lake Balaton and the
January the Third Ukrainian Front was within seven miles of the
surrounded, the suffering of
quite
of the Carpathians for the
from the north-west, while Tolbukhin's Third
south of the
to the
and emissaries were sent forward
axis to
of its
far side
October Malinovsky's Second Ukrainian Front began an
5
offensive designed to encircle Budapest
Ukrainian Front
another
a logic
from the Red Army's preparations on the
by IV SS Panzer began on
III
Panzer Corps,
18 January 1945
and
Panzer Corps fought savagely, switching from one
an awful warning to Malinovsky and Tolbukhin of what
damage experienced German tank
could
soldiers
still
inflict
on
Soviet
formations
operating on stereotyped and predictable fixed lines of advance. By 24 January IV Panzer
Corps had driven
to within fifteen miles
of the
German perimeter
in
Budapest, and the
defenders could have broken out to safety had that been Hitler's wish. As during
December 1942, however, he wanted hope collapsed when IV Panzer Corps,
Manstein's winter thrust to Stalingrad in
the city to
be recaptured, not evacuated. This vain
after three
weeks of
frantic operations, ran out
of steam.
Within the perimeter, meanwhile, the Russians had brought up dense concentrations of 152-mm guns and Pest, the
when
203-mm
northern half of the
howitzers to reduce the city, Its
German
positions block by block in
garrison began to surrender en masse
on
they were trapped with their backs to the Danube. In Buda, Pest's twin
south bank, resistance held up fiercely until assault.
For
a
week
the
Germans
stuck
it
5
February,
city
when Malinovsky ordered
out. taking to the
509
15 January,
sewers to
on the a final
frustrate the Russian
THE WAR
advance,
by
but
13
IN
THE EAST 194M945
more room
February they had no
overwhelmed. The Stavka claimed
and taken 138,000 prisoners since 27 October;
is
it
known
Red Army's own undisclosed
1000 Hungarians escaped from Budapest. The
killed
and wounded may have equalled those of the enemy. There was to be one more
drew
however,
his last supplies
was
a far greater battle
Berlin. Since earl)-
Hungary,
battle fought in
of non-synthetic
oil.
785 Germans and
that only
some
Hitler
manoeuvre and were
for
have killed 50,000 German and Hungarian soldiers
to
at
By the time
Lake Balaton, from which it
opened on
White Russian and Konev's
First
15 February,
of the war
in preparation for the ultimate objective
February Zhukov's
losses in
First
itself:
Ukrainian
Fronts had been poised astride the river Oder, read)' to launch themselves into the climactic offensive as
On
requisite forces.
soon
as the Stavka
made
defined the attack plan and
January Hitler had
15
left
mountains (Amt 500) from which he had overseen the Ardennes offensive Reich Chancellery. For
all
his talk
sensed the approach of the
of secret weapons
final struggle
available the
the western headquarters in the Eifel
that
were
and was resolved
to
still
to return to the
to bring victor)',
be present on the
he
field in
person.
The road Hitler's
Rastenburg headquarters
war, was
now
begun on
15
in
East Prussia.
in East Prussia,
from which he had directed most of the
Russian hands. The Red Army's offensive north of the Carpathians had
September 1944 when the three
an attack on Schorner's contact with
to Berlin
Army Group
Baltic
and the Leningrad Fronts had opened
North, designed to cut
Army Group Centre and its lines Schorner commanded some thirty
divisions,
but lacked mobile forces with which to counter-attack.
slow the Russian advance, therefore, an eight-day
battle,
Riga
fell
to
it
was not able
Bagramyan's
it
disposed
Though
to disrupt
First Baltic Front.
completed the encirclement of Army Group North
coast
Courland)
in the
end of the war;
'Courland pocket', where
would
it
in January) to
his forces in Latvia.
Prussia
Its
improve
its
also
Baltic front's clearance
Konev's
First
(shortly
be renamed
to
against to
it.
Finland's
command Army
in
Memel, between
October and held out
until
of the approaches to East Prussia (which
had been
two
to
after
position by abandoning Estonia and concentrating
surrounded
assault. Plans for the great offensive
allotted the greater effort to the
October,
13
This breakthrough to the
removed
Third White Russian Front had actually entered on 17 August)
Berlin,
and on
four dependent divisions in the port of
and Lithuania, were
The
it
linger in pointless isolation until the
defection in September allowed Schorner (before he was
Group Centre
in well-fortified terrain,
army group was able
his
were fought by the Red Army
six separate battles
from
off in the Baltic states
of communication into Germany through
fronts
Ukrainian and the
laid
which
First
la)'
most
laid
it
in early
a unit
open
to
of the
major
November and
directly astride the route to
White Russian,
510
now
by the Stavka
East
January 1945.
command
of which
Stalin
THE VISTULA AND THE DANUBE
on Zhukov,
conferred directly
now
front
exceeded any German army group
greatly
controlled 163
of his proven
in testimony
in strength.
6500 tanks and 4700
divisions, 32,000 guns,
rifle
strategic
achievements. Each
Between them they or one-third of all
aircraft,
Red Army's tanks. Together they outnumbered the German formations opposite, Army Groups Centre and A, over twofold Soviet
current
infantry
strength
in infantry, nearly fourfold in
time in
first
and
half
armour, sevenfold
Wehrmacht had only
commanded by new
their defensive capabilities
faced in the west.
Army Groups Centre and
now
A,
formations were under strength,
aircraft; all their
depended
greatly
on the
'fortresses'
border towns - Konigsberg, Insterburg, Folburg,
now been
For the
sixfold in airpower.
Hans Reinhardt and Josef Harpe, disposed between them of
generals,
seventy-one divisions, 1800 tanks and 800
Silesian
and
in artillery
the war the Red Army had achieved both the human and material superiority
that thitherto the
and
the
which the Prussian and
Stettin, Kiistrin,
Breslau - had
so designated by Hitler.
The Stavka plan was
Zhukov
for
to lead off
down
the Warsaw-Berlin axis, while
Konev aimed for Breslau. Both offensives were to be direct power-drives against the German defences, eschewing manoeuvre, in what had now become the Red Army's distinctive, brutal and terrifying means of making war. Over a million tons of supplies were brought up to Zhukov's front alone in the days before the attack; they were carried in 1200 trains
and 22,000 of the American-supplied
six-by-six trucks
The
daily
requirement of each front was 25,000 tons,
Konev's offensive opened disposed artillery
Panzer
at a
on
less fuel
behind
12 January 1945
front.
and ammunition. a barrage fired
by guns
density of 300 to each kilometre of front - an earthquake concentration of
power. By the evening of the
Army
Austrians had
army
first
which were the backbone of
were stockpiled behind Konev's
the Soviet logistic system. Almost equal quantities
to a
first
day
depth of twenty miles,
made
their great
breakthrough
in 1915, but in the opposite direction.
way
his tanks
had broken the front of the Fourth
in exactly the in the
same sector
Gorlice-Tarnow
as the
Germans and
battle against the tsar's
Cracow, the great Polish fortress-monastery
open to Breslau and the industrial regions of Silesia, where Speer had concentrated clusters of German armaments factories out of range of the Anglo-American bomber force. Zhukov's offensive on the Warsaw-Berlin axis began two days later, behind another pulverising bombardment, from the Vistula bridgehead south of Warsaw. The city was quickly encircled, and inevitably decreed a 'fortress' by Hitler, but it fell on 17 January city,
was threatened; beyond
it
the
lay
before the reinforcements he had allotted
announced,
to the despair
it
could reach the defenders.
of his commanders both in the west and the
transferring the Sixth SS Panzer
Army,
just extricated
offensive, to the east: 'I'm going to attack the Russians
SS Panzer
Army
have to go little
is
off to Budapest! If
too.' This
we
start
On
20 January he
east, that
he was
from the debacle of the Ardennes
where they
an offensive
in
least
expect
it.
The
wild diversion of precious defensive resources demonstrated
he grasped both the Wehrmacht's growing
511
debility
Sixth
Hungary, the Russians
will
how
and the imperviousness of the
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1943-1945
Russians to subsidiary manoeuvres; the Ukrainian fronts, as events deal adequately with the Sixth SS Panzer Army's intervention, and
not
at all
On
deflected from their drive
on
Berlin.
decreed the creation of
21 January, again clutching at straws, Hitler
command
group, Vistula,
would prove, could
Zhukov and Konev were
of which he gave to Himmler (also head of the
though he was quite unfitted
a
new army
Home
Army),
command, in the belief that loyalty to the generalship. Army Group Vistula, positioned behind
to exercise military
Fiihrer might prove a substitute for
the threatened front, had almost
Volkssturm units - the militia
no troops except
too young or too old to serve in the arm)' which Hitler had
set
of Germans
up on 25 September under
Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party secretary.
The advance The
Volkssturm
would
shortly be fighting for
Ukrainian Front crossed the
Oder
at
arrival
Army
of the Red
en masse
towards any tenuous outlet to
Wehrmacht had done
in
German
territory.
Steinau; Rokossovsky's
which had attacked across the Narew on
The
Oder
to the
safety.
It
was
22 January Konev's
soil
provoked
a
come to the the snowbound
surface,
German
farms, villages
settlement in the east were
and towns
in a frantic trek
were evacuated from the port of sought rescue
at
Danzig,
Haff lagoon to reach
enemy
to the
it.
ended
as
whole
few days 800
a
2 million East Prussians
left
homes,
towards the German interior or the coast; 450,000
Pillau in the
next few weeks, while another 900,000
many of them trudging across the Many escaped, many did not. As
Red Army, has described
seized
roads in an agony of
urgency to put themselves beyond the reach of the Red Army's columns. In years of
Prussia.
stampede of refugees
submerged knowledge of what the
as if the
the east had suddenly
populations with terror and flung them on to
First
Second White Russian Front,
was by then deep into East
14 January,
on German
On
this terrible
frozen waters of the Frisches Professor John Erickson,
no
episode:
Speed, frenzy and savagery characterised the advance. Villages and small towns 7
burned, while Soviet soldiers raped those houses and .
.
.
some
fussily
mow down
homes decked
bedecked Nazi
at will
and wreaked an
atavistic
vengeance
in
out with any of the insignia or symbols of Nazism Party portrait
photograph would be the
the entire family amidst their tables, chairs and kitchenware.
signal to
Columns of
combined with groups of Allied prisoners uprooted from their camps, and no longer enslaved in farm or factory, trudged on foot or rode in farm carts, some to be charged down or crushed in a bloody smear of humans and horses by the juggernaut Soviet tank columns racing ahead with assault infantry astride the T-34s. Raped women were nailed by their hands to the farmcarts carrying their families. Under these lowering January skies and the gloom of late winter, families huddled in ditches or by the roadside, fathers intent on shooting their own children refugees,
slave labour
512
THE VISTULA AND THE DANUBE
COLLAPSE
The Red Army's
ON THE EASTERN FRONT
drive into East Prussia.
driven into eastern
By
the end of
Germany was
or waiting whimpering for what
seemed
barely
January 1945 the
50
tip of the salient
miles from Berlin.
the wrath of
God
to pass.
The
Soviet Front
command
finally
discipline
and the implementation of 'norms of conduct' towards the enemy
intervened, with an order insisting
on
the restoration of military
population. But this elemental tide surged on, impelled by the searing language of
roadside posters and crudely daubed slogans proclaiming 'the lair
of the Fascist
beast', a
this
and the land ahead
continuous incitement to brutalised ex-prisoners of
513
war
now
in the Soviet ranks or to the reluctant peasant conscripts
Red Army
in
march through the
its
None of the German army groups
Baltic states,
men
dragged into the
with pity for no one.
north of the Carpathians could stem
this
onrush; the
only impediment to Zhukov's and Konev's uninterrupted advance on Berlin was provided
by the attenuation of their
sumed
at
own
supplies,
which the enormous
artillery
preparations con-
the rate of 50,000 tons for each million shells fired, losses in the ranks - divisional
strengths in the
two
fronts averaged only
the 'Fuhrer fortresses'.
On
4000
at
Rokossovsky's front
the
end of January - and the
Memel
resistance of
held out until 27 January, Thorn
on Zhukov's and Konev's, Posen (Poznan) held until 22 February, Kiistrin until 29 March, Breslau until the day before the end of the war. The loss of other places brought the Red Army great propaganda sensation: on 21 January Rokossovsky's Second White Russian Front took Tannenberg, where a 'miracle' battle had saved East Prussia from the tsar in 1914, and from which the retreating Germans just managed to save the remains of the victor of that battle, Field Marshal Hindenburg, until 9 February',
Konigsberg
until mid-April;
and the colours of the regiments he had commanded (they hang
Bundeswehr
On
Officer Cadet School
27 January Konev's
First
at
relics
who had once pushed
Slav lands, held out to block or
punching westward towards
its
of the
memorial tomb.
camp of
operatives had not succeeded in
menace
frontier, so
many of them
fortresses
of
the tentacles of Germantum eastward into the
the lines of advance
which the Soviet
fronts
were
Berlin.
By the beginning of February, however, great conference of the
in the hall
of the victims - clothes, dentures, spectacles and playthings.
Meanwhile the strong places of Germany's eastern the Teutonic knights
his
Ukrainian Front stumbled on the extermination
Auschwitz, chief place of the Holocaust, from which
removing the pathetic
now
Hamburg), before blowing up
European war
at
as the Allied leaders
Yalta in
514
gathered for the
last
the Crimea, Zhukov's and Konev's fronts
A
fearsome salvo
by the Red Army's
fired
Organs' by
German
Katyusha
rocket launchers, dubbed 'Stalin
troops on the Eastern Front.
were firmly established on the
line of the Oder, ready to begin their final advance on The German army groups opposite them - now reorganised as Vistula and Centre, the latter commanded by the Fiihrer-dedicated Schorner - were shadows of their former selves. In East Prussia the Third Panzer Army was still active, and was to launch a brief Berlin.
counter-attack against the flank of the Russian concentration
February the Sixth SS Panzer
Army opened
Hitler's
on
15 February;
promised diversionary offensive
on
17
against
Tolbukhin's Third Ukrainian Front to the east of Lake Balaton in Hungary. But the sands
were
now
running out
fast for
the Wehrmacht.
On
13
February Dresden, the
last
un-
devastated city of the Reich and packed with refugees, but also stripped of anti-aircraft
guns to bolster the anti-tank screen on the Oder
bomber
assault
and burnt
sometimes quoted of 300,000 dead
The consequences of this
raid.
front,
is
grossly exaggerated,
attack, for
throughout Germany and gravely depressed offensive,
at least
life.
30,000 were killed in the
civilian
justification,
morale
though mounted with the
last
its
bombing became known months of the war. strategic
quickly
in the last
600 tanks
an uncommitted force, soon ran into immovable Russian defensive Yugoslavia was meanwhile bending
a British
Although the figure
which the champions of the
have never been able to advance a convincing military
The Lake Balaton
was overwhelmed by
to the ground, with appalling loss of
at Hitler's
lines.
disposal as
Army Group E
front back towards the bastion of
in
pro-German
The remnants of Army Group South gathered what strength they had left to bar the approaches to Vienna. But the crisis of the war hovered between Kiistrin and Breslau Croatia.
where, along the Oder and the Neisse, Zhukov's and Konev's fronts stood ready to race the
last forty-five
miles to Berlin.
515
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1^43-1945
28 CITY BATTLE
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN siege of cities
TheSecond World the thrust of flight
seems an operation
that
belongs to an earlier age than that of the
War, whose campaigns appear to have been exclusively decided by
armoured columns, the descent of amphibious landing
of bomber armadas.
however, are
Cities,
forces or the
geography of war
as integral to the
as great
An arm) - however well mechanised, indeed precisely because is mechanised - can no more ignore a city than it can the Pripet Marshes or the defile of the Meuse. On the Eastern Front the three 'cities of Bolshevism' - Leningrad, Moscow and rivers or
mountain
ranges.
it
Stalingrad -
which
Hitler
had marked out
brought one of his decisive campaigns to Calais,
as the targets
grief.
Dunkirk and the Ruhr complex
His
own
in the west,
advance had each designation of cities as fortresses of the
Ostheer's
Memel and
Koningsberg, Posen,
Breslau in the east - had severely hindered the progress of his enemies' armies towards the
heartland of the Reich. Capital
constructed
public
cities,
communications, storehouses of
army can construct
for the
with their maze of streets, dense complexes of stoutly
labyrinths
buildings,
fuel
and
of
and
underground
food, are military positions as strong as
any an
defence of frontiers, perhaps stronger indeed than the Maginot
Line or the West Wall, which merely tried to replicate in capital cities intrinsically
tunnels
sewers,
embody.
decision by default not to leave
it
artificial
Hitler's return to Berlin
thereafter,
more
ensured
on
form the
features that
16 January 1945,
that the last great siege
and
his
of the war,
would be Berlin's. The final moment at which he might have left Berlin, and over which he deliberately prevaricated, was his birthday, 20 April. 'I must force the decision here', he told his two shorter than Leningrad's but even
intense than Stalingrad's,
516
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
remaining secretaries on
was
Berlin
a stout
his birthday evening, 'or
place for a
last
stand.
It
down
go
righting.'
was unique among German
modern and planned. Hamburg, densely packed around
large,
burned
as if
by spontaneous combustion
Dresden had gone up
like tinder in
bombed throughout
the war,
in Jul)
its
1943; the fragile
port
and
being
cities in
on the
had
Elbe,
of
historic streets
February 1945. Berlin, though heavily and consistently
target. A complex of nineteenth- and on strong and deep cellars, and disposed at along wide boulevards and avenues which served as effective fire-breaks,
was
a
tougher
twentieth-century apartment blocks standing regular intervals
the city
had
about 25 per cent of
lost
its
Bomber Command during
built-up area to
of Berlin between August 1943 and February 1944. Yet
Battle
firestorm,
as
Hamburg and Dresden had done, nor had
it
its
the
had never suffered
essential
a
been
services
overwhelmed, and new roads had since been constructed. While the destruction of their dwellings had driven the ruins
left
many
behind were
At the heart of the
formidable military obstacles
and deeper extension of an
rooms,
lay
air-raid shelter
dug
end of
in 1936.
It
bunker
Hitler's
The bunker was
1944.
a
contained eighteen tiny
55 feet under the Chancellery garden, had independent water, electricity and
air-conditioning supplies and
switchboard and
its
own
copiously
stocked
competely
self-sufficient.
communicated with
radio link.
storerooms.
his after-dinner
It
also
For anyone
had
the outside world through a telephone
own
its
who
liked
at
and
kitchen, living quarters
underground,
living
Although Hitler had spent extended periods of the war
and semi-subterranean surroundings, air;
the
at
city,
as the buildings left standing.
moreover, beat the pulse of Nazi resistance.
city,
had been constructed under the Reich Chancellery larger
accommodation or out of the
Berliners into temporary
as
Rastenburg and Vinnitsa, he
felt
was
it
in spartan
the need for fresh
walks had been favourite occasions for his monologues.
On
16 January,
however, he descended from the Chancellery into the bunker and, apart from two
on 25 February and
excursions,
accommodation
15
March, and occasional
upstairs, he did not leave
it
prowls about
for the next 105 days.
The
old
his
last battles
of the
Reich were conducted from the bunker conference room; so too was the Battle of Berlin. Berlin did not have
of uneasy peace at
its
own
garrison.
Throughout the war, except
for the brief period
between the French armistice and Barbarossa, the German army had been
the front; the units of the
Home Army
which remained within the Reich performed
recruitment or training functions. Inside the capital, the only unit of operational value was the Berlin
Guard
Battalion, out
of which had grown the
figured largely in the suppression of the July Plot
However, the bulk of Berlin's defenders was back from the Oder on the 320,000, to
and
it
oppose nearly
3
and was
men
in
to fight in the siege
to be supplied by
capital. Its strength at the
million
Grossdeutschland Division.
Army Group
of
had
It
Berlin.
Vistula as
it
fell
beginning of the siege was about
Zhukov's, Konev's and Rokossovsky's fronts,
comprised the Third Panzer and Ninth Armies. The most substantial force within
Army Group
Vistula
was LVI Panzer Corps, containing the 18th Panzergrenadier and SS
Nordland divisions, as well as fragments of the 20th Panzergrenadier
517
and 9th Parachute
THE WAR
IN
THE EAST
1943-1945
Divisions and the recently raised Miincheberg Division; Miincheberg belonged to a
on
collection of 'shadow' formations, based
military schools
without military experience. To them could be added police, anti-aircraft
French SS
and SS
units;
among
and reinforcement
units,
motley of Volkssturm, Hitler Youth,
a
the latter was the Charlemagne Assault Battalion of
men and a detachment of the SS Walloon Division, formed from pro-Nazi commanded by the fanatically fascist Leon Degrelle, the man Hitler is have said he would have liked for a son, and who would lead in a fight to the
French Belgians alleged to
it
end over the
ruins of the Reich Chancellery.
During the
last
weeks of March and the
of April Zhukov's and Konev's fronts
first
assembled the force and supplies they would need accumulated 7 million
shells to
supply his
295 guns to each attack kilometre; Konev,
artillery,
on
for the assault
which was
who needed
to
the
be massed
city. at a
Zhukov
density of
to capture assault positions across
the river Neisse from which to launch his offensive, had concentrated 120 engineer and thirteen bridging battalions to seize footholds,
and 2150
While Zhukov and Konev were preparing
aircraft to
cover the operation.
for the great assault,
Malinovsky opened the drive out of central Hungary on Vienna.
On
columns began
plain,
their race
German armoured
northward across the wide Danubian
brigades which could put
no more than seven
1
Tolbukhin and April their tank
brushing aside
to ten tanks in the field.
By 6 April Tolbukhin's spearheads had entered the western and southern suburbs of Vienna and on 8 April there was intense fighting for the fanatically,
with
total
disregard
for
the
city centre.
of the
safety
Local SS units fought
monuments
they
made
their
strongpoints. Point-blank artillery duels broke out around the buildings of the Ring, there
was had
fierce fighting in the
Graben and the Kartnerstrasse
resisted the Turkish siege of 1683,
totally
in the heart
of the old
which
city
and the Burgtheater and the Opera House were
burnt out. Miraculously the Hofbarg, the Albertina and the Kunsthistorische-
museum
survived; but
when
the survivors of the
German
garrison eventually dragged
themselves northward over the Danube across the Reichsbriicke on great treasure-houses of
European
13 April
one of the
burning and devastated in acres behind
civilisation lay
them.
Crossing the Rhine In the west too the great cities of the Reich
were
were aligned along the west bank of the Rhine south the Canadian
First,
First,
the
last
of the
Eifel,
still
on
First,
the far bank of the
separated from the Rhine by the
but both succeeded in driving deep corridors to the river by 10
March. Eisenhower's plan for the Rhine crossing consisted of a deliberate assault on front,
armies
American Ninth,
facing the Black Forest
Third and Patch's Seventh Armies were
difficult terrain
falling to Allied attack. Eight
the beginning of March, from north to
Allied First Airborne, British Second,
Third and Seventh and French river. Patton's
now
at
with the heaviest effort to be
made
in the
518
a
wide
north by the Canadian, British and
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
American Ninth and
The
Ruhr.
British
Armies, aimed
First
Second
encircling the great industrial region of the
at
American
and
Ninth
Armies'
codenamed
operations,
and Grenade, were vast and spectacular offensives involving large numbers of amphibious craft, massive air and artillery preparations and the dropping of two divisions of the Allied Airborne Army behind the German defences on the east bank respectively Plunder
of the
river.
They began on 23 March and were
Army now contained strength of
the Westhcer
was only twenty-six
The evolution of Eisenhower's
On
event.
7
lightly
opposed; the Allied Liberation
and numbered 4 million men, while the
eighty-five divisions
divisions.
however, had already been altered by
plan,
March spearheads of the US 9th Armoured
exploited, but
Main
places, in the
command
a large scale.
in the theatre
On
inevitable penetration of
March
10
Italy
a
at first
be
their
on
headlong thrust into
it
First
the
west with
had relieved Rundstedt of supreme
third
and
last
dismissal)
and replaced him
successfully contained the Anglo-
now
deflect the
on
11
into northern
Germany, aiming towards
Armies proceeded with the encirclement of the Ruhr
forcing the surrender of 325,000
to within thirty miles of
the evening of
position in
German soldiers and driving suicide. At the same time Patton's Third Army was embarking southern Germany which at the beginning of May would have
on 1 April, commander, Model, to
it
could not
Germany's western provinces by the seven Allied armies. While
Hamburg, the US Ninth and
On
Remagen below
at
change of commanders could not
the British and Canadian armies pressed
a
Hitler
where he had so
American drive up the peninsula; but
and completed
It
confluence with the river
at its
Wehrmacht
was the old warrior's
(it
with Kesselring, brought from
carried
Ruhr and
Mainz, thus threatening the whole
envelopment on
the far side.
Patton's Third
two widely separated
at
at
chance
Army established another bridgehead by Oppenheim. The German defences of the Rhine were therefore
on 22 March
surprise assault near
broken
on
to establish a bridgehead
it
a
Division, belonging to the First
Army, had found an unguarded railway bridge across the Rhine Cologne and had rushed
real
both Prague and Vienna.
US Ninth Army reached
April the
the river Elbe, designated the
previous year as the demarcation line between the Soviet and Western occupation zones in
Germany. At Magdeburg the 2nd Armoured Division seized
Elbe and next day the 83rd Division established another
at
they were going to Berlin, since the 83rd Division was only its
bridgehead on 14 April.
misled. Eisenhower was
American forces
Word
swiftly
bound by
came down
the
a
bridgehead across the
Barby; their soldiers believed fifty
miles away after enlarging
however,
line,
that they
were
the inter-Allied agreement, according to which his
in the central sector
would
stay
where they were, while the
British
and
Canadians continued to clear northern Germany and the southernmost American and
French armies overran Bavaria and occupied the suggested the Germans might be organising to
be
left It
exclusively to the
was
not,
territory in
a 'national
redoubt'.
which
Allied intelligence
The capture
of Berlin
was
Red Army.
however, to be
a
simple operation of war, but
519
a
race
between
military
ENGR C W 988 TDWY CO 998 TWPf COJ
•29\ . .
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
November
In
rivals.
adviser, senior
the
army
Red Army's
1944 Stalin had promised staff officer
victories
April, at a Stavka
meeting
in
Moscow devoted first
General Staff posed the question
how
final
a
forty miles
more
difficult
on
pencil line
of the
city.
than
fronts
jumped
architect of
to ensuring that the Soviets
into the Reich capital, General A.I.
the demarcation line
it
need
1
and not the
Antonov of the
between Zhukov's and Konev's
be. Stalin listened to the
to
make
the
argument and then,
the situation map, designated their approach routes to within
Thereafter, he said,
— The two
personal military
be drawn. To exclude Konev from the drive on Berlin would be
operation
drawing
as his
- that he should have the privilege of taking Berlin. Then on
Western powers would be the fronts should
Zhukov - who
and operational commander was the principal
The
off across the
'Whoever breaks
fall
Oder on
16 April.
first,
let
him
take Berlin.'
—
of Berlin
leading the assault went to Chuikov's Eighth Guards
in
On
Zhukov's front the honour of
Army
(formerly the Sixty-Second
whose soldiers had sworn an oath to fight without thought of retreat in the coming battle. German resistance was particularly strong in their sector, however, and at the end of the day it was Konev's front which had made greater progress. On 17 April Konev continued to make the faster advance, closing on the Spree, Berlin's river, and persuaded Stalin by telephone that he was now better placed to open the assault on the city from the south, rather from the direct eastern route on which Zhukov's armoured columns were labouring against fierce opposition by German antitank teams. Zhukov now lost patience with his subordinate commanders and demanded that they lead their formations against the German defences in person; officers who showed themselves 'incapable of carrying out assignments' or 'lack of resolution' were Army, which had defended
Stalingrad),
threatened with instant dismissal. This warning produced
a
sudden and notable increase
the pace of advance through the Seelow heights. By the evening of 19 April Zhukov's
had cracked
all
three lines of defences between the
Oder and
Berlin
in
men
and stood ready
to
assault the city.
Rokossovsky's Second White Russian Front was
now
aiding Zhukov's advance by
German defenders of the lower Oder, where their defences still held, from the north. Zhukov was more concerned by the urgent advance of Konev's front through Cottbus, on the Spree, to Zossen, the headquarters of OKH, since threatened to take the capital's fashionable suburbs from the south. On the evening of 20 April, when Konev ordered his leading army 'categorically to break into Berlin tonight', Zhukov brought up the guns of the 6th Breakthrough Artillery Division and began the bombardment of the pressing the
it
streets
of the
capital
Above: Troops
of the Third Reich.
of the British 8th Airborne Division advancing on the eastern
Rhine on 25 March 1945
after landing
which the
by
glider. Left:
logistics are large
and the manner
521
bank of
the
Doing things the American way, laconic.
in
THE WAR
On
20 April Hitler celebrated his
bunker, leaving
it
briefly to inspect
IN
THE EAST
fifty-sixth
1943-1945
birthday with bizarre solemnity in the
an SS unit of the
Frundsberg Division
and
to decorate a
squad of Hitler Youth boys, orphans of the Allied bombing raid on Dresden,
who were
capital. This was to be his last public appearance. His power over the Germans nevertheless remained intact. On 28 March he had dismissed Guderian as chief of staff of the German army and replaced him with General Hans Krebs, once military attache in Moscow and now installed in the bunker at his side; soon the Fuhrer would dismiss others who had managed to make their way to the bunker to offer their
defending the
congratulations as
head of the
more 'flying
on SS.
his birthday, including Goering, as
impressively, there
was no
courts martial' which had
continue the
command
fight for the
lack of
begun
Germans, whether or not intimidated by the to
thirty
miles
hang deserters from lampposts, ready
to
one of
his
Nazi regime. Keitel and Jodl, intimates of
conferences throughout the war,
Fiirstenberg,
head of the Luftwaffe, and Himmler,
There would be no lack of Germans willing to carry out these orders;
north
of Berlin
left
the bunker
and
on 22
conveniently
ever)'
April to take refuge at close
to
Ravensbruck
concentration camp, where a group of so-called Prominenten, well-connected foreign
Hitler celebrates his 56th birthday, tweaking the cheeks of the boy defenders of the Third
Reich in the rubble-choked garden of the Chancellery.
522
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
prisoners,
were held
Grand Admiral, went
as hostages. Donitz, the
the Baltic, immediately after his
interview with the Fiihrer
last
to Plon, near Kiel
on
21
April;
transferred naval headquarters there during March. Speer, chief of war industry,
went on 23
April; other visitors
included Ribbentrop,
Julius Schaub, his naval representative
physician Dr
Theodor Morell,
still
came and
his Foreign Minister, his adjutant
Admiral Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, and
whom many
on
he had
his personal
inner circle believed had secured his
in the
privileged place by dosing Hitler with addictive drugs.
A few
make their way to the bunker, commander of the Luftwaffe, General Robert Ritter von pilot, Hanna Reitsch, who succeeded in landing on the
others actually overcame great danger to
including Goering's successor as
Greim, and the celebrated East-West Axis in
up
a
test
while outside the bunker the garrison of Berlin kept
a training aircraft,
ferocious struggle against the encroaching Russian formations throughout the
beween 22
man who wants may
On
the
go!
stay here' -
I
morning of 21
units following
week
day on which Hitler definitively announced his refusal to leave - 'Any
April, the
April,
and
his suicide
on 30
April.
Zhukov's tanks entered the northern suburbs, and the
them were regrouped
for siege warfare: Chuikov,
who had
fought the
Battle of Stalingrad, knew what was necessary. Assault groups were formed from a company of infantry, supported by half a dozen anti-tank guns, a troop of tank or assault
guns, a couple of engineer platoons and a flamethrower platoon. According to the theory
of siege warfare, assault weapons were used to blocks, into
which the
blast or
burn
down
Overhead the heavy
infantry then attacked.
resistance in the city artillery
and rocket-
launchers threw crushing salvoes to prepare the way for the next stage, house-to-house fighting.
heavy
Medical teams stood close in the
casualties,
not only from gunshot
and the collapse of
On
21 April,
teleprinter centre
at
street fighting
rear;
short range but also
produces exceptionally
from
falls
between storeys
debris.
Zossen
fell
into the
hands of Konev's
receiving messages from
still
unconquered Germany. The next day advance into central
Berlin.
army
front,
units
its
all
elaborate telephone and
over what remained of
Stalin finally delineated the thrust lines for the
Konev's sector was aligned on the Anhalter railway
station, a
would be 150 yards away from the Reichstag and Hitler's bunker. Zhukov, whose troops were already dug deep into the city's streets, was to be the 'conqueror of Berlin' after all, as Stalin had promised the previous November. position which ensured that his vanguard
However, German
demanded
resistance
was
the whereabouts of the
still
stiffening.
two surviving
From
his
bunker
Hitler constantly
military formations nearest the city,
General Walther Wenck's Twelfth and General Theodor Busse's Ninth Armies. Although
he
railed at their failure to
come
to his rescue,
both were fighting hard from the west and
south-east to check or throw back the Soviet advance. Nevertheless by 25 April
Zhukov had succeeded unprecedented force centre,
wheel
to
Konev massed to wheel,
in encircling the city
reduce resistance within
artillery at a
Konev and
from south and north and were assembling it.
For the
final stage
of the
density of 650 guns to the kilometre,
assault
literally
on the almost
and the Soviet 16th and 18th Air Armies had also been brought up to drive
523
THE ENCIRCLEMENT OF BERLIN
Magdeburg #
Schwartzheide
—H^—
—— I
I
------
—
B^^ —— ^—
^^^^
Key Front
line 16 April
^V
1945
Russian attacks 16 - 18 April
'^
Coidicza
Front
line 18 April
Russian attacks 19 April - 8
Front
line
German
8
May
May
/
>•
^^
Army Group
Kamenz
VA-.-^ \ )
.Dresden
Centre p,rna
(Schorner)
•
counter-attacks
Surrounded German pockets
,^,'
Berlin defence line
^1 524
r
.b
V
^'
(-•
*
L
/ Sudeten Mts
CZECHOSLOVAKIA ,
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
away the remnants of the Luftwaffe Tempelhof, the inner Berlin
via
still
trying to fly munitions into the perimeter, either
on
airport, or
which Greim and Reitsch made
avenue of the East-West Axis (by
to the great
and eventual departure)
their spectacular arrival
in the city
centre.
On
26 April 464,000 Soviet troops, supported by 12,700 guns, 21,000 rocket-launchers
and 1500
tanks, ringed the inner city ready to launch the final assault
circumstances of the inhabitants were
huge
the
concrete
impervious
dominated the without
where
cellars,
became
the
rapidly
the
interrupted
and gas supplies and sewerage;
electrical
behind
to
while
water,
bombardment had
relentless
The
Food was running
was
too
siege.
almost
rest,
taken
conditions
living
squalid.
as
so
short,
the
had
of the
Tens of thousands had crowded into
which
explosive,
centre;
exception,
frightful.
towers',
'flak
high
to
now
the
troops,
fighting
moreover,
ranged those of the second echelon,
many
released prisoners of war with a bitter
Germans of any
personal grievance against
who
age or sex,
vented their hatred by
and murder,
rape, loot
By 27
April,
when
a pall
of smoke
from burning buildings and the heat of
combat rose
a
thousand
the area of the city
had been reduced
still
feet
in
to a
above
A
Berlin,
German hands strip some ten
broad smile from General Chuikov (centre), the hero
of Stalingrad
Berlin as
and
in at the
commander
death during the Battle of
of Eighth Guards
Army.
miles long and three miles wide, running in
an east-west direction. Hitler was demanding the whereabouts of Wenck; but
had
failed
to
break through, as had Busse's Ninth Army,
Manteuffel's Third Panzer
Army were withdrawing
Charlemagne Division,
Socialist
revolution
Walloons,
as well as Degrelle's
tossed into the environs of the bunker.
found themselves
to the west. Berlin
units - Baits,
by remnants, including shreds of foreign SS
On
fighting
for
its
was
of
now defended
and Frenchmen from the
whom
28 April these
Wenck
while the remnants
the chaos of fighting had
last fanatics
of the National
government buildings
Wilhelmstrasse, the Bendlerstrasse and near the Reich Chancellery
itself.
in
the
Professor John
Erickson has described the scene:
The
Tiergarten, Berlin's
famous zoo, was
broken, battered animals. The
a
nightmare of flapping, screeching birds and
'cellar tribes'
525
who dominated
the
life
of the
city crept
THE WAR
and crawled about, but adding to
sharing a
life,
little
stopped and the
IN
THE EAST
1^43-1^45
to the horror of these tribalised
warmth and
communities clinging
desperately improvised feeding,
when
the shelling
through the houses and across the squares,
assault troops rolled
there followed a brute, drunken, capricious
mob
of rapists and ignorant plunderers.
Where the Russians did not as yet rampage, the SS hunted down deserters and commands hanged simple soldiers on the orders of young, hawk-faced officers who brooked no resistance or excuse. .
.
.
lynching
On cellery it
the
same
da)"
German defenders of the
the
and the Reichstag
tried to
hold off the northern Russian thrust into
had been designated, by blowing the Moltke bridge over the
damaged but did not destroy ness.
There then followed
ler's
house', as the Russians
29 April the fighting was
it,
and
it
was rushed
dubbed than
a
it
earl)-
river Spree.
this 'citadel', as
The demolition
next morning under cover of dark-
the Ministry of the Interior building
a fierce battle for
less
around the Reich Chan-
central area
'Himm-
- and shortly afterwards for the Reichstag. Early on
quarter of a mile from the Reich Chancellery, which
was being demolished by heavy Russian cratered garden Hitler was enacting the
shells,
last
while SS feet beneath the surface of the
decisions of his
life.
He
spent the
first
part of
the day dictating his 'political testament', enjoining the continuation of the struggle against
Bolshevism and Jewry, and he then entrusted copies of this to reliable subordinates
were ordered
to
smuggle them through the
fighting lines to
OKW
who
headquarters, to Field
Marshal Schorner and to Grand Admiral Donitz. By separate acts he appointed Schorner to
succeed him
commander-in-chief of the German army and Donitz
as
Donitz's headquarters
at
he would remain there
as
head of
state.
Plon thus became the Reich's temporary seat of government, and
until 2
May,
when he
transferred to the naval
academy
at
Miirwik,
near Flensburg, in Schleswig-Holstein. Hitler also dismissed Speer, for recently revealed acts
of insubordination
in refusing to carry
Goering and Himmler from the Nazi
promised succession
out a 'scorched earth' policy, and expelled
Party,
the former for daring to anticipate his
to Hitler's place, the latter for having
approaches to the Western
Allies.
He had
of the Luftwaffe and specified eighteen other military and in the political testament.
He
also married Eva Braun,
April, in a civil
ceremony performed by
Volkssturm unit
defending the
Hitler until the
had not
a Berlin
slept during the night
meeting was
political
who had
municipal
appointments
arrived in
to
Donitz
the bunker on
official hastily recalled
from
15
his
'citadel'.
afternoon of 29 April.
o'clock, but the
made unauthorised peace von Greim commander
already appointed Ritter
He
of 28/29 April and retired to his private quarters
attended the evening conference, which began
a formality, since the
at
ten
balloon which supported the bunker's
down that morning and the telephone switchboard no longer communicated with the outside world. General Karl Weidling, the 'fortress' commander of Berlin, warned that the Russians would certainly break through to the radio transmitting aerial had been shot
Chancellery by
1
May, and urged that the troops remaining
526
in action
be ordered to break
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
THE FALL OF BERLIN
The Battle of
Berlin: the Russians
advanced not only through the
through courtyards, basements and buildings. In city,
this fashion
although at heavy
out of Berlin. Hitler dismissed the possibility.
own
nurses, cooks -
men
was
but also
cost.
clear that
he was committed to
his
end.
During the night of 29/30 April he took ies,
It
city's streets
they secured entire blocks oi the
who
had continued
- adjutants, party functionaries and
30 April, attended his cellery,
last
his farewells
to attend officials.
situation conference, at
him
He
from the
women
- secretar-
weeks, then from the
slept briefly in the early
morning of
which the SS commandant of the Chan-
Wilhelm Mohnke, reported the progress of the
527
first
in the last
fighting
around the building, and
THE WAR
THE EAST 194M
IN
then adjourned for lunch with his two favourite secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge,
who had
spent the long
months with him
Rastenburg and Vinnitsa. They ate
at
noodles and salad and talked sporadically about dogs; Hitler had
and inspected the corpses
self,
Hitler,
remained
just
had
his
and four pups destroyed with the poison he intended
Alsatian bitch, Blondi,
to assure himself that
him-
now
Frau
worked. Eva Braun,
it
cherished
to use
her quarters; then about three o'clock she emerged to join Hitler in
in
shaking hands with Bormann, Goebbels and the other senior
members of the entourage
who remained
in the
bunker. Hitler then retired with her into the private quarters - where
Frau Goebbels
made
a
gaden - and
brief
and
he escape to Berchtes-
hysterical irruption to plead that
few minutes, measured by the funeral party which waited outside,
after a
gether they took cyanide. Hitler simultaneously shot himself with
An hour
of Zhukov's
earlier soldiers
belonging to the
front,
to-
a service pistol.
1st Battalion,
756th Rifle
Regiment, 150th Division of the Third Shock Army, had planted one of the nine Red Vic-
army by its military soviet) on the second whose capture would symbolise the end of the
tory Banners (previously distributed to the
floor
of the Reichstag, chosen
siege
of
Berlin.
The building had
Russian guns of 152
Combat within
just
been brought under
mm and 203 mm; but
the building raged
all
Yegorov and Meliton
its
German
direct fire
garrison was
afternoon and evening until
men
allowed two Red Arm)
a final assault
hail
as the point
of the
intact
and
at a little after
fighting.
ten o'clock
Battalion of the 756th Regiment, Mik-
1st
Kantaria, to hoist their
by eighty-nine heavy still
Red
Victory Banner
on the
Reichstag's
dome.
The bodies of Hitler and a shell crater in the
his wife
had by then been incinerated by the funeral party
Once
Chancellery garden.
in
the flames, kindled with petrol brought
from the Chancellery garage, had died down the remains of the bodies were buried
in
another shell crater nearby (from which they were to be disinterred by the Russians on 5 May). Shells were in
all
the it
the
government buildings
same time
as Hitler
important to
could be
garden and
falling in the
made
make for
in the Chancellery area,
in the 'citadel'.
nominated Donitz
and
fighting
was raging
Goebbels, appointed Reich Chancellor
him
to succeed
as
head of state, nevertheless
at
felt
contact with the Russians to arrange a truce so that preparations
peace
talks,
which, in the deluded atmosphere prevailing in the bunker,
he believed were possible. Late
in the
evening of 30 April
the nearest Russian headquarters, and early
colonel was sent as emissary to
a
on the morning of 1 May General Krebs,
since
March the army chief of staff, but formerly military attache in Moscow (at the time of Barbarossa) and a Russian-speaker, went forward through the burning ruins to treat with 28
the senior Soviet officer present.
Guards Army, but
who two
It
was Chuikov,
years earlier
now
the
commander of
the Eighth
had commanded the Russian defenders
in the
siege of Stalingrad.
A
strange four-sided conversation developed.
connected by telephone
to
Zhukov.
porting,' the general said. 'General
who
in turn
spoke to
of Infantry Krebs
528
Chuikov heard Krebs out and was then
is
here.
Stalin in
He
Moscow. 'Chuikov
re-
has been authorised by the
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
German ask
authorities to hold talks with us.
you
to
inform Comrade
and Admiral Donitz. however,
.
.
ended
states that Hitler
power
Stalin that
Krebs suggests
.
He
is
now
a cessation
would be ready
to treat with Hitler's successors as if they
life
by suicide.
I
hands of Goebbels, Bormann
in the
of military operations
Bormann and Goebbels, remained deluded by
like
his
were
at
once.' Krebs,
the belief that the Allies
legitimate inheritors of the
authority of a sovereign government. Stalin tired quickly of the conversation, declared
abruptly that the only terms were unconditional surrender and sisted a
little
went
to bed.
Zhukov
per-
longer but then announced that he was sending his deputy, General Sokolov-
and broke off communication. Sokolovsky and Chuikov between them engaged
sky,
interminable parleys with Krebs,
who had
murky were recent developments
in the
difficulty in
bunker (with which he communicated twice by
runner). Eventually Chuikov's patience ran out. In the early afternoon of
new government's powers were
Krebs that the that Hitler
is
dead, that
Himmler
is
in
establishing his credentials, so
a traitor
and
1
May he
told
limited to 'the possibility of announcing to treat with three
governments - USSR,
- on complete capitulation'. To his own forces Chuikov sent the order: 'Pour no more talks. Storm the place.' At 6.30 pm on 1 May every Soviet gun and rocket-launcher in Berlin opened fire on the unsubdued area. The eruption was signal enough to those remaining in the bunker that hopes of arranging a succession were illusory. About two hours later Goebbels and his wife - who had just killed her own six chil-
USA and England on the
shells ...
dren by the administration of poison - committed suicide to Hitler's grave. Their bodies
of the bunker party, underlings
rest
as well as
made
themselves into escape parties and
what they hoped was
their
grandees like Bormann, now organised way through the burning ruins towards
safety in the outer suburbs.
Meanwhile the Soviet troops - under-
standably reluctant to risk casualties in what were clearly the Berlin - pressed
2
inward behind continuous salvoes of artillery
May LVI Panzer Corps
mandant of the
Chancellery garden close
in the
were more perfunctorily cremated and buried nearby. The
last fire.
transmitted a request for a ceasefire. At 6
Berlin 'fortress', surrendered to the Russians
minutes of the siege of Early
am
on the morning of
Weidling, the com-
and was brought
to Chuikov's
headquarters, where he dictated the capitulation signal: 'On 30 April 1945 the Fuhrer took his left
own
life
and thus
it
is
that
we who remain
alone. According to the Fiihrer's orders,
Berlin, in spite tion,
of the
fact that
him an oath of loyalty you, German soldiers, were to fight on - having sworn
ammunition had run out and
which makes further resistance on our
part senseless.
in spite
My
of the general
are for
situa-
orders are: to cease
re-
sistance forthwith.' In fire
on
John Erickson's words:
Berlin.
A
'At 3
pm
great enveloping silence
on the afternoon of 2 May fell.
Soviet guns ceased to
Soviet troops cheered and shouted, breaking
out the food and drink. Along what had once been Hitler's parade route, columns of
Overleaf: The Red Flag
flies
over the Reichstag.
The Red Army
the Battle for Berlin.
529
lost
over
300,000 men
in
I
"
^^^ ^^^^^.
g ~,
'
J
*
I f
*
||rv
<^
^
-V£ii^-w
THE WAR
The
victors:
Soviet
Soviet tanks
Zhukov and
commander
his staff
IN
on the
THE EAST
steps of the Reichstag.
of the war, but his very success
were drawn up
1
as for inspection, the
undermined
Zhukov was
the outstanding
his relationship
with Stalin.
crews jumping from their machines to
embrace all and sundry at this new-found cease-fire.' The peace which surrounded them was one of the tomb. About 125,000 Berliners had died in the siege, a significant number by
suicide; the suicides included
Krebs and numbers of others
in the
bunker
party. Yei
probably tens of thousand of others died in the great migration of Germans from east to
west
in April,
when
refuge from the
8 million left their
Red Army
in
homes
in Prussia,
Pomerania and
Silesia to
seek
the Anglo-American occupation zones. By one of the most
bizarre lapses of security in the entire war, the demarcation line agreed
532
between Moscow,
THE SIEGE OF BERLIN
London and Washington had become known to the Germans during 1944, and the last fight of the Wehrmacht in the west was motivated by the urge to hold open the line of retreat across the Elbe to the last possible moment. Civilians too seem to have learned where safety lay and to have pressed on ahead of the Red Army to reach it - but at terrible cost. The cost to the Red Army of its victory in the siege of Berlin had also been terrible. Between 16 April and 8 May, Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky's fronts had lost 304,887 men killed, wounded and missing, 10 per cent of their strength and the heaviest casualty list suffered by the Red Army in any battle of the war (with the exception of the captive toll of the great encirclement
were not
of 1941). Moreover, the
battles
yet over. Bresla'u held out until 6
killed
and wounded;
Army
resistance
in Prague, capital
May,
its
the
in
it
on
over.
Wolff,
on 29
A
April,
Montgomery. at
On
7
German
May Jodl,
forces in
at
paid a terrible price in blood
Hitler's
empire was almost every-
On
3
May Admiral Hans von
on
8
on
in France.
a general It
surrender of
was confirmed
at
German
forces at Eisen-
an inter-Allied meeting
9 May, as did the
last
Channel
in the
Peace brought no
of the 'Fiihrer
Islands, Lorient
West was
rest to
the
at
fortresses' in
its
intact
11
German
Pallice,
La
western Europe, surrendered
and Saint-Nazaire on
Heligoland on
human
in
fractionally penetrated only at the very
May. The Courland pocket capitulated on 9 May. Dunkirk, La
render of the war
to
dispatched by Donitz from his makeshift seat of government
Reims
Rochelle and Rochefort, the
when
through the SS General Karl
in Italy,
north of the country from Finland in October 1944, was surrendered by garrison
the city to
Denmark, Holland and North Germany
Norway, which the Russians had
10 May.
hope of delivering
scheduled for announcement on 2 May.
hower's headquarters
on
in the
what remained of
in
Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, signed
Berlin
men
had been arranged
local armistice
Friedeburg surrendered the
of the Reich
9 May.
By then, however, the war
where
cities
which the puppet German 'Vlasov army'
hope, for which Vlasov's
a vain
Red Army entered
of the
sieges
of the 'Reich Protectorate', the Czech National
group staged an uprising
changed sides and skirmished against the SS garrison the Americans -
last
siege having cost the Russians 60,000
10
May. The
final sur-
May.
flotsam of the war, which swirled in hordes be-
tween and behind the victorious armies. Ten million Wehrmacht prisoners, 8 million Ger-
man
refugees, 3 million Balkan fugitives, 2 million Russian prisoners of war, slave
and
forced labourers by the millions - and also the raw material of the 'displaced person' tragedy which was to haunt Europe for a decade after the war field.
In Britain
in the
Europe
and America crowds thronged the to
which
their soldiers
had brought
streets
on
8
victory, the
washed about the
May
vanquished and their
tims scratched for food and shelter in the ruins the war had wrought.
533
battle-
to celebrate 'VE Day'; vic-
—
PART
VI
—
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1943-1945
\,
<+*
i
y^m
n^mm
-
*
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
1943-1945
29 ROOSEVELT'S STRATEGIC
DILEMMA The news
of Roosevelt's death on
12 April 1945
had
stirred a flicker
the Berlin bunker. Hitler had sustained his spirits during the
two
beliefs: that his secret
weapons would break
a
March be
hit,
moribund empire
Marxist dictatorship must inevitably lead to the disintegration of that alliance. By 1945,
when
he knew
desperately
his
weapons had
out might occur. According to the historian that,
for reasons
Hugh
of Historical Necessit)
inevitable, like the Miracle
the
in
Goebbels,
Allies.
in earl) April
how
Britain
could
the
more
all
the
political
such
a falling-
Trevor-Roper, he had 'developed his
and
Justice,
a
change of fortune was
of the House of Brandenburg in the Seven Years War.'
Frederick the Great of Prussia faced defeat by the
France
from which
last sites
Thereafter he clung
failed.
hope of dissension among
the
to
V-2 had been driven beyond the
that his secret
philosopher of his court, had explained to some intimates
thesis
in
the will of the British; and that the
contradictions of an alliance between a decadent capitalist republic, a
and
of optimism
year of the war by
last
combined
When
armies of Russia, Austria
and
the Seven Years War, the tsarina Elisabeth had unexpectedly died, to be
succeeded by
a
tsar
who was
Frederick's
Frederick's Prussia survived. In April 1945,
Goebbels exclaimed, 'congratulate' him.
'It
'the is
tsarina
is
admirer;
on hearing
dead',
in the hellish
news of the
and telephoned
the turning-point,' he said,
Previous page: US Marines
the alliance then collapsed and
the
landscape
'it
is
President's passing, 'in
written in the
of Ivvo
defended to the death by a Japanese garrison of
536
Hitler
Jima, a speck
23,000 men.
an ecstasy' to
stars.'
in
the Pacific
ROOSEVELT'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
Hitler himself was briefly
years of the
moved
war he had come
to share Goebbels's euphoria.
Throughout the
to identify closely with Frederick the Great
latter
and was even
ready to believe that the evolution of his fortunes might mirror those of the Prussian king.
He was
would produce
particularly read) to believe that Roosevelt's death
the disabling
crack in the alliance that he predicted, since one of his fundamental misappreciations was
American people were unwarlike and had been drawn
that the
machinations of their President. 'The arch-culprit for
diplomat in August 1941, Bolshevism.' 'Jewish
He
said,
into the conflict by the
he had told
a
Spanish
Roosevelt, with his freemasons, Jews and general Jewish-
'is
whether he believed
He was
ancestry".
this war',
or not, that he had proof of Roosevelt's
it
obsessed by the number of Jews in American
certainly
government, including Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, whose plan to reduce defeated Germany to
German
a
nation of cultivators and pastoralists had been leaked and
republished
in the
propaganda
for a 'total war' effort.
Hitler's
September
press in
1944, to the great benefit
of Goebbels's
understanding of America's commitment to the war was almost exactly
contrary to the truth. Isolationism was certainly a powerful force in American politics
December
before
sons depart to
a
while America's parents remained naturally reluctant to see their
1941,
war up
foreign
to the
moment
of Pearl Harbor. Few Americans, however,
objected to the measures of rearmament enacted in 1940, which doubled the size of the fleet,
allocated funds for an air force of 7800
Luftwaffe - and increased the size of the raised by conscription.
When
a
months of the
and the
Blitz
waxed powerfully
coming of war was
- three times the size of the to
one million men,
in
ultimately almost a
civilisation stood.
since Americans
relief,
to be
enthusiastically.
The
the United States during the
of the Atlantic; so too had
Battle
paradigm of everything against which American
the
aircraft
war came, moreover, the nation reacted
sense of being 'out of things' had
eighteen
combat
army from 200,000
hostility to Hitler, as
As
in
Europe
in 1914,
had been oppressed by
indecision and inactivity and were untainted by an)' fear of defeat.
Roosevelt too saw Hitler
and
as a tyrant
a
malefactor.
accurately, the facts of Roosevelt's
war
Hitler's belief that
him is at variance with the facts; months before Pearl Harbor,
Roosevelt dragged his people to war reluctantly behind
more
However,
policy, in the
defy objective arrangement or analysis. Roosevelt's attitude to United States entry into the
Second World War remains profoundly ambiguous, war-making
in the three
and
a
half years in
as
do the aims and objectives of his as commander-in chief ol the
which he acted
United States forces. Roosevelt
is
by
far
the
most enigmatic of the major
devious, double-dealing and treacherous
limned
set
in
his
of aims: while determined to sustain
and arm), whoever he had to save the Soviet
to dismiss or
Union from
defeat,
even
figures
methods,
Ins position as
kill
of 1939-45.
steadfastl)
Stalin,
pursued
though a
quite
head of government, party
to maintain his
power, he wanted,
first,
second, to expel the Wehrmacht from Soviet
territor) and, third, to extract the largest possible benefit - territorial, diplomatic, militar)
537
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
and economic - from the Red Army's eventual workings of his psyche, also held to revenge for
then
Versailles,
1943-1945
victory. Hitler,
a clear-cut if wildly
German
however mysterious the
over-ambitious strategy: he wanted
master) of the continent, followed by the subjugation
of Russia and the eventual exclusion of the Anglo-Saxon powers from
European victor)
was
gained in
Churchill was transparently
affairs.
his
first
way
a
and
last
a
Empire overseas. His
'naturally
all
who
at
swayed
as his listeners
by the force and nobility of
Roosevelt too was Churchill's, for
him during
might be
victor)'
it,
the war. Captious
for sustained dissimulation,
a
his
own
grasped
orator)'.
magnificent speaker; his range, indeed, was
he was the master of not only the high-flown set-piece -
of the 'Four Freedoms' to Congress
Harbor - but
after Pearl
his 'fireside chats', a ad
how
survival of the British
the semblance of generosity in the statements of others and was as powerfully
eagerly
speech
influence in
nature', as his wife described
treated with
and contrary though he often was, he had no capacity
an}'
romantic and an imperialist:
Europe and the
in
open and unsuspicious
automatically revealed his motives to
a
he consider
desire: only secondarily did
secured British interests
that
patriot,
in
far
his
greater than
proclamation
January 1941, for example, or his 'Day of Infamy'
and individuals
also the intimate radio appeal to families
medium of political communication which he
in
himself invented, the
hominem stump speech of the political campaign, subtly varied from place to place and
audience to audience, the disingenuously frank news conference, the personal telephone call,
above
the face-to-face conversation, flattering, funny, discursive, beguiling and
all
ultimately almost wholly baffling to the interlocutor
words. Roosevelt was
McGregor Burns,
magician with words.
a
he
sent
away
visitors
who
sat
mesmerised by the flow of
According to
from
Oval
the
his
Office
'expansiveness, openness, geniality'; but the) rarely took back with
biographer James
entranced
by
them any answer
the problems or questions they had brought. For Roosevelt talked perhaps above find bearings
and moorings
dozens of attitudes and of his
a
and time:
class
in his
own
all
his
to 'to
experiences and recollections'. Roosevelt had
few deeply held values, which were precisely those of Americans he believed
in
opportunity, in political compromise, he
human
felt
dignity
and freedom,
in
economic
deeply for the hardships of the poor, and he
detested recourse to violence; but he had few policies, either for peace or for war, while
war
itself
he found
Hence
his
had sustained the
utterly distasteful.
profoundly ambiguous attitude towards American involvement. Churchill
his
own
New World would
spirits
had given him ever) reason
American armed
during the darkest hours of 1940 and 1941 by the belief that
eventually
come
forth to redress the balance of the Old. Roosevelt
to believe that such
would be the outcome. He had erected an
neutrality against the Axis almost
the war, selling arms to Britain
from the moment of Hitler's opening of
and France which would
Germany, then authorising unrestricted
'cash
and
carry'
extending American protection to Britain-bound convoys neutrality
zone which
effectively
been refused
certainly have
in the Atlantic.
He
denied the U-boats access to American
538
to
arms shipments and progressively first
defined
a
waters, then in
ROOSEVELT'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
extended the zone
April 1941 as
convoy
in the garrison in 1940.
to the
On
11
mid-ocean
and allowed American warships
line
he dispatched American Marines to replace
escorts, while in July
of Iceland, which Britain had summarily occupied
March
1941 Congress,
at
his persuasion,
after the
to act
British troops
fall
of Denmark
passed the Lend-Lease Act, which
allowed Britain to borrow war supplies from the United States against the
effectively
promise of
later
Washington
(the
repayment;
including 'German)
at all
United States
on the
President
laid his
any way
in
assets in the
in practice
sign, therefore, Churchill
his nation to intervention
of that danger and
Americans
which would
First',
By every outward
was leading
February he had sponsored Anglo-American
in
ABC-1 conference) which agreed on most of the
on
be implented
had reason
- even
after
June
December.
after
was acutely aware
orders not to provoke the
Roosevelt authorised the freezing of
telephone
all
German
conversations with the
1941. Churchill, in his private
scrambler
transatlantic
strict
staff talks in
fundamentals,
to believe that the President
Britain's side; certainly Hitler
U-boat commanders under
in
strategic
intercepted
(erratically
by
the
Germans), was given even more strongly to understand the warmth of the President's
commitment, while from the agreement
that the
one American his return
United
Placentia Bay
States
ship, in effect a
meeting of August
Navy would protect
all
means of defying Donitz
that they
should
come
in';
his
he brought back the
convoy which included
a
to sink an
from Placentia Bay, Churchill told the war cabinet
determined
1941
ships in
American warship.
concluding message had been
wage war but not declare it, and that he would become more and more Germans 'did not like it', Roosevelt said, 'they could attack American Churchill's Chiefs of Staff were staff officer, Ian Jacob,
war can be
won
noted
by our simply not losing
lot
had shown the
slightest
it
United
at sea',
a year or two'.
keenness to be
when on
sinking the destroyer
31
and
States
would
provocative'. If the forces.'
in
Navy 'seem
that the
He observed
in the
of individuals but they appear to be living
Moreover,
that 'he
suspicious and formed a different impression.
in his diary that the
being able to do anything for officer
more
On
Roosevelt was 'obviously
that
army
a
side.
different
no prospect of
'sees
that not
war on our
'a
A
to think that the
single
They
are a
American charming
world from ourselves.'
October the Germans committed the ultimate provocation by
USS
Reuben James in the Atlantic with the loss of 115
Roosevelt chose not to regard
it
as a casus
belli
- though
it
was
a far
American
more
lives,
flagrant act
of
aggression than, for example, the 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident used by President Johnson to authorise American military intervention in Vietnam in 1964. Roosevelt's inaction over the sinking of the Reuben James
may be
taken as the ke) to
the 'strategic enigma' he remained during 1941, as his biographer James
MacGregor Burns
has characterised him.
Roosevelt was following a simple policy:
was
part of a long heritage of
blocking Hitler's aspirations
all
aid to Britain short
Anglo-American friendship;
in
the west;
539
it
it
of war. This policy
was
a practical
way of
could easily be implemented by two
THE WAR
THE PACIFIC
IK
nations used to working with one another;
1943-1945
suited Roosevelt's temperament,
it
momentum
the needs and pressures of the British, and was achieving a
But
it
was not
political
and
grand strategy
a
military alternatives.
could achieve
it
only
its full
.
(Roosevelt]
was
recognising that long-tested situation,'
flair
it
.
.
- that
.
it
a
Above
is,
this strategy
all
joint military
would
was
a
one
negative
political action
in the Atlantic)
in that
with Britain -
to take effect (aside
a strategy
It
was
a
from war
only in the event of war.
waiting for a major provocation from Hitler even while
come at all. Above all, he was trusting to luck, to his He had no plans. am waiting to be pushed into the Morgenthau in May - and clearly had to be a strong shove. might not
for timing. ...
he told
and
force the United States into war.
few defensive actions
still
met
own.
its
did not emerge from clear-cut confrontation of
of war nor of peace, but
supply to Britain and .
effect
the Axis took action that
if
strategy neither
.
...
of
'I
it
Trusting to luck and waiting to be shoved were to characterise Roosevelt's conduct as
commander-in-chief from Pearl Harbor almost torians have argued that
war and during the years
into the
need
he was playing
for
arms on any terms
indeed liquidated by 'cash
a
to the very
end of his
Revisionist his-
life.
deep game both before the United
thereafter: that
he saw
in Britain's isolation
States entry
and desperate
means of liquidating her overseas investments (as they were and carry' sales), and thus of reducing the mistress of the
a
world's greatest empire - an institution he disliked as strongly as he did industrial trusts
and
financial cartels within his
American pressure a
own
country - to a
Machiavellianism he did not possess. War, Machiavelli
and Roosevelt was indeed princely
prince;
much
of his business through
a
flatter)
is
where she could not
said,
in a distinctively
is
Renaissance
White House and
as indispensable to
Camp
None
its
United
had been founded on the principle
States
tages over
As
rulers
a result,
him, dispensing
a
of
who
refuge from the heats
thirty years as the
a mis-
honoured
the less Roosevelt was not Machiavel-
power and ethos of the New World to dissemble and traduce. The alliances'; it had grown entangling of 'no
from the Old World's narrow needs
which absolved
weaker
- not
official
the simple reason that the wealth,
had liberated to riches
no
David for FDR), even formally maintaining
treating his cousin-wife
spouse of a dynastic marriage of convenience.
up
style, transacting
with lordly largesse, operating a political oubliette for those
and longueurs of Washington (no
lian in strategy, for
resist
Roosevelt with
the only proper study for a
incurred his displeasure, maintaining a private country palace as
tress in the
endow
surely to
court favourite, Harry Hopkins, permitting
even the implacable Marshall - to establish himself
charm and empty
state
to divest herself of her colonies. This
it
from the temptation
to
pursue cheap and temporary advan-
states.
Roosevelt was able to hold aloof from the business of directing war, an
activity alien to his
temperament. Such an aloofness was not granted
leaders. Churchill, of course, revelled in high
command, dedicated
540
to
any of the other
his days (and nights) to
ROOSEVELT'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
war-making, had rooms,
Prime Minister, preferred uniforms of an honorary talion),
demanded
even whole houses adapted to
suites,
his 'siren suit' to
air
grating. Stalin's
turnal, troglodyte.
Hyde
in
hour-to-hour
hermit
after the
his generals,
Roosevelt scarcely altered his pattern of life
and there pursued
at all after
Pearl Harbor.
Un-
to live at the
White House, occasionally vacationing
a timetable that
drove the methodical and purposeful
he continued
air attack,
Park,
a military
even though he found their company wartime routine conformed strangely in pattern to Hitler's - secretive, noc-
opening of Barbarossa, seeing few but
at
wartime
an honorary colonel of the Cinque Ports Bat-
of Ultra intelligence intercepts and lived
intimacy with his military advisers. Hitler turned himself into
threatened by
as a
any other garb (though he also kept handy his
commodore and
a constant diet
needs
his
almost to distraction. Marshall's day was measured to the minute: his only relaxation was to visit his wife in his official quarters for lunch,
veranda from his
which was served
He saw
were
a
he stepped on to the
Roosevelt lunched off a tray brought into the Oval Office, did
staff car.
not begin work until ten in the morning and took few telephone to Burns, there
as
few fixed points
in his
calls at night.
According
week:
the congressional Big Four - the Vice-President, the Speaker and the majority
chamber - on Monday or Tuesday; met with
leader of each
the press
on Tuesday
afternoons and Friday mornings; and presided over a Cabinet meeting on Friday afternoons. [Otherwise] there
seemed
to
be no pattern
at all in
the
way
that Roosevelt
did his work. Sometimes he hurried through appointments on crucial matters and
dawdled during
phone
calls,
of apparently greater
political
This pattern, or lack of
to
who was
Moscow,
tween
it,
constantly
or intellectual weight to
persisted
to
British troops
little.
to Paris (before the
to
city),
of poliomyelitis and which
result
1944), Cairo
February 1945.
no
some
mystify-
to himself.
to 12 April 1945. Unlike fall
of France), to Cairo,
He saw
prisoners,
and Tehran
at
after-effects
in
the
nothing of the war
no
a discreet press disguised
of
There were
at
when he
January 1943,
end of 1944 and at first
battle,
directed American strategy as he had directed the
but decisive strikes
Rome, Naples, Normandy, the
His mobility was, of course, limited by his physical dis-
took him only to Casablanca
his travels
the front,
according to
from 7 December 1941
on the move -
and ELAS rebels rocked the
which was the
and September in
all
no one, perhaps not even
readership almost completely. Nevertheless he travelled
war
He took many
letters altogether. ...
Athens (where he spent Christmas Day 1944 while the sound of gunfire be-
Rhine - Roosevelt travelled ability,
ignored most
known
ing structure of priorities
Churchill,
He
lesser ones.
refused others, saw inconsequential and dull people, and ignored others
hand, no
from
Quebec
twice (August 1943
Yalta, in the
bombed
Russian Crimea,
cities,
no troops
and probably did not choose
New
its
chose, but during the
to;
at
he
Deal - by lofty rhetoric and by rare
the conjunctions of power.
effectively four decisive actions in
541
all.
The
first
was
his
endorsement of
THE WAR
the 'Germany
November 1941,
adopted by the Anglo-American ABC-1 conference of February-March
agreed with Churchill
after Pearl
THE PACIFIC 1
decision, advanced by Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, in
First'
1940,
IN
Placentia Bay in August, but enshrined as national policy only
at
when Roosevelt, who might popular demand for vengeance on
Harbor,
yielded to the
with his Japan,
the greater should be beaten before the lesser enemy. the dispute
between Marshall and the
authorised the Torch landing in North Africa, with
flowed from
The
that expedition.
third
was
States
had conducted
its
decision to distance himself from Churchill deal directly with Stalin
on the
war
at
committed the
the Cairo conference,
at
to
his settlement
of
on terms which
on the proclamation of 'uncon-
against the Confederacy.
The
last
was
his
the Yalta conference in February 1945 and
future of Europe.
Churchill had reluctantly accepted the in effect
have
dictate that
high-minded re-echoing of the terms
There had been anticipations of Roosevelt's Yalta
which
in July 1942
head
the dubious consequences that
all
his insistence
ditional surrender' at Casablanca in January 1943, a
on which the United
The second was
London
British in
political heart so easily
let his strategic
British
more
initiative
both
Empire
to granting
where Roosevelt had shown
Placentia Bay,
at
when
of the Atlantic Charter -
liberalising provisions
independence
to
its
colonies - and
a typically 'China lobby' over-tenderness
Chiang Kai-shek. At Cairo the Bntish had been persuaded to surrender
their historic rights
of extraterritoriality in China as a token of commitment to their belief in the norminal equality of Chiang's leadership with that of the Western democracies.
Chiang Kai-shek was to
let
Roosevelt down. Contrary to the President's expectations,
he neither went through the motions to reform China's -
how
and economic
political
structures
could he have done,
a realist
might have asked, with the more productive half of his
country in the hands of the
enemy 7
- nor utilised American aid and American advice, sup-
plied so liberally
Wedemeyer,
to
first
by
Stilwell
and then,
maximise China's
after
fighting
Chiang had
of Stilwell's lecturing, by
tired
power.
By the time of Yalta, therefore, Roosevelt had privately written off Chiang; for form's sake,
China was elevated to permanent membership of the Security Council of the United
Nations Organisation, whose institution and structure was decided
accorded no
fruits
of the victory he had done so
tion of Indo-China
though exile
it
he had been offered
American and
in size
British;
were permanently transferred act less
the
its
among
September
Stalin,
willingness to barter
was written off
at
Yalta,
1939, maintaining an army in
eastern provinces, over-generously delimited in 1920,
to Russia at Yalta,
though
reality,
was an Red Army already occupied
this Roosevelt-Stalin deal
since the
territory.
However, the most important of all decisions taken Roosevelt and
but Chiang was
those opposed to the Wehrmacht, after the
of political treachery than of political
whole of Poland's
1
at Yalta,
to advance, certainly not the annexa-
Cairo. Poland too
had fought every day of the war since
which stood fourth
Russian,
at
little
at Yalta,
concerned the future conduct of the war
away the future of Poland and
542
agreed directly between
in the Pacific. Roosevelt's
to finalise a division
of Germany which
ROOSEVELT'S STRATEGIC DILEMMA
The Big Three
at Yalta,
February 1945, where the shape of postwar eastern and central
Europe was decided.
accorded the Soviet Union an over-generous allocation of occupation mately determined by his anxiety to engage the Red
Army
the time of Yalta, the United States had neither yet assured itself that
programme would its
result in the successful test
forces to a point
amphibious tating
assault
territory
was
ulti-
in the battle to defeat Japan. At
explosion of an atomic
its
nuclear-research
bomb
nor advanced
from which the land invasion of Japan might be underaken. The
on Iwo Jima was
in preparation but
had not been launched; the devas-
fire-bombing of Japan had not begun. The Red Army's commitment in Europe, on
the other hand, was clearly almost
an end, and from western Russian the Trans-Siberian
at
where in 1904-5 Tsar Nicholas ITs army The opportunity to avenge it stood high on the list of
railway led directly to the border of Manchuria,
had suffered Stalin's
a humiliating defeat.
wartime
priorities.
When
he might take the opportunity, however, was what pre-
occupied the American President. To ensure
that
he did so
ated almost
The
price
all
Roosevelt's initiatives
at Yalta.
Churchill in the eyes of their joint Polish
allies,
to
later rather
he paid
in the
concede Russia
than sooner motiv-
end was
rights
to discredit
over territory in
sovereign China which were not America's to grant, but ultimately to assure that the re-
possession of Japan's conquests in the Pacific would not be bought
at
the cost of American
To
a nation which had watched the heroic advance of the United States Navy, Marine Corps and MacArthur's army divisions from New Guinea to the Philippines, the
lives alone.
diplomatic price paid Britain's
one
at
Yalta -
when
good name was balanced
the cost to a distant European state's territory and to
against further
to pay.
543
American
casualties -
seemed
a small
PAPuV..
Bou * amV '" e
* ,Bina
ARAFURA SEA
Port Moresby
New
Geoi I
Woodlark ]
• Darwin
CORAL
AUSTRALIA
544
SEA
THE PACIFIC, NOVEMBER
ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
Aicu
1944
Kiska
Key 1
Japanese
minimum
defence area concept, September
1943 2 The capture
Marianas chain gave the
of the
Americans a springboard 1500 miles south of Tokyo from which launch the B-29 bombers of the newly formed XXI Bomber
Command.
Virtually
immune from
and on a
large-scale Japanese counter-attack
direct
supply route from the United States, these islands provided the bases for a concerted bombing campaign against the Japanese
home
November 1944 when
HAWAIIAN ISLANDS PACIFIC
OCEAN
Pearl
111
which began on 24
islands,
B-29s took
off to raid the
Musashi aero-engine plant outside Tokyo
Harbor«° ahu
3 Extent of Allied advance, March 1945
HAWAII
4 Japanese forward Jima
lies
about
700
air defence base at
Iwo Jima. Iwo
miles south of Tokyo. This eight-
square-mile island of sulphuric sand and volcanic ash
was
the site of Japanese radar stations
which warned of
ajafetn
the approach of the
ARSHALL ISLANDS
B-29 bomber
regularly flew right over
Makm
it
Japan. Fighters flew from
on its
streams, which
their
two
way
and from
to
airstrips to deliver
Ta>-awa
harassing strikes against the American airfields on
-BERT ISLANDS
Saipan in the Marianas. The capture of Iwo Jima
PHOENIX ISLANDS
offered
US
forces the prospect of a base
which could provide
fighter support
landing
facilities for
Marianas-based
runs
Tokyo.
near Japan
and emergency
ELLICE ISLANDS
TOKELAY ISLANDS uCrul
to
Its
proximity
to the
aircraft
Japanese
on bombing
home
SAMOA ISLANDS islands
SOCIETY ISLANDS
.pintu Santo FIJI
would make
ISLANDS strategic victory.
its
elaborate fortifications the
NEW ZEALAND
545
command
capture both a moral and
However,
it
was honeycombed with
manned by 23,000
of General Kuribayashi
troops under
THE WAR
THE PACIFIC
IN
1943-194S
30 JAPAN'S DEFEAT IN
THE SOUTH the six
In
months of 'running
wild'
between
Pearl
Harbor and the expulsion of the
from Burma between December 1941 and May
1942, the Japanese had succeeded in what five other imperial powers - the Spanish, Dutch, British, French and Russians - had previously attempted but failed to achieve: to make themselves masters of British
all
the lands surrounding the seas of China and to link their conquests to a strong central
position. Indeed,
western
Pacific,
established
if
China
is
included
among
the powers with imperial ambitions in the
Japan had exceeded even her achievement. The Chinese had never
more than
cultural
dominance over Vietnam, and
their
power had
failed
altogether to penetrate the rest of Indo-China, the East Indies, Malaya or Burma. In
mid-1942 the Japanese had conquered
all
those lands, were preparing to establish puppet
regimes in most of them, were also the overlords of thousands of islands which were incognitae in
swathes of mainland territory In a half
crude
territorial
in
Manchuria and China which they had seized since
terms the extent of Japanese power even
times greater than the area Hitler had controlled
at
in
brute force of
and
the high tide of his conquests in
manpower, deploying over 300 German and in the
down
satellite
his
empire by
divisions
at
the
occupied lands. Japan, by contrast, deployed an army only one-sixth
the size, with only eleven divisions available for mobile operations.
committed
1931.
mid-1944 was one and
1942 - 6 million against 4 million square miles. However, Hitler held
battlefront
terrae
Peking, and had joined their maritime and peripheral annexations to the broad
to the interminable, enervating
The
rest
were
and (apparently) ultimately irresoluble war
546
JAPAN'S DEFEAT IN THE
against
Chiang Kai-shek
SOUTH
the Chinese hinterland. This state of
in
map
fundamentally unbalanced strategic position. Though the strong, since she
occupied
have argued
theorists
is
in
a
as
most desirable
affairs
left
of war which
that 'central position' in the theatre
the
hold, logistics pointed to
to
Japan
represented her situation all
military-
different
a
conclusion. Intercommunication between
man) of the Japanese strongholds, particularlysouthern China, Indo-China and Burma, had always been difficult if not impossible by land because of the mountain chains which define their frontiers. Intercommunication by sea was wearisome and increasingly perilous because of the bold and
American submarine
the
Indian islands was
captains.
size
of the country,
Intercommunication between the
depredations of Pacific
and East
menaced both by submarines and by American airpower, army
carrier-based. Finally the Japanese
assisted
effective
its
units
committed
China
in
was
itself
to pacification or occupation - in
which they were
by thousands of so-called 'puppet' Chinese troops belonging
government of Wang Chmg-wei,
set
up
in
land- or
immobilised by the
effectively
to
the bogus
1939 - and only rarely freed to undertake
offensive operations against the Chinese armies proper.
Those armies belonged
two
to
hostile
camps, the army of the legitimate Kuomintang
government commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, and the communist army of Mao Zedong. By
pre-war truce they had agreed to
a
truce
fight the
Japanese instead of each other, but the
was often broken, while the communist arm) was
Chiang's troops exhaust themselves in battle with the foreign to victory
.
Their actions were quite uncoordinated, in
distant north-west,
where
rivals to
around Yenan
the central
an)- case, for
Mao's base was
bend of the Yellow River beyond
in the great
government had
more interested in letting enemy than in helping them
certainly
in the
the Wall
traditionally established themselves, while
Chiang had been driven into the deep south, around
emergency
his
capital oi
Chungking,
500 miles away. Between the two seethed the remnants of the warlord armies which had carved out their territories after the collapse of the empire in
accommodations with them and
To both
also recruited
the Japanese
1911;
made
from them puppet troops.
the warlord and puppet armies Chiang's was militarily superior - but only
barely so. In 1943
it
was
the world, but in reality
theoretically 324 divisions strong it
and therefore the
largest
army
in
consisted of only twenty-three properly equipped divisions, and
those were small ones of only 10,000 men. For their equipment and supplies, moreover, the)
depended
entirely
provide them with 'the
on the Americans, who
facilities
to
fly
Hump', the mountain chain
in turn
depended upon
14,000 feet high
between Bengal
of Szechuan. These supplies had previously been delivered Mandalay; but since the
fall
of Burma to the Japanese
Chiang was dependent on the Americans not only for training
and
Chennault's
Flying
air
for
in
Tigers,
originally
b) the
the
in India
via the
May
and the province
'Burma Road' from
1942 that route was closed.
armament and subsistence but
support - provided by the few dozen
machines supplied to China
the British to
transport aircraft from India into southern China over
aircraft
of General
'American Volunteer Group' of
United States
547
in 1941.
He
also
Claire
pilots
and
was, moreover, dependent on
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC 194M94S
the Americans for his armies' cutting edge, since the
command was as Merrill's Stilwell,
Marauders. The
man he had
accepted
as his
element
effective to
his
in
become famous
nominal chief of staff, 'Vinegar Joe'
displayed an impatience with the Chinese that was exceeded in degree only by his
rudeness towards the British with
The Japanese arm)
Mao pinned
keeping
mountains of Burma
War
most
American brigade-size 5307th Provisional Regiment,
the
in the East
in
whom
he was co-operating.
China, twenty-five divisions strong, was so successful in
of the north-west and Chiang backed against the
in his 'liberated area' in the
south that for the
first
was not under an obligation
it
two and to
a half years
mount mobile
of the Second World
operations.
It
already
controlled the most productive parts of the country, Manchuria and the valleys of the
Yellow and Yangtse
rivers, as
well as enclaves around the ports of the south,
Amoy, Hong Kong and Canton, together with Sea.
It
was taking what
industrial goods,
it
wanted from China,
particularly rice, coal, metals
was scarcely discommoded either by
all,
continued to exercise by
occupying the
Pacific
all
The Ichi-Go and U-Go
offensives
—
sudden
Fleet's
advance
Ultimately
it
the
into
complacency. Nimitz's thrust was aimed position.
the advantages of
the country
strategic 'central position'.
— The
presence
any-
and Mao's armies and,
in
its
and Manchurian
- from which
'resistance'
sensible Chinese held aloof - or by the operations of Chiang's
above
Foochow,
the key island of Hainan in the South China
like
central
an arrow
Pacific
at
dissipated
Japanese
the heart of Japan's central
threatened their control of the South China Sea - the Pacific
'Mediterranean' which washes the shores of China, Thailand, Malaya, the East Indies,
Formosa and empire
the Philippines - and that control was essential to Japan's maintenance of
in the 'Southern Area'.
Tokyo issued orders
On
25 January 1944, therefore, imperial headquarters
its
in
to General Iwane Matsui. the chief of staff in China, to undertake a
The last offensive in China had occurred in the spring of 1943, when Arm) had cleared the area west of Peking in Shansi and Hopei provinces. plan was to occupy more territory in the south, with the object of both opening a
large-scale offensive.
the North China
Now the direct
north-south
rail
American
airfields in
strength
of 340
route between Peking and Nanking and clearing the south of
Chiang's area, from which Chennault's
aircraft
including
strategic
bombers,
air force,
was
which had reached
harassing
the
a
Japanese
Expeditionary Arm) throughout China. This Ichi-Go offensive was to offensive,
U-Go, had opened
in
open on
17 April 1944. Earlier in the year
an associated
Burma. Curiously the two Japanese plans were not co-
ordinated in time, objectives or aims - except
in the
general and favoured Japanese aim of
enemy with a complexity of thrusts - whereas the Allied campaigns in southern China and Burma did in fact interconnect. For one thing, Chiang's armies based on Chungking were dependent on supply via the 'Hump route'; secondly, Chinese troops, confronting the
548
JAPAN'S DEFEAT IN
commanded by
effectively
Stilwell,
reopening the Burma Road; and,
means
THE SOUTH
were operating
in
southern China with the object of
Chinese troops were being trained
thirdly,
in India as a
improving the quality of Chiang's army. Nevertheless imperial headquarters did
to
not order General Renya Mutaguchi,
commanding
Army
the Fifteenth
in
Burma, to make
an attack up the Burma Road to lend assistance to the Ichi-Go offensive. Instead
him
undertake nothing
to
than a
less
it
directed
invasion of India, in an entirely different
full-scale
direction.
U-Go was an operation
which Mutaguchi was wholeheartedly committed.
to
Between November 1942 and February 1943 back
Burma down
a British offensive into
had successfully turned
his predecessor, Iida,
the Arakan coast
on the Bay of
Bengal.
A
subsequent irregular operation, mounted by the long-range penetration Chindit forces led
by
Orde Wingate, had
their creator, the messianic
and April
However, Mutaguchi had been
1943.
been defeated between February
also
rightly
impressed by the success of
Wingate's troops in penetrating the Japanese front on the mountainous and roadless
of the Indo-Burmese
terrain
force
one
had marched
his
own
frontier.
larger Allied armies
He
feared that
might follow.
hardy soldiers could take
in the
where Wingate's
He
also
saw
tiny penetration
that Wingate's route
was
opposite direction, as the best means of
defending Burma, interrupting the Allied
efforts to
reopen the Burma Road (on which
American engineers were working from
roadhead
in India at
a
Ledo), quashing Stilwell's
from southern China, and so indirectly assisting Ichi-Go
increasingly intrusive thrusts
in
China proper. Mutaguchi's offensive
defence
is
November
attack.
was
spirit
South-East Asia
justified
by the principle
that the best
Command, which bad come
1943 with the dynamic Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten
planning offensives of its
own
designed to re-establish Allied power
form of
into existence at its
in
on
15
head, was indeed
Burma.
Among
the
operations planned was another offensive in the Arakan, a major offensive across the Indo-
Burmese border from Assam two Chinese which was
to
be mounted by
Marauders, the other to be
which
to the river
Chindwin, gateway to the Burmese central
offensives into north-eastern
Merrill's
a
Stilwell's
Burma from
the province of Yunnan,
Chinese troops with the support of Merrill's
Chindit operation into the Japanese rear
Marauders were going to
attack.
For
this
operation the whole
Count Terauchi, had been reinforced, 1st
the
at
Myitkyina,
at
strike.
Mutaguchi's operation was therefore not merely an offensive;
emptive
plains,
one of
in part
it
was
also a pre-
Burma Area Army, commanded by General with troops from Thailand,
in part
with the
Division of the Indian National Army, raised by Subhas Chandra Bose from 40,000 of
45,000
Indians
captured
in
Malaya and Singapore
who
had shown themselves
sympathetic to his cause. However, Mataguchi's spoiling attack was
another one, for steam) Arakan.
in
On
British lines in the
November
1943 the British had
resumed
itself
preceded by
their attempt to penetrate the
4 February, therefore, the Japanese 55th Division was launched into the Arakan, with
a
mission to disrupt the advance. Only with the greatest
549
THE WAR
difficult)'
THE PACIFIC
IN
1943-194S
was the 55th Division dispersed and driven back
to
its
departure point
at
of the month. Meanwhile the Japanese 18th Division was dealing harshly with
the
end
Stilwell's
advance towards Myitkyina, behind which Wingate's second Chindit expedition was due to
descend by glider It
U-Go
was
on
offensive
India, the 31st
These
March.
in
in a highly
disturbed northern Burma, therefore, that Mutaguchi opened his
6 March,
when
his three divisions crossed the
Chindwin
river to invade
heading for Kohima, the 15th and 33rd for Imphal. places in the high
tin)
hills
industry before the war. The)" provided
Indian arm)' which
now
of Assam had been centres of the tea-growing
no
facilities for
the basing of the large British-
occupied the front and were poorly connected by road
of India. Moreover, General William Slim,
commanding
to the rest
the British Fourteenth Army, was
position to receive attack.
The
Fourteenth Arm)', under his inspired leadership, had been transformed from the low
state
preparing to go over to the offensive and was not in
a
humiliating withdrawal from the Arakan eight
Burma months
fought
at
it
had reached
agonising retreat from
after the
Japanese troops
a full-scale battle against
Slim had nevertheless scented surprised by
it.
He
the Americans to
a
the spring of 1942 and the
in
later.
It
had not
Japanese offensive in the offing and was not wholly
therefore persuaded Mountbatten to coax sufficient
fly
however,
yet,
the peak of their aggression.
the 5th Indian Division,
air
transport out of
one of the most experienced
in the British-
Indian forces, up from the Arakan front between 19 and 29 March, and he himself sent
forward supplies and reinforcements from the resources he had been gathering for his
own
offensive to the defenders instructions not to
strict
defenders stood
British
on the border. He
also gave his subordinate
withdraw without permission from higher
fast at
without attempting to defend
the key points its
whole
on the mountainous Indo-Burmese
length, the Japanese
succeeded
Imphal and Kohima, but could not take possession of the
encircling
lead
down
day.
The
into the Indian plain.
fighting that
commanders
authority. Since the
Kohima was surrounded on 4
ensued was among the most
bitter
April,
frontier,
in their object
of
frontier roads that
Imphal the following
of the war,
as the
two
sides
it out often at ranges no wider than the tennis court of the district commissioner's abandoned residence which formed part of no man's land on Kohima ridge. The British were supplied by airlift erratically at Kohima, rather more regularly at Imphal. The
battled
Japanese were not supplied
even siege,
Terauchi that the Fifteenth gave
at all;
diseased and emaciated, they persisted in their attacks
coming of the monsoon. On 22 June, however, after over Imphal was relieved, and four days later Mutaguchi was forced
after the
its
Army ought now
eight) days to
of
suggest to
to retreat. In early July imperial headquarters
approval, and the survivors struggled off down roads liquefied by the tropical rains
Burmese
Only 20,000 of the 85,000
to cross the river
Chindwin and return
who had begun
the invasion of India remained standing; over half the casualties had
succumbed
to
disease.
The
1st
to the
plains.
Division of the Indian National Army, mistrusted as
turncoats and therefore mistreated by the Japanese
550
commanders, had ceased
to exist.
JAPAN'S DEFEAT IN
THE SOUTH
Indian troops at Imphal-Kohima, a decisive Allied victory which saw the destruction of
General Mutaguchi's Japanese Fifteenth Army.
The focus of the
Burma now
fighting in
Japanese were holding their
own
shifted to the north-eastern front,
where the
with tenacity against both Stilwell and the Chindits; Slim
meanwhile began to prepare the Fourteenth Army for its delayed offensive across the Chindwin to recover Mandalay and Rangoon. However, with the defeat of Mutaguchi's
U-Go offensive, Burma itself ceased to be a major preoccupation of imperial headquarters. Though the Ichi-Go offensive was proceeding satisfactorily in southern China - so much so that the
American government had begun
collapse - the situation in the southern
worsen. In
New
Guinea, the
Philippines island of Mindanao,
on
15 September,
of Chiang Kai-shek's imminent
critically) central Pacific
of the Vogelkop peninsula
fall
capture of the island of Morotai,
followed, also
to entertain fears
and (more
on
in July
midway between New Guinea and 15
September; the
by the invasion of Peleliu-,
551
fall
of
continued to
was followed by the the southern
Guam and
Saipan was
in the Palau islands, the closest
A
Japanese aircraft
falls
blazing from the sky in the fight for the
chain.
Marianas
The capture
Marianas,
in
of the
June-August
1944, provided bases from
which Allied naval and
air
forces could cut the lines of
communication
to
Japan's
southern empire and
launch a sustained
bombing campaign against the Japanese
home
islands
by B-29 Superfortresses of
XXI Bomber Command. The bombing campaign began on
24 November
1944 when
111
B-29s
took off from Saipan to attack the Musashi aero-
engine plant on the outskirts of Tokyo.
THE WAR
THE PACIFIC
IK
1<>43-1
point to the Philippines the Americans had yet reached
on
the central Pacific front.
invasion of the Philippines, which gave access to China, Indo-China and Japan
now
at
itself,
The was
hand.
A The extent and
timetable for the Leyte landings
rapidity of MacArthur's
and Nimitz's success had, however, so surprised
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their planners in Washington that the exact nature of the
now once
invasion was
European theatre, where in Supreme Allied Commander Designate had laid down a the German border which the actual pace of events then
again a matter for debate. As in the
1943 the chiefs of staff to the
timetable for the advance to
overtook with unanticipated speed, important
now faded
all
sorts
of the Atlantic ports,
as points
of operations which had once seemed
Europe events had made
into insignificance. In
irrelevant the capture
of supply from the United States for an American army
fighting in central France, as well as the invasion of southern France. In the Pacific
the capture of ports
on
of Formosa and the occupation of the southern Philippines island of Mindanao their significance.
Two
making the capture of nearby ports
The
attack
troops that
it
island,
who
world, was calculated to
until the
war
in
after
Europe was Halsey's
instead that a landing be
over.
carriers
made
first
this
thought the approach of the Chief of Naval Operations, it
carried his support.
president, Joint Chiefs of Staff and operational
when
in the
Luzon, in December, two months ahead of schedule. As
Admiral King, over-ponderous,
September,
near the coast, thereby
of the archipelago, and that the troops proceed thereafter to the
timetable suited MacArthur,
15
airfields
September
13
He urged
light resistance in the area.
in Leyte. in the centre
northernmost
cliffs
could not be undertaken
on Mindanao was abandoned on
encountered only
that lost
and the invasion of Formosa, an island twice
irrelevant;
the size of Hawaii and defended by the highest sea
many
was
of these projects cancelled themselves. The success of Ichi-Go in
southern China had led to the loss of most of Chennault's
require so
it
the south China coast to supply Chennault's air bases, the invasion
The debate had run between since 26 July; it was ended on
commanders
the joint chiefs authorised MacArthur to begin landings
on Leyte on
20 October.
The Japanese Japanese forces success.
in the Philippines
as a
were
whole were now
Having passed what Clausewitz
found themselves
in possession
of more
ill
prepared to withstand invasion. Indeed, the
suffering the calls 'the
consequences of
their
own
earlier
culminating point of the offensive', they
territory than they
could closely defend and were
enemy who was on the rampage and whose resources were growing by the month. Though the manpower available to the US Arm)- in the Pacific and to the Marine Corps was limited by the demands of the war in Europe, the USAAF had been acquiring more and better aircraft throughout 1944, particularly the B-29 Superfortress, confronted by an
which had the range
to
bomb
the Japanese
home
554
islands
from the old bases
in
southern
JAPAN'S DEFEAT IN
new
China and the
bases
on
Saipan.
THE SOUTH
The United
States Navy,
the Pacific, enjoyed almost an embarrassment of riches;
and destroyers,
twenty-one Essex-class
carriers:
do
so,
and the
embarked
and
carriers
naval air force three times the size of the Japanese
mobilised since 1937 and was stuck
fully
had been continuously and
1941
shipyards.
1944. Losses in Japan's
all
new
at a size
Only
its
war production.
of about
fifty
were
fleet
Its
army navy
and could not make
losses
far
Its
divisions.
five fleet aircraft carriers
merchant
were launched
higher and threatened the
collapse of the Japanese system. Because Japan could not feed itself or supply
its
own raw
material needs, free use of the western Pacific seas was essential to the running of
economy;
was
it
also necessary to the sustenance,
garrisons within the Southern Area. During 1942
to
an
aircraft,
at its largest.
had suffered heavy
in action since 1941,
them good from the output of its between
above
had come into service since 1941 or were about
Japan, by contrast, had already passed the high point of
had been
battleships, cruisers
small, but
provided flight-deck space for over 3000
total carrier fleet
was
particular theatre
had new
it
attack transports, landing craft large
fast
whose
its
movement of
reinforcement and
American submarines had sunk 180
Japanese merchant ships, totalling 725,000 tons deadweight, of which 635,000 tons was replaced by
because the
new skill
building;
the tanker tonnage actually increased. In 1944, however,
of American submarine captains had increased and they were operating
from bases much further forward total
New
in
of sinkings increased to 600, or
years 1942
Guinea, the Admiralties and the Marianas, the
2.7 million tons,
more than had been sunk
and 1943 combined. By the end of 1944 half Japan's merchant
thirds of her tankers
had been destroyed, the flow of oil from the
stopped, and the level of imports to the
home
islands
The destruction of the merchant fleet obliged merchantmen to ship and provision units, and this troops between threatened spots, thus affecting
had
fallen
fleet
East Indies
had almost
by 40 per cent.
the navy to use destroyers instead of seriously
Japan's
impeded
movement of
the
defence of the Philippines.
Imperial headquarters had correctly divined that the Americans planned to invade
southernmost island of Mindanao, from Luzon,
as a
New
in the
and two-
first
the
Guinea, and then the northernmost island of
stepping-stone to Japan; but they had not anticipated that the Americans
would change
their plan in the light
of events. In consequence, Leyte was
left
even more
weakly garrisoned than Mindanao. Although on 20 October 1944 there were 270,000 Japanese troops in the Philippines,
commander of the Northern only 16,000 men, Arm)-,
it
which began
was no match to
Tomoyoku
Yamashita, the conqueror of Singapore and
Area, had only the
go ashore
weak
for the four divisions in
not.
kept in
and
It
was
home
now
on Leyte
itself.
With
of General Walter Krueger's Sixth
Leyte Gulf that morning.
Although the Japanese army was unprepared
was
16th Division
for the Leyte landing, the
Japanese navy
divided into two halves, the remaining carriers and their escorts being
waters, the battleships - of
Musashi, the largest in the world,
which there were
still
nine, including the Yamato
of 70,000 tons and mounting 18-inch guns - lying
Lingga Roads, near Singapore, to be near their supply of East Indies
555
oil
at
which could not be
THE WAR
shipped to the involvement
home
on
15
which had
Division).
1943-1945
Both sections of the
had sensibly held back from
fleet
American island landing operations, the descent on September - an uncancelled operation of the original central
in the latest of the
in the Palaus
strategy
islands.
THE PACIFIC
IN
lost
The home
point (though
its
inflicted agon)'
it
on
the veteran
did not evade involvement in the pre-Leyte
fleet
air
Peleliu Pacific
Marine
1st
offensives
on
Formosa, Okinawa and Luzon, during which the American Third Fleet destroyed over 500 Japanese carrier- and land-based
Ozawa's
Lingga remained
was
It
between
aircraft
none of
carrier force risked
its
10
and
October; but Admiral Jisaburo
17
Combined
ships, while the bulk of the
Fleet at
intact.
in these
circumstances that imperial headquarters decided to launch
decisive
a
codenamed Sho-1, against the American Third and Seventh Fleets covering landings. Of great complexity, as large Japanese offensives always were, in
naval offensive, the Leyte
essence
it
was diversionary: Ozawa's
to lure Halsey's Third Fleet
and landing
down from Japan's
Leyte Gulf and destroy them. The
craft in
approach through the San Bernardino
and Force C through the Surigao
What followed was
brought
and 2nd Attack Forces and Force
cruisers, divided into the 1st
transports
carriers,
away from the Leyte beaches; then the
Strait to
Strait to
were
C, 1st
and heavy
to attack the
Attack Force was to
the north of Leyte, the
2nd Attack Force
the south.
the largest naval battle in history, larger even than Jutland, but,
confused by misreportings and misunderstandings.
like Jutland,
Inland Sea, were
battleships
Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita's
First into
the fray was
Attack Force, which had sailed from Lingga.
1st
It
was
damaged by American submarines en route but reached the western approaches to the San Bernardino Strait on 24 October. The land-based aircraft which supported it inflicted heavy damage on one of the American carriers from Halsey's Third Fleet, USS Princeton, which eventually sank, but they lost more heavily themselves against intercepted and
the
American Hellcat
Kurita's
own
torpedo
hits,
fighters;
and
under
battleships
more even than
as the
attack.
day developed American torpedo-bombers took
During the afternoon the Musashi suffered nineteen
enormous bulk could absorb, and
its
rolled over
and sank. Kurita decided he could not
and
heavy cruisers
his ten
in the
risk Yamato, his
at
7.35 in the evening
two other
confined waters of the San Bernardino
Strait,
battleships
without the
assurance of support from Ozawa's carriers (of which he had heard nothing), and so
turned back to retreat to Lingga. At the
Halsey just
moment he
in the
received
did so, however, the Sho-1 plan was on the point of success, for
Third Fleet's flagship New
news
that
Ozawa's
had been offended by w hispered in the Battle
The
Jersev,
carriers
stationed off the southern tip of Luzon, had
had been sighted 150 miles
allegations that
he had
let
to the north. Halsey
the Japanese escape too easily
of the Philippines Sea the previous June, and he was determined
Battle of Leyte Gulf,
23-25 October 1944,
was broken on the
at
anvil of
556
which the reformed Japanese
American
air
power.
to
carrier fleet
make
LEYTE GULF
557
THE WAR
Ozawa
He
fight.
THE PACIFIC
IN
therefore extemporised plans to leave behind part of his force, designated
Task Force 34, to guard the San Bernardino
and destroy the Japanese
to seek
Two
now
changes of mind
Shamed by
Kurita's.
1943-1945
Strait
while he raced his heavy units northward
carriers.
supervened
urgings from the
to alter the course
Combined
Fleet that
of the
The
battle.
first
was
he was shrinking from the
chance of victor), he reversed course to pass through the San Bernardino
onward towards Leyte
the night of 24/25 October and sailed
by reports of
Halsey's. Excited
how
Strait after all on The second was
Gulf.
vulnerable Ozawa's carriers were, he decided not to
leave any part of his force to guard the San Bernardino Strait but to take those ships
which
would have formed Task Force 34 with him northward to attack them. Sho-1 was suddenly after all on the point of success. Kurita's 1st Attack Force was about to appear oft Leyte Gulf, where the landing force was protected only by a fragile fleet of destroyers and escort carriers. Vice-Admiral Kiyohide Shima's 2nd Attack Force and Vice-Admiral Shoji Nishimura's Force C were meanwhile heading for the Surigao Strait to take
the Leyte landing force
northwards
the
in
rear
from the south. While Halsey proceeded
encounter with the Japanese
to a putative
American invasion of Leyte was threatened with All that
unknown
carriers,
him
to
the
disaster.
stood between the two advancing Japanese forces and disaster were three
tiny escort carriers in the
San Bernardino
Oldendorf s
the Surigao
Strait.
the Second
World War and
battleships
Strait
and Admiral Oldendorf s
were
a spectre
from the
six battleships in
past, since
predated
all
had been raised from the bottom of Pearl Harbor. In the
five
intervening years, however, they had been refurbished and re-equipped, particularly with
modern
radar. In the darkness
appeared
ships
battleship Fuso as
distinct it
of the night of 24/25 October, the images of Nishimura's
on Oldendorfs radar
approached; his
own
the other Japanese battleship Yamashiro as well. alerting the Strait.
It
as
it
destroyers
The
C
survivors of Force
crippled
the
and sank
beat a retreat, not
passed them to the danger that lurked
in
Battle
of the Surigao
Strait
was
a luck}'
in the
Surigao
escape for the Americans. The second
the San Bernardino Strait promised not to be. Kurita's
outgunned any American force which stood between United
His
too suffered damage, hastily reversed course and followed in Nishimura's wake.
The round
2nd Attack Force
screens.
battleship salvoes then finished her off
States Navy's
heavy metal was
far
it
away. As Halsey cruised
in
was pursued by messages which included the notorious 'Where
whole world wonders'; the
last
Attack Force greatly
1st
and the landing
fleet,
while the
search of Ozawa, he is
Task Force 34 the
four words were a misunderstood piece of security
padding, but to Halsey the) were eternally galling. In the meantime Kurita had fallen
among
the landing
five escort carriers,
equipped
fleet's
protecting warships. Those he found
converted merchant ships with
for anti-submarine rather than
torpedo
little
first
were
speed and few
strikes.
The
five
a
puny group of
aircraft,
which were
nevertheless rose to the
occasion with aplomb and superb braver). While Admiral Clifton Sprague manoeuvred
Task Force
3 at all available
speed
to escape 16-
558
and 18-inch
salvoes, his pilots flew off their
The
escort carrier
USS
Gulf,
aircraft to
was by
takes a direct hit from a Japanese
bombs
launch anti-submarine
and
their
own
escorting destroyers. In the face of this
through the San Bernardino
To
the south,
but were
pursuit of
still
Ozawa
Zuiho sinking.
aircraft at Leyte
later.
One of the
carriers, Gambier Bay,
was
10.30
battleships
on
but
would toll.
A second
the
and
defiance,
dispirited retreat
morning of 25 October.
were steaming
to the rescue
from the Surigao
take even longer to reach the scene. Halsey's aircraft In an early-morning strike they
strike
left
had
the light carriers Chitose
destroyed Chiyoda and Ozawa's flagship Zuikaku, a veteran
come
to the battle with only 180 aircraft
completed the extinction of the in total a quarter
embarked,
great Japanese naval air force.
moreover, had to be added that of three battleships,
and ten destroyers,
Tom Thumb
decided to break off action and
three hours away; to the north, Halsey had reversed course from his
of Pearl Harbor; though they had loss virtually
carriers, Kurita
Strait. It
Oldendorf s
nevertheless taken their
and
the battleships.
at
kamikaze
than an hour
left
by the non-appearance of Ozawa's
Strait
less
on fire. The rest, to which another group of 'baby flattops' from Task Force assistance, managed to cover their retreat by air strikes and torpedo attacks launched
hit
2 lent
L6
St
25 October 1944. She sank
six
heavy
To
their
their loss,
cruisers, three light cruisers
of the losses the Imperial Japanese Navy had suffered
since Pearl Harbor.
Leyte Gulf was therefore not only the largest but also one of the most decisive battles
of naval history, even though for the Americans for Leyte itself
was
a
more long-drawn-out
on the Philippines stood or
fell
affair.
it
had been
a close-run thing.
The Japanese, recognising
by the defence of Leyte, rushed
559
in
The
that their
battle
hold
reinforcements by
THE WAR
THE PACIFIC
IN"
19-43-1945
destroyer from elsewhere in the islands - the 8th. 26th, 30th and 102nd Divisions, as well
from the dwindling general reserve
as the elite 1st Division
made
reinforced the four divisions with which the) had
November
they deployed six of their
own
- the
1st
77th and 96th Divisons. Fighting during the next
by
Cavalry, 7th, 11th Airborne, 24th, 32nd,
month was
bitter,
Japanese launched a counter-attack to take the main American
When
The Americans too
in China.
their initial landing, so that
and on 6 December the
airfield
the attack failed, the campaign for the island was effectively
at a
complex on
close.
Leyte.
had cost the
It
Japanese 70,000 and the Americans 15,500 losses.
On
9 January 1945 Krueger's Sixth
Army moved from
Leyte - and the nearby islands
of Mindoro and Samar, which had also been cleared - to invade Luzon, where the Philippines capital, Manila, was located. In the
mopping up Japanese
resistance in
New
while Slim's Fourteenth Arm}" opened
far
south the Australian
New
Guinea,
Britain
offensive into the plains of
its
First
Army was
and Bougainville. In Burma,
Burma by
capture
its
of Kalewa on the Chindwin on 2 December, Chiang's troops, with American assistance,
were by
also
making progress on the north-eastern
the vitriolic Stilwell,
who had
front.
They were no longer commanded
definitively fallen out in turn with the British, the
and ultimately President Roosevelt. After
Stihvell's
removal on
18
Chinese
October, his role was
divided between Generals Albert C. Wedemeyer, the architect of the American 'Victory Plan' of 1941,
China; the
and Daniel
latter
Sultan.
The former had taken over
now commanded
Merrill's
American commander
as the
in
Marauders (renamed Mars Force) and the
Indian-trained Chinese forces in Burma. In China, Chiang's armies, strengthened by
from Burma,
at
threatened to drive
Chungking
itself.
managed
last
a
Ichi-Go had achieved
of Chiang's arm). Indeed,
succeeded
which
Stilwell
in
after
it
had
a
in
at
subsidiary object in opening a continuous it
had not brought about the destruction
January 1945 the best of his troops (under Sultan's
command)
breaking across the mountainous north of Burma through Myitkyina,
had taken
forces advancing
divisions brought
Kweiyang,
corridor from the Japanese-held coastal areas to Chiang's capital
corridor from northern Indo-China to Peking, but
finally
two Indian-trained
to halt the Ichi-Go offensive at
in August, to join
from Yunnan.
On
up with the
so-called Y-Force of Chiang's China
27 January the two reopened the
Burma Road,
thus
assuring a direct source of land supply from the Anglo-American base in India to the
Kuomintang heartland around Chungking. The Japanese nevertheless remained the dominant force in southern China. British strength was aligned towards the plains of Burma,
into
Wedemeyer's,
which Sultan's
the
Fourteenth
Army was making
its
advance,
determined Japanese operation south of the Yangtse. In the spring of 1945, since 1941, the future of the battle
and
neither
nor even Chiang's troops were powerful enough to stem any
war
in
China was closely bound to
between the Imperial Japanese and United
forces in western Pacific waters.
560
as in every year
the outcome of the main
States Navies' fleets
and
their
amphibious
31 AMPHIBIOUS BATTLE
OKINAWA With
the
fall
of the Philippines and the capture of the Marianas, the war
approached
Pacific
climactic
its
continue throughout 1945 'defensive perimeter' of 1942; in
become
a
ghost
city as
devastated as
overwhelming force the
the northern Philippines,
Warsaw,
fighting
now underwent
two separate and competitive American
while the arm) Indies.
to the landing
moved by
shorter
in the
was
to
was
to
where Manila would
be very heavy indeed. The
a radical
change.
strategies,
No
longer would
with the navy bringing
of individual Marine divisions on
hooks
fighting
score of places inside or close to the Japanese
Burma and
character of the Pacific war, however, there be
at a
amphibious phase. Ground
tiny,
remote
in greater strength to seize large land
Navy and army would now combine
operations against the outlying islands of Japan
itself,
to
mount
large-scale
atolls,
masses in
amphibious
involving several divisions
at a
time,
enormous fleets and naval air forces as well as dense concentrations of embarked troops. The success of these operations would depend entirely on the combined amphibious skills
of
sailors, soldiers,
airmen and Marines.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff had confidence in the outcome of the projected operations, of which the most important was to be the landing on Okinawa in the Ryuku islands, only 380 miles from Kyushu, the southernmost of the large Japanese
amphibious
skills
were
now
been developing throughout the belonged above
all
to the
home
islands.
American
very high but had taken time to develop - indeed, they had Pacific
campaign. Credit for their conception, however,
United States Marine Corps, which had seen the need to learn
how troops could best be transferred from ship to shore twenty years before the Second World War began. The United States Marine Corps put forward the idea that transit between ship and shore must be essentially a tactical movement. The idea, so arrestingly simple, had been grasped by none of the oceanic powers before. Neither the British nor the French, though they had built great empires by projecting military through naval force,
561
THE WAR
had perceived
that there
debarking them
at
amphibious landing to shore
was more
THE PACIFIC
IN
them in ships' boats and mounted the great Hastily adapted lighters, towed
to landing troops than putting
When
the water's edge.
Gallipoli the result
at
1^43-1945
1915
in
the)
was catastrophic.
jointly
by steam pinnaces, were grounded under Turkish machine-guns and the soldiers
on board were massacred determined
that
World War
in the water. After the First
such would not be
its
reason for wishing to
make amphibious
entertained the fear -
common
men's
fate.
landing tactics
to small organisations
It
US Marine Corps
the
had, admittedly, an institutional
its
own
particular specialism, for
it
which operate between the margin
of two larger ones - of being absorbed by either the army or the navy; but there was more to
than
it
that set
it
that.
The Marines foresaw the danger of a
could be
won
Pacific
war with Japan. They
saw
also
only with specialised methods and specialised equipment, and they
about developing both.
The
amphibious warfare doctrine was Major
architect of the Marines'
in 1921 first
proposed the concept of landing
emphasised the need
for
as a 'ship-to-shore tactical
Earl Ellis,
who
movement'. He
landing troops to be covered with the heaviest available
left the ship, to debark on the run and to take up their first positions not on the beach itself but on dry ground inland. Sea and beach, in short, were to be regarded as a no man's land. The fighting would commence in or beyond the enemy's first
firepower as the)
defensive line well above the high-water mark. The realisation of such
not only special training but also purpose-built equipment. operating from a carrier but flown
if
One
a
concept required
item was a dive-bomber,
own
possible by pilots of the Marines'
air
arm; dive-
bombing was an essential means of delivering pinpoint firepower on to enemy beach strongpoints. The other was a 'dedicated' landing craft, with the power to cross the danger zone between ship and shore
high speed, and with the build to enable
at
debark and back off without waiting for the
need
for
tides.
and across the beach before
its
if
possible,
to beach,
With time, the US Marine Corps perceived
two and eventually three types of landing
amphibian or amphtrac, armoured
it
which could
occupants debarked;
a
craft.
The
first
was
actually drive out
a tracked
of the water
prototype was produced in 1924 by
Walter Christie, the astonishingly creative American tank pioneer (who also fathered the T-34).
The second was
a larger
beaching
model, the Higgins boat, was based on
New
Orleans for use
in the Mississippi delta.
tanks; the sketch for the
first
of more than
during the war was roughed out in the
US Navy's Bureau of Ships.
supplies
By
craft to carry
a
a
the second wave; the successful
design built by the Higgins
a civilian
The
third
was
a
Company of
ship capable of beaching
thousand Landing Ships Tank (LST)
few days
in
November
All three types could,
1941 by
built
John Niedermair of
of course, also be used to tranship the
which the landing troops needed once ashore. early 1945 the Pacific Fleet possessed
all
three types and
many
variations, in
enormous numbers;
the United States Coast Guard had specialised in the role of manning
the Marines' landing
craft.
In addition
on which landing troops and
craft
it
possessed large numbers of fast
'attack transports',
were embarked, and which could keep pace with the
562
OKINAWA
destroyers and carriers of an amphibious task force.
command
It
Ryuku
Plans for the advance to the
islands
when Admiral Raymond
the Leyte landing,
had numbers of dedicated
also
from which admirals and generals could
ships
jointly direct operations.
had been
commanding
Spruance,
before
laid as early as July 1944,
the Fifth Fleet, had
suggested that intermediate positions, particularly Formosa, should be bypassed and a giant stride taken to Japan's doorstep.
Admiral King, Chief of Naval Operations,
when
thought the scheme over-ambitious. By September, however, the persistence of the war in the
Europe (through
release
of more army formations. King relented. With
under
divisions
him
to
mount
large-scale operations
target for
to the
and
Ryukus was
to drive an
Formosa and Luzon, emergency landing
between the home
corridor' it
was
Marine divisions and
Because
army
five
force of sufficient size for
a
main aim of the advance
more
Iwo Jima
field for B-29s.
quickly,
in the
bombardment of Japan
and the Japanese
islands
also agreed that a subsidiary base
October the Joint Chiefs of
3
six
29 September 1944, therefore, King,
in the following year.
nearby, which could be taken
island
determination to stand on
the Philippines precluded the
to secure better air bases for the preparatory
'air
at first
clear that
San Francisco, agreed to make Okinawa the principal
at
amphibious operations
On
of his own.
became
in
command, Nimitz now had an independent
his
Nimitz and Spruance, meeting
On
Hitler's evident
West Wall) and MacArthur's deep involvement
it
provide
to
a
on
airfields
should be seized on
a
smaller
staging post
and
Bonin islands seemed the best choice.
Staff issued a directive for
Iwo Jima
be attacked
to
in
February and Okinawa in April.
The Ten-Go plan Meanwhile the Japanese were In
revising their
September 1943 they had accepted
had defined the
home
New
a
new
islands, the Bonins,
in 1944
abandoned, and
that the 1942 defensive
perimeter was untenable and
Marianas and Carolines in the central
Burma
had so deeply penetrated its
architects
representatives of the
in
zone
this
based on
in July
its
situation
It
formulated
a
ensured
that
codenamed Ten-Go
plan
as
Prime
remained
it
had so gravely deteriorated
China (where the Ichi-Go offensive proceeded)
headquarters had to think again.
defence were
Tojo resigned
Koiso, though the inclusion of
in the cabinet
By the spring of 1945 the
and western
Pacific,
Subsequently the American
that plans
more moderate Kuniaki
war and navy ministries
military control.
everywhere except
in the south-west.
withdrew from government;
Minister, to be replaced by the
under
plans for the future conduct of the war.
Absolute National Defence Zone, enclosing the Kuriles to the north of
Guinea, the East Indies and
advance
own
that
imperial
for the
defence
of the most vulnerable points on what remained of Japan's defensive cordon, which
Overleaf: One
of the airstrips at
Iwo Jima. The B-29
damaged bombers which landed on Iwo Jima
563
in
the foreground
is
one of over
before the end of the war.
2500
*«
|
s
THE WAR
IN
THE PACIFIC
1943-1945
included the island of Hainan between China and Indo-China, the China coast
itself,
Formosa and, lastly, the Ryukus. The sub-plan for the defence of the Ryukus, of which Okinawa was recognised to be the island most at risk, was codenamed Ten-Ichigo, and 4800 aircraft based on Formosa and the home islands were allotted to its execution. Because of the shortage of fuel, which limited the number of sorties that could be flown and severely
restricted the pilots' training hours, Ten-Ichigo
missions to
was
to
be
new
a
sort
of
would be loaded with high explosive and would fly one-way crash themselves on American ships in what the Americans would learn to call
The
offensive.
aircraft
'kamikaze' ('divine wind') suicide strikes.
The Americans had ahead)' experienced of the
Battle
a foretaste
of kamikaze
tactics
on
the
of Leyte Gulf, but fortunately those suicide missions had been
last
day
hastily
more methodically prepared and was not ready for launching when the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions assaulted Iwo Jima on 19 February. That was the only mere)' granted the Americans at Iwo Jima; heavily gunned and garrisoned, honeycombed with tunnels, its bedrock of basalt covered with a deep layer of volcanic improvised. Ten-Ichigo was
dust, the island subjected the
Amphtracs
Marines to their worst landing experience of the
and ditched on the beaches,
lost traction
close-range artillery which three days of battleship
to
Pacific war.
be destroyed by salvoes from
bombardment had not
destroyed;
riflemen dug trenches which collapsed as soon they were deep enough to give cover; the
wounded were wounded
again as they lay out
Sherrod, the correspondent
thought
the worst battle he
it
violence'.
who had been
When Iwo Jima was
and 20,000 wounded, over died almost to
a
at
had ever seen: finally
a third
on the beaches awaiting
evacuation. Robert
Tarawa and most island landings
men
died,
he
in
between,
said, 'with the greatest possible
secured on 16 March, 6821 Americans had been killed
of those
who had
landed; the 21,000 Japanese defenders
man.
Okinawa,
the last battle
Iwo Jima provided an awful warning of what lay in store for the American divisions assigned to Okinawa - the 1st, 6th and 7th Marine, and the army's 7th, 27th, 77th, 81st and 96th Divisions. Because of the casualties taken at Iwo Jima on the first day, it was decided to make the preparatory bombardment the heaviest yet delivered on to a Pacific island. It lasted from 24 to 31 March, and when it was over nearly 30,000 heavy-calibre shells had impacted on the landing
area.
battleships, forty carriers
On
1
April,
from an armada of 1300 ships including eighteen 1st and 6th Marine and 7th and 96th
and 200 destroyers, the
Divisions raced to shore in their amphtracs and Higgins boats to seize the central waist of
the island,
where
Okinawa
is
its
resist
and then reduce resistance
a large island nearly eighty miles long.
capture was based
would
airfields lay,
on
the supposition that, as
tenaciously
at
at all
in the
two
halves.
The American scheme
but one landing so
far,
for
its
the Japanese
the water's edge and then be beaten back inland, to increasingly
566
OKINAWA
untenable positions, by the weight of American
American expectations, had adopted
anticipating
defence. The) were to
the Marine and
let
what they regarded
into battle against
army
as
to drive the fleet away, leaving
The Japanese landed on the
first
on the
forces
day -
contrary
a
divisions land
scheme
numbered some
Okinawa's
lines within the island,
be destroyed
to
for
unopposed, then draw them
against the ships offshore.
landbound half
its
island
a figure that
and naval firepower. The Japanese,
impregnable defence
meanwhile turning the weight of the kamikaze was
air
The ultimate aim at leisure.
120,000 against 50,000 Americans
eventually rose to nearly a quarter of a million in the
US Tenth Army. These Japanese troops were organised into the 24th and 62nd Divisions and together with a large number of non-divisional units formed the Thirty-Second Army, commanded by General Mitsuru Ushijima. He was more realistic than the staff officers in imperial general headquarters, since he recognised that victory on Okinawa was unattainable; nevertheless he intended to inflict the largest possible toll of casualties on the invaders, and had made preparations accordingly. The island was honeycombed with tunnels and firing positions, fighting positions
formed
many of which concealed
weapons; and the
large-calibre
of lines which extended from the beaches where he had
a series
Americans would land into the high ground to the south and north.
correctly judged the
The Americans landed
without loss on
virtually
were
Divisions (whose volunteer soldiers
for the
April.
1
The
1st
and 6th Marine
time in the war diluted with
first
conscripts) then turned north to clear the top of the island before joining the army's 7th
and 96th Divisions
in the battle for the
mounted, both were Shuri and Naha.
It
in contact
was on
more mountainous
south. By 6 April, as casualties
with the Machinato Line covering the southern
day that the Japanese
that
air
cities
of
and sea offensive against the
offshore fleet began.
The Americans had already had defend Okinawa
when
Task Force
58,
of how fiercely the Japanese intended to commanded by the resolute Admiral Mitscher,
taste
a
still
had raided the Inland Sea on 18-19 March American
carrier aircraft
suffered heavily
by rapid
Another
itself.
The
firefighting, a
carrier
preliminary to the landing. Although
was
her crew died, the highest
hit
fatal
aircraft,
Wasp was badly damaged by
technique
carrier, Franklin,
as a
had destroyed some 200 Japanese
at
a
the task force had also
kamikaze and only saved
which the American now excelled
by two
bombs which
all
other navies.
almost incinerated the ship; 724 of
casualty toll suffered by any surviving
American ship
in the
Pacific war.
On Japan's
6 April kamikazes attacked in dense waves;
last
eight destroyers set
sail
the
same
time, far to the north,
from Japan. Yamato had taken on board the
available at her Japanese
home
penetrate the screen around the
amphibious
noon on
at
operational surface force, the giant battleship Yamato escorted by a cruiser and
force.
port to
make
the one-way
Okinawa beaches and
inflict
trip.
last
2500 tons of
fuel
Her mission was
She was detected long before she got within range, however, and
7 April v\as taken
under
attack by 280 aircraft
567
to
unacceptable damage on the
of Task Force
58.
at
Between noon
THE WAR
Amphibious landing
IN
THE PACIFIC
churn towards Okinawa,
craft
1
1943-1945
April 194S, while the 16-in guns of a
battleship plaster the shoreline. In taking the island the
12,000
casualties, over
of
them dead. of
and two o'clock she suffered
duck
to successive
almost
were
all
six
whom
110,000 were
torpedo
waves of American
the 2300 sailors
last sortie
suffered nearly
speed and
hits, lost
aircraft
on board. Her
and
cruiser
117,000
50,000
casualties,
killed.
at 2.23
pm
steering,
became
rolled over
a sitting
and sank with
and four of her seven destroyer escorts had launched the Imperial Japanese
also sunk. This 'Special Surface Attack Force'
Navy's
Americans
In contrast the Japanese sustained
of the war.
The kamikazes proved
far
more
difficult to repel.
were on suicide missions, attacked the amphibious
About 900
aircraft,
of which
a third
on 6 April and by the end of the day, although 108 were shot down, three destroyers, two ammunition ships and an LST had been sunk. The attacks were repeated on 7 April when a battleship, a carrier and two destroyers were
all hit
by kamikaze
strikes.
fleet
The American response was
to thicken the
screen of radar-picket destroyers, lying off Okinawa up to ranges of 95 miles, which gave early
warning of
semicircle
attacks.
There were soon sixteen on
station,
eleven of which lay in the
between the north-eastern and south-western azimuths, nearest Japan and
Formosa. As the
British task force at the Falklands
568
was
to rediscover forty years later,
OKINAWA, APRIL-JUNE
1945
PACIFIC
OCEAN
Takabanare Shima
9 April J_J US XXIV Corps begins attacks against Shuri line
29 May Shuri taken
Key ^rnrnrn
US /
^dfc-A.
attacks
Area occupied by US Tenth Army by 4 April Main Japanese defence
lines
Airfields
5 miles
22 June Japanese resistance ends
569
Left: The flight deck of the carrier
by two kamikaze
1945 during fleet
They
the fighting for
stood off
sinking
Okinawa
Okinawa.
also sacrificed the battleship
off
ferring the
wounded from
the
types,
Hill after direct
one minute on
hits
May
1900 kamikaze
US
missions,
and damaging dozens more.
Yamato, which was
aircraft
1 1
two months that the
one-way journey, only
Okinawa by 300 US
571
In the
the Japanese flew
38 warships, mostly smaller
suicide mission, with fuel for a
bottom
USS Bunker
aircraft within the space of
on 7
USS Bunker
j4pril.
Hill.
despatched on a to
be sent to the
Above:
Trans-
US Marines in the
cautiously await the results of a satchel charge tossed into a Japanese strongpoint
murderous
terrain of
Okinawa, which saw some of
the
most savage
fighting of the
Pacific war.
however, but
its
a
screen of radar pickets
mission
as targets.
fourteen
is
a sacrificial
may
give the large units of a fleet early
one, for the incoming
enemy
That was to be the American destroyers'
fate.
American destroyers were sunk by suicide
Between 6
pilots,
seventeen LSTs, ammunition ships and assorted large landing
Over 5000 American heaviest toll the
Between 6
mounted
sailors
died
US Navy had April
and
as a result
warning of attack;
strikes readily
choose
April
together
craft lying
its
ships
and 29
with
July
another
within the screen.
of the Okinawa kamikaze campaign - the
suffered in any episode of the war, including Pearl Harbor.
10 June, besides
ten mass attacks by 50-300
many
aircraft,
smaller missions the kamikaze corps
which damaged
carriers as well as destroyers; the venerable Enterprise
572
battleships
and the newer
and
aircraft
carriers Hancock
and
OKINAWA
Bunker
crew
Hill
were
killed.
all
but below the principal
kamikaze victims, and Bunker
American flight
Spruance's flagship,
deck, burned
too easily
all
when
a
lost
396 of her
kamikaze landed aboard. A
advantage of the four British carriers of Task Force
American force off Okinawa as a
Hill,
which were horizontally armoured above the engine room
carriers,
in
March, was
that
57,
which joined the
they were armoured on
decks
their flight
precaution against the shellfire likely to be encountered in narrower European waters,
and therefore survived kamikaze
strikes
without serious damage.
Ultimately the kamikaze attacks could not go on, for the Japanese began to run out of
both
pilots
and
May
bound
remain
to
the
aircraft;
heavier in
than in June, in place
number of raids was heavier in April than in May and far when only four ships were sunk. However, the pickets were
- arid so expose themselves to damage or sinking,
unbearable cost to their crews' nerves the campaign
protracted,
as
long
as the
army and Marines
at
almost
battled ashore. As
Army
Nimitz grew increasingly impatient with the Tenth
commander, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, complaining that he lost 'a ship and a half a day' at the pace at which the front was moving. Buckner, son of the general who had fought Ulysses
methodical lines
were
Grant in the American
S.
tactics. Successive'
ridge lines
were washed by constant
Civil
which bogged tanks
rain,
inexperienced naval shore personnel, fought
June did resistance cease, and
1862,
defended
resolutely
offensive
his
mounted. The
trying to give support,
some
had suffered
literally to
and they
the death. Not until the
some 4000 Japanese surrendered
including Ushijima, committed
officers,
subordinates and outset,
in
imposed delay on every
defended by Japanese who, whether trained infantrymen or wholly
fanatically
Japanese senior
War
civilian Japanese.
terribly; at least
end of
in the last days. All the
ritual suicide, as
many of their
did
The Okinawan population, 450,000 strong
70,000 and perhaps as
many
as 160,000
at
the
died in the
course of the fighting. Thousands took refuge in the island's numerous caves, which the
were
garrison subsequently occupied as strongpoints, and infantry attacked
them with flamethrowers and high lost
4000
killed,
destroyed and 38 ships sunk. The Japanese
7800
aircraft,
over
a
thousand
in
the American
explosive.
For the fighting troops Okinawa had been the grimmest of
American army divisions
when
killed
all
Pacific battles.
The
the Marine Corps 2938; 763 aircraft were lost 16 ships
and an almost incredible
total
of
kamikaze missions. The Japanese servicemen on the
island - shore-based sailors as well as front-line riflemen, clerks, cooks,
Okinawan labour
conscripts - found ways of dying almost to the
total
including
men
too badl)
number, died refusing
wounded
to
commit
to surrender.
573
last
man. The American
suicide,
was 7400;
all
of prisoners,
the others, 110,000 in
THE WAR
IX
THE PACIFIC
1943-1945
SUPER-WEAPONS AND THE DEFEAT OF JAPAN Okinawa
left
war drew
an awful warning of what awaited the American forces
towards the perimeter of the Japanese
in
battle for a large island
and duration hinted
at far
on
to circulate
among American
an invasion of Japan.
campaign So
far
American
- and
sailors,
war had been
a
this
was
of 'a million
to
implies
no
small war.
was the
the
Inland Sea.
casualties',
shadow over
even
slur
'a
From
cost to
source never
a
million dead', had begun
number of losses
their discussions
to
be expected
in
of how the victorious
a national tragedy.
on the courage, dedication and
who
its
first
Navy advanced
the United States
be brought to an end without
Marines and soldiers
any other theatre: with
come once
strategic planners as the
cast a terrible
It
in the Pacific
to
on the shores of
satisfactorily identified, the figure
as the Pacific
It
the approaches to the empire's heartland, and
worse ordeals
land soldiers and Marines
home
islands.
self-sacrifice
of the
fought and died in the front line - the Pacific
The number of major a dozen battleships,
ships engaged exceeded that deployed in fifty
aircraft
carriers,
fifty
cruisers,
300
destroyers and 200 submarines, the Pacific Fleet in 1945 was not only the largest navy in the
world but the
largest
navy that had ever existed;
Navy, whose few units
still
it
had extinguished the Imperial Japanese them to put to sea. The American
afloat lacked the fuel for
naval air force, 3000 strong, was also the largest in being; in addition the navy and the
574
US
SUPER-WEAPONS AND THE DEFEAT OF JAPAN
Army
had tens of thousands of shore-based
Air Force
which had begun
Superfortress, 250 of
March, with devastating
The
Pacific
B-29
including the
aircraft,
to operate regularly against Japanese cities since
effect.
war had been an enormous war
in
its
geographical scope, encompassing
over 6 million square miles of land and ocean. In terms of human numbers, however, the
war had been quite small compared mobilised 12 million
most of Pacific,
men
and about
Britain's 5 million
There the Soviet Union had
committed
posted to the
and 1945
1941
army and four Marine to the
that
the
number were
of these, however, only 450,000
theatres;
and of those twenty-nine divisions only some
were involved
theatre,
where
in regular
six
periods of prolonged combat.
mid-1944 300 German and
in
of
which America
million and a quarter United States servicemen
a
divisions,
divisions
European
engaged
five-sixths
in China;
had perhaps not exceeded
and China-Burma-India
Pacific
belonged to army or Marine
Compared
had been stationed
islands
to the fighting in the islands
Between
sent.
home
also
quarter of the United States' 12 million. In the
a
by contrast, although the Japanese had mobilised 6 million men,
those deployed outside the
had
to that fought in Europe.
Germany's 10 million, and the theatre had
against
satellite divisions
confronted 300 Russian and seventy British and American divisions, the 'ground combat'
dimension of the
war was small indeed -
Pacific
if
one
sets aside the appalling casualties
suffered by the Japanese island garrisons. In the aftermath of
Okinawa,
The surrender of German) meant
its
scale
that
all
suddenly threatened to swell exponentially.
of the ninety divisions the United States had
made available for the invasion Army Stalin decided to allot as once Germany was defeated, at
mobilised and most of the British Empire's sixty could be
of Japan, together with whatever proportion of the Red
soon
he declared war
as
Tehran
November
in
numbers such territory
(as
he had undertaken
as these
to do,
According to the Okinawan experience, however, even
1943).
could not guarantee that the defeat of the Japanese on their
would be quick or cheap. Okinawa and Japan were
offered a defender a vast succession of ridge, mountain and forest positions from
hold an invader
at
bay.
The prospect appalled the United
States'
18
on Okinawa,
June
that
home
of the Japanese
as
many
fronts so
battle
that,
with 767,000
at a
first
men committed
dead and wounded would therefore amount
to 268,000, or
deaths as the United States had suffered throughout the world on
all
far.
Truman's comment was
that
Okinawa from one end of Japan at the end of May
Washington Olympic)
and
to
casualties
percentage could be expected in an attack on Kyushu, the
islands selected for invasion,
to the operation, the toll of
about
Truman
the army and Marine divisions had suffered 35 per cent
that a similar
which
decision-makers. Admiral
William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out to President
meeting on
home
similar in terrain, but Japan
in
the
he 'hoped there was to the other'.
1945,
autumn of 1945 and an
assault
The
for an
called
possibility
of preventing
,\n
worked out
in
Joint Chiefs' plan,
invasion of
on the main
575
a
island
Kyushu (codenamed
of Honshu (codenamed
THE WAR
Coronet)
March
in
been
largely fixed
war.
The
1946.
It
THE PACIFIC
IN
had been agreed with
by MacArthur, insisted
that only
which the US Arm)
Air Force
navy, to
1943-1945
difficulty.
The
whose view had
arm)',
an invasion would definitively finish the
commanders
unspoken support,
lent
argued that the seizure of bases on the coast of China from which close-range
bombardment could be mounted would reduce Japanese risk
American
inflicted
lives in
resistance without the
need
an amphibious landing. Strategic bombing, however, had thus
damage on the home
little
government's
strategic air
will to war.
and had had
islands
insignificant effect
upon
to far its
MacArthur's view therefore prevailed.
The destruction of Japan's
cities
Before the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued their directive for Olympic and Coronet, however,
bombing campaign had taken
the strategic
a different turn. Like the British
Americans had been constrained
in 1^42, the
much more
dogmatically than the British
accept that
had
it
to
be used
as a blunt instrument.
They had been driven
doctrine by the success of the Japanese (in imitation ofSpeer's 1943-4) in dispersing production of
new
centres to
factories
which could not be
the
main base
bombing
for the Superfortresses
tactics.
Targets
by high explosive but
were
bomb
or
hit
of XXI
change of
Germany
Harris had
made in
Bomber Command,
his
'thousand-bomber
one German filled
city after
with
in
by the Twentieth Air
drenching by incendiary bombs
and created firestorms
chiefs
the main industrial
which had become
arrived in the Marianas,
LeMay's aircrew used, however, being
efficient
paper
easily located
in
implement new
to
be subjected not to precision high-level daylight
to
to low-level
method by which 'Bomber' terror in 1942
LeMay
to that
programme
weapon components away from
Force. In February 1945 General Curtis
bomber
abandon the belief- which they had held - that the bomber was a precision tool and to to
at
strikes
night, exactly the
raids'
another.
jellified petrol,
an instrument of
The incendiary was
a far
more
more important, Japan's flimsy wood-andmore easily than European stone and brick. March Bomber Command attacked Tokyo with 325 aircraft armed exclusively
agent of conflagration than the RAF's;
cities
On
9
burned
far
with incendiaries, flying
bombing
the
city
at
low
centre took
altitude
fire
under cover of darkness.
and by morning
16 square miles
In a
few minutes of
had been consumed;
267,000 buildings burned to the ground, and the temperature in the heart of the firestorm
caused the water to boil large again as the
in the city's canals.
number of injured
The
casualty
list
recorded 89,000 dead, half as
survivors treated in the city's hospitals. Losses to the
bombers were below 2 per cent and were to decline as the campaign gathered force. command soon rose in strength to 600 aircraft and brought one city after another
LeMay's
under attack; by mid-June Japan's five other largest industrial centres had been devastated - Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka. Yokohama and Kawasaki - 260,000 people had been killed, 2 million buildings destroyed and
The destruction continued
between
9
and
13
million people
relentlessly, at virtually
576
no
made homeless. American bomber
loss to the
SUPER-WEAPONS AND THE DEFEAT OF JAPAN
£s
B-29s over Yokohama, 29
May
1945, a daylight raid on which
26 Japanese
crews but sixty
at
their
down
fighters.
appalling cost to Japan; by July 60 per cent of the
larger cities
P-51 escorts shot
and towns had been burnt
out.
ground area of the country's
As MacArthur and other military
hardheads had argued, however, the devastation did not seem to deflect the Japanese
government from draw China into
its
a
commitment
to continuing the war. In early April, after failing to
separate peace, Koiso had been replaced as Prime Minister by a
moderate figurehead, the seventy-eight-year-old Admiral Kantaro Suzuki; Tojo, though
deposed Prime
standing in the army, and he and other militarists were determined to fight
end. This determination exacted sacrifices which even Hitler had not
Germans
a
Minister, nevertheless retained a veto over cabinet decisions through his it
out to the
demanded of
the
months of the war. The food ration was reduced below the 1500 support life, and more than a million people were set to grubbing up
in the closing
calories necessary to
pine roots from which a form of aviation fuel could be
distilled.
On
the
economic
front,
reported a cabinet committee instructed by Suzuki to examine the situation, the steel and
577
THE WAR
IK
THE PACIFIC
1943-1945
chemical industries were on the point of collapse, only
remained
afloat, insufficient to sustain
railway system
would
shortly cease to function.
made
Tentative openings
May through
in
Still
million tons of shipping
a
movement between
the
home
islands,
and the
no one dared speak of
peace.
the Japanese legation in Switzerland by the
Dulles, were met with silence; over 400 people were on the mere suspicion of favouring negotiation.
American representative, Alan arrested in Japan during 1945
The search midsummer
In
the
weapons
for revolutionary
American government began both
patience
lose
to
Japan's
at
intransigence and to yield to the temptation to end the war in a unique, spectacular and
incontestably decisive way. The)' were aware through Magic intercepts that the Suzuki cabinet, like Koiso's before
whom
it
point
in
hoped would Japan's
it,
was pursuing backdoor negotiations with the Russians,
were
act as mediators; they
attitude
to
ending
the
war
aware
also
was
that a principal sticking-
'unconditional
the
pronouncement of 1943. which all loyal Japanese recognised system. However, since the Russians mediated in no way at
surrender'
as a threat to the imperial all,
and since the Potsdam
conference following the surrender of Germany indicated that unconditional surrender
need not extend
to the
during the summer. threatening
'the
utter
government offered
known
emperor's deposition, America's willingness to wait attenuated
On its
26 July the Potsdam Proclamation was broadcast to Japan,
destruction
of the Japanese
that 'utter destruction' lay within the
United
atomic weapon had been successfully detonated
On
21 Jul),
Spaatz, the as
weather
at
States'
power, for on
Alamagordo
in the
Truman had
that
day the
New Mexico
first
desert.
while the Potsdam meeting was in progress, he and Churchill agreed in
principle that
weapon of
homeland' unless the imperial
unconditional surrender. Since 16 July President
it
should be used.
On
25 July he informed Stalin that America had
'a
new
unusually destructive force'. Next day the order was issued to General Carl
commander of the will
permit
visual
Strategic Air Forces, to 'deliver
bombing
after
about
3
its first
special
bomb
August 1945 on one of the
Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki'. The attempt to bring the Second World an end by the use of
a
as
soon
targets:
War
to
revolutionary super-weapon had been decided.
The search for a revolutionary weapon was one of the most immediate and outcomes of the industrialisation of war in the mid-nineteenth century, and both a logical and an inevitable extension of the revolution in war which preceded it. Until the fifteenth century, warfare was a muscular activity, and decision on the battlefield went persistent
to the side which could sustain muscular effort longer than the other. The invention of gunpowder changed that; by allowing energy to be stored in chemical form, it made the weak man the equal of the strong and transferred advantage in war to the side which possessed superior intellectual quality and morale. The first attempts to draw on the
products of industrialisation for military purpose therefore took the form of multiplying
578
SUPER-WEAPONS AND THE DEFEAT OF JAPAN
power of chemical energy by
the
accelerating the rate
discharged; breech-loading and magazine
rifles
which
at
projectiles could be
and then the machine-gun were the
result.
Their purpose was to nullify morale and intellectual quality by weight of metal.
When human industrial age their tack.
resilience
and
demonstrated
adaptability
could survive even quantum leaps
They began
that the fighting
problem of
to apply their inventiveness not to the
disabling warriors en masse but to attacking
man
of the
changed
in firepower, military inventors
killing
and destroying the protective systems
in
or
which
on land, fortifications; at sea, armoured ships. Human ingenuity had means of destroying ships by stealth even before the industrial age, and the idea of the submarine and the torpedo had found primitive forms in sailing days. Between 1877 and 1897 both the torpedo and the submarine emerged as practicable weapons and did indeed transform the nature of naval warfare. The tank, which appeared in 1916, promised they took shelter -
sought
a
a
comparable transformation of land warfare.
The promise, however, proved
illusory. Tank and submarine, though they appeared weapons in essence, were more or less quickly revealed to be tactical; that is to say, they were susceptible to counter-measures at the point of encounter and they struck at the products, not the structure, of an enemy's war-making system. However great
to
be
the as
strategic
human
and material damage they
losses
he could replace those losses and
inflicted at the battlefront, the
repair that
damage from
continue to wage war. The production of tanks and submarines,
were destroyed and had
battle
on
industrial capacity
to be replaced
enemy,
as
his internal resources, as
from current output,
those committed to
itself
became
a
It
was
charge
and therefore merely raised instead of reducing the price of victory.
World
This perception was one of the most important military legacies of the First
War.
long
might
to lead to the formulation
of the theory of strategic bombing. In the years
the war, both the British and the American air forces
were converted
after
to the belief that the
heavy bomber, by carrying the high explosive which had proved so ineffectual against trench systems to the industrial heartland of the enemy, could quickly and
finally
destroy
means of making war and so win victory without the need for armies or navies to fight 'decisive' battles at all. The British further persuaded themselves that if such a 'strategic bombing' campaign were carried out at night it would spare the bombing force
his
appreciable
by the
made
loss,
Italian
while the Americans independently arrived
dogmatist, Giulio Douhet, that a large, heavily
self-defending: the Flying Fortress
was the
at
the conclusion advanced
armed day-bomber could be
result.
we have seen, the experience of war proved the theory of strategic bombing to be founded. A major cause of its failure lay in the realisation of one of the war's greatest As
ill
scientific
endeavours, the development of radar. Invented by the British before the
outbreak, in 1940
it
provided an effective though
which allowed Fighter
Command
to
Luftwaffe raids during the Battle of Britain.
which became operational
in 1942,
static
chain of early-warning stations
be directed quickly and accurately against incoming
The
British invention
enabled radar to function
579
at
of the cavitron
valve,
'centimetric' wavelengths
THE WAR
on
THE PACIFIC
IK
These developments, which
a directional arc.
1943-1945
reduced the bulk of radar
greatly
sets,
increased the definition of the image received and allowed the operator to search a chosen sector of air space,
meant
was used with considerable success
It
during
night raids
its
range lethal to an
When
'centimetric' radar
against the V-ls.
on the Reich; had
to inflict a
heavy
would have
By 1944
US Eighth
also discovered the secret of
the)
mid-1945
The
clear to
Air Force that strategic
seemed
it
strategic
bombing
by-
suffered proportionately.
had become
it
on Bomber
toll
miniaturising radar fusing for anti-aircraft shells, the American formations daylight
fuse,
anti-aircraft shell at a
was developed by the Germans, however, they began
Command
in night-fighters; a
was the miniaturised radar proximity
introduced in August 1944. which exploded an aircraft.
could be mounted
that effective search radars
application of the cavitron valve
further
of the
clear that the fire-bombing
bomber,
like the
Bomber Command and
but the dogmatists in
all
bombing would not win
home
the war in islands
Europe
would not
the
(just as in
beat Japan).
submarine and the tank, had been revealed to be
a
weapon
susceptible to counter-measures, a system that required expensive 'dedicated' defences to protect
and
it
a
victim of attntional losses
on war production. search for
it
la)'
in
If
which imposed
one
field
of the search, the Germans had
weapons'
made
greater progress than any of the other
combatants. They were on the point of deploying
weapon
heavy and continuing charge
another direction.
Hitler's 'revenge In
a
there was such a thing as a revolutionary war-winning weapon, the
research had an extended history,
much
of
a ballistic missile. it
German
intertwined with the
life
pilotless
stories
of
Werner von Braun and Walter Dornberger. Von Braun was a professional technologist whose youthful enthusiasm for the idea of space travel had translated itself by two
individuals,
the late 1920s into practical experimentation with rockets. Dornberger
gunner
officer
who
had served with the heavy
was charged with rocket development brought the two into contact and firings.
the
in 1932 they
Army Weapons
would have
to meet.
highest achievement to date had
about 25
lb
'I
of high explosive about 80 miles.
would send
a
a
Office.
among
regular in 1930
Circumstances
Paris Gun',
My
practical criteria a
heavy gunner,' he wrote. 'Gunnery's
idea of a
ton of high explosive over 160 miles.'
military requirements,
a
began to experiment together with rocket
had been
been the huge
was
World War and
Braun supplied the technical expertise, Dornberger defined the
successful rocket
that
at
artillery in the First
which first
He
fired
'a
21-cm
shell with
big rocket was something
also 'stipulated a
number of
others that for every 1000 feet of range a deviation of only 2
or 3 feet [from the chosen impact point] was acceptable.'
we must be able width laid down maximum
He
rocket by insisting that
to transport
exceed the
for road vehicles.'
it
intact
finally 'limited the size
by road and
that
it
of the
must not
Dornberger's prescription revealed both the institutional roots of his thinking and,
580
at
SUPER-WEAPONS AND THE DEFEAT OF JAPAN
the
same
went back
which the German
German
into the future.
to the characteristics of the
had devastated the Belgian
artillery
ballistic missiles
range, accuracy and
size
What he demanded,
twentieth century.
305-mm and 420-mm guns with
forts in 1914;
ensured
it
that future
would be weapons of the artillery arm. His requirements of warhead, on the other hand, cast German rocket research
which has become the
missile
on road
time, an astonishing prescience of the rocket's potential. His insistence
transportability
When,
in effect,
was
later,
he was to
prototype for the transportable
a
principal strategic
weapon of
insist that
for far
ballistic
the superpowers in the late
model
the successful production
Germans as the A-4, to the Allies as the V-2) should move on a vehicle (the Meillenvagen) which was also its launcher, he ensured the appearance of the 'transportererector' which in our own time has made the Soviet SS-20 and the American Pershing 2 instruments of strategic power so 'survivable' that their existence has produced the world's
(known
first
to the
ever categorical agreement of disarmament between leading military powers.
The German army's decision
to invest in rocket
provisions of the Versailles treaty, which forbade
proscribe rockets. By 1937, however,
advanced
Braun and Dornberger
for
it
when work on to
development was motivated by the
to possess
heavy
artillery
but did not
the V-2's predecessors was sufficiently
have secured funds to establish
a testing station
the Baltic island of Peenemtinde, Hitler had already breached the Versailles treaty
The rocket team's current preoccupation was
point.
research.
The army favoured the programme,
and provided
Armaments
Speer, the after
viewing
announced supplied
finance. In
a film
October 1942
was
a successful test firing
Minister, authorised
was
it
'the decisive
on
every
funding to continue
to be an
army weapon,
staged, in
mass production, and on
of a missile launch, designated
that 'whatever labour
to sustain
since the V-2
at
December
7 July 1943 Hitler,
weapon of the
war' and
and materials [Braun and Dornberger] need must be
instantly.'
British were already aware that the German ballistic missile programme was well advanced. Warning from a still-unidentified German wellwisher, received in Norway in 1940 and known as the 'Oslo Report', had alerted London to the existence of a missile research programme. The trail had then gone cold, but had revived when new evidence suggested in December 1942 that a ballistic missile was under development in Germany and, in April 1943, that the Luftwaffe was also experimenting with a pilotless aircraft. Both clues came from 'Humint' (human intelligence, or the word of agents' contacts), one of its few successes of the war. By June both German programmes had been identified as centring on Peenemunde, where in fact the Luftwaffe was
By 1943, however, the
developing the FZG-76
(V-l
flying-bomb)
Braun worked on the V-2 rocket
Bomber Command August
it
to take
that
it
was not
until 12
at
one end of the
the other.
On
aircraft
Dornberger and
attack
and on the night of 16/17
and devastated.
raid so gravel) set
June 1944
island while
29 June Churchill personally ordered
Peenemunde under heavy
was attacked by 330
The Peenemunde
at
that the
back the first
German
pilotless
flying-bomb landed
S81
weapons programme September
in Britain; 8
THE WAR
was the date of the
IN
THE PACIFIC 194M945
successful V-2 rocket attack. By then the Luftwaffe's 155 Regiment
first
had been driven back from the positions whence
V-ls could reach England; as a result,
its
out of the 35,000 produced, only 9000 were fired against England and of these over 4000
were destroyed by chosen launch
anti-aircraft fire
which 1300 impacted, and which by then was the
The V-2s their
killed
or fighter attack.
The V-2s were never
northern France; from Holland the) could
sites in
after
just
fired
October an equal number were directed
Allied Liberation Armies'
main
from
Antwerp,
at
logistic base.
2500 Londoners between 8 September 1944 and 29 March 1945,
launch positions were
finally
overrun by the
21st
their
reach London, on
Army Group.
Britain
had had
when
a
lucky
escape - and perhaps also America, for Braun and Dornberger had already written the specifications for a missile, designated the
which would have had
stage,
a
A10 and
utilising the
V-2 (A-4) as
its
second
range of 2800 miles and been launched across the Atlantic.
Under other circumstances, moreover,
these missiles, to which the Allies had not even the
beginnings of a counterpart and no counter-measure whatsoever, would have carried a
warhead
as revolutionary in
namre
as the missiles
were themselves. For Germany too had
atomic weapons programme.
its
It
was the crowning mercy of the Second World War
complex of reasons, which included Nazi Germany's scientific talent
by
its
that
it
came
to nothing.
self-deprivation
For
a
of significant
persecution of the Jews, but also the inefficient multiplication of
programmes by as many as a dozen agencies which all hoped to win the Fiihrer's favour by bringing him news of the successful development of the super-weapon, the research
American atomic intelligence team which ransacked Germany
were about
bomb
at all'.
as far as
we were
In the last
as for ballistic missiles,
months of his developed too
deployment, attempted
vengeance on
his
in 1940, before
235
on
that,
war
in 1942, the
would have
for nuclear
weapons,
'although
that,
Germans had
[he]
had been
failed to separate
while they had apparently started separation
only recently succeeded in manufacturing uranium metal at
1945 found that 'they
to ensure their decisive operational
by means of a centrifuge and were constructing
taken their experiments to the point
May
about him with promises of unanswerable
weapon
element] and
in
any large-scale work on the
whose enthusiasm
enemies. However, the evidence showed
[the essential fissile
a small scale
Hitler,
late in the
to revitalise those
advised of the possibility of an atomic
U
life,
we had begun
which
the)
.
.
.
a
uranium
pile,
they had
and had not by August 1944
were aware of the
difficulties
they
overcome before the pile would function.' Germans were years from manufacturing an atomic bomb at the time when the Allied atomic weapons programme was already close to fulfilment. In October 1939 Albert Einstein, then the most famous man of science in the world and an emigre to the United States, had nevertheless been prompted by two younger physicists to write to to
In short, the
Above: A
V-l plunges to earth in central London. Right: The scene in
June 1944
after a
582
V-l attack.
Clapham on 17
Law*
n
v> > c*>
>
^
^
THE WAR
programme and Roosevelt
up
set
own
efforts
that
THE PACIFIC
German)
1943-194S
might be bent on an atomic weapons
suggesting that the United States should study the possibility
'Uranium Committee', which reported
a
would be
feasible and, if so,
their
warning
Roosevelt
President
IK
'determining'. In 1942 the British,
researches with excellent
manpower
Project,
who had been
was
pursuing
but insufficient funds, amalgamated their
with those of the Americans in the United
employed by the Manhattan
itself;
in Jul)' 1941 that the project
By 1945 120,000 people were
States.
which had succeeded
the synthetic element plutonium and in developing
in separating
mechanisms
to
uranium 235 and explode both
as
warheads of bomber-borne weapons. It
was the uranium 235 version of
this
bomb
atomic
over Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945;
a
that the B-29 Enola Gay
few hours
later,
dropped
while 78,000 people
House statement called on the Japanese to surrender or 'the)- may expect a rain of rum from the air'. No word being received, on 9 August another B-29 flew from Timan to bomb the city of Nagasaki, killing 25,000. The United States thus temporarily exhausted its supply of nuclear weapons and awaited the outcome of the damage done. la)-
dead or dying
On
in
8 August, following a
1942 non-aggression offensive into
Allies,
moment
to
at
Potsdam of America's
'secret
scientists, in particular the
it
Stalin
weapon';
enthusiastic for
had shown as
little
surprise
we now know,
German communist emigre
it
was no longer necessary
the Allied cause and
would win them advantages
find cause to regret.
He
in the Far East
equally admitted that there was
third
staff,
was
to the success
which the United
of
States
no means of deterring the
Arm) Groups had been formed from
most experienced veterans of the European campaign, the
the
when
Klaus Fuchs, had
Russians from their offensive, which had been in preparation ever since the surrender. Three Far-Eastern
to the as
the treachery
existence to the Soviets already. Marshall, the American chief of
particularly insistent that Russian intervention
would
in April that
grown decreasingly
launch their atomic strike approached.
Truman its
treaty, the Soviet
had issued
it
but the Americans had
of certain Western revealed
would repudiate its Union declared war on Japan and opened a vast
warning
Manchuria the following day. This offensive had been promised
Western told by
the ruins, a White
German
the best-equipped and
under the famous Marshal
R Y. Malinovsky. They were highly mechanised, the Japanese Kwantung Army was not. Though 750,000 strong, and regarded as the best formation in the imperial army, it had little
recent experience of fighting.
Manchurian
plain,
but
when
It
bitterly
defended the approaches
the Soviet Sixth Guards
country on 13 August large sections of
it
to the central
Tank Army broke out
into
open
were rapidly enveloped. The remainder was
driven back across the river Yalu into northern Korea, where fighting continued until a final
Japanese collapse on 20 August.
By then the Japanese forces everywhere
else within the Pacific
their surrender to
whichever Allied troops were
in the first public
speech
a
at
hand.
On
war zone had made
15 August
Emperor
Hirohito,
Japanese sovereign had ever made, broadcast to his soldiers,
584
SUPER-WEAPONS AND THE DEFEAT OF JAPAN
MacArthur watches
Explaining that
enemy had begun series
Tokyo Bay, 2 September 1945.
announce that his government had decided to treat with the enemy. the war 'had turned out not necessarily to Japan's advantage' and that the
and people
sailors
the Japanese surrender,
to
'to
employ
a
new and most
cruel
bomb', he called upon them,
in a
of strange and obscure phrases which never mentioned surrender, to accept the
coming of peace. A few fight; a
intransigents disobeyed
few irreconcilables committed
and attempted
ritual suicide.
The
rest
million subjects relapsed instantly into the posture of defeat. arrived at
Yokohama
to institute the
briefly to
continue the
of the emperor's seventy
On
28 August MacArthur
American occupation and reconstitution of Japan.
On
2 September, aboard the battleship Missouri lying in Tokyo Bay, in the presence of representatives of Britain, the Soviet Union, China, France, Australia,
New
Canada, MacArthur and the Japanese Foreign Minister, chief of
and chief of naval
staff
operations signed the instrument of surrender. The Second World
585
War was
Zealand and
over.
EPILOGUE
THE LEGACY OF THE SECOND
WORLD WAR The war was
who had fought it would war had touched - Greece, Palestine,
over, but the return of peace to the peoples
prove patch) and
erratic. In
some
places the
Indonesia, Indo-China, China itself- peace was scarcely to return
where the ELAS
guerrillas, despite their defeat
by the
communist
retained bases in the northern mountains, their
1946 to resume the
civil
rural population, 700.000
many
families
were
war. The war dragged
of whom fled to the
territory's rulers
under
a
Arabs,
the
immigration, fixed
border
against the
August 1949,
at
cruel cost to the
and towns under government control;
in states
75.000 in 1939,
was shortly driven
Mandate government.
setting off 500 explosions,
in
thousands to be
under communist control.
Home, who were
also the
Fearful of
zero
camps
to
had
the)
relations with the
set
be given refuge. Haganah, the
semi-official
to side with the radical Jewish terrorist organisations
In
-
damaging
on further Jewish even when Washington petitioned London to allow
October 1945 Haganah
and by the spring of
Previous page: Ground raid of
settlers.
refused to raise the limit
100,000 survivors of the concentration Zionist militia,
In Greece,
Christmas 1944,
League of Nations (then United Nations) Mandate, soon found
British at
until
at all.
at
leaders resolved in February
sponsors of the Jewish National
themselves in conflict with the Zionist native
on
cities
Athens
who had been kidnapped
bereft of their children,
raised as future guerrilla fighters across the In Palestine the British
British in
1946,
the blasted landscape of
6 August 1945.
A
neu military
588
initiated a sabotage
when
Hiroshima era
campaign,
80,000 British troops were
after the
had dawned.
atomic bomb
THE LEGACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
deployed
trembled on the brink of open insurrection, which
in Palestine, the territory
become
threatened to
communal war should
a
the Palestinian Arabs judge that the British
intended to permit large-scale Jewish immigration or abandon the Mandate.
and Indo-China the
In Indonesia fires
of
a local
were shortly
British also
found themselves caught between the
nationalism and an alien presence. In Indonesia, as the Dutch East Indies
to
be
called, the
upon
Javanese set
were released from prison camp, and
it
former masters
their
Indian Division in nineteen days of fighting in
November
Mansbridge released from
captivity,
whom
army
it
by Japan's surrender.
to
commander of
reoccupy southern Indo-China
In the north,
which the
great
long
E.
as the
the 17th Indian
September
in
army of Ho Chi Minh had taken power
the
as
lasted.
Released Japanese prisoners were also used by the
when was sent embryo Viet Minh party and
Major-General
rearmed and kept under control
struggles against the Japanese-trained Indonesian
Division
the internees
1945 to restore order. The Indian
sepoys and their British officers were assisted by Japanese troops, C.
when
took the deployment of the whole of the 5th
powers had agreed
in the at
The
1945.
vacuum
left
Potsdam should
temporarily be garrisoned by Chinese nationalist forces, the arriving Chinese general established a co-existence with
Ho
Chi Minh. In the south the British conceived
duty under the Potsdam directive to wrest control of the
civil
Minh, and they found they needed the help of rearmed Japanese soldiers to do
October
a division
of French troops arrived, led by Leclerc, the Gaullist hero
liberated Paris in August 1944. His
he did so none the
less, at
form and another, was In
title
their
it
administration from the Viet so. In
who
the cost of beginning the 'war of the ricefields' which, in
to drag
on
the}'
China the war between communists and
nearly half a million
had agreed
invader.
George
a truce, to
hold
men under as
nationalists,
first
begun
in the 1920s,
arms, Chiang Kai-shek over 2 million. In 1937
to
wartime chief of
China 50,000 American Marines and General staff,
with
a
mission to prolong the truce. In
January 1946 an extension of the truce was indeed agreed; but
Chiang Kai-shek's principal concern was to re-establish the previous August by the Russians,
who were
that the Russians,
allow
Mao
power
who had
to
was unstable.
bus) stripping the province (the richest in
agreed to evacuate Manchuria by
was
basis
Manchuria, overrun
as
war reparations from
check the depredations; but he was determined to see
Zedong's troops to succeed them
negotiated, therefore, he
its
his position in
China) of its industrial plant, which they claimed was due to them Japan. Chiang lacked the
had
Mao
long as both were engaged in war against the Japanese
The defeat of Japan brought C. Marshall, the
one
for the next thirty years.
only been interrupted by the Second World War. Both sides deployed large armies:
Zedong had
had
French authority was disputed, but
to re-establish
as occupiers.
busily transferring units
from
1
February 1946, should not
While the truce was being
his area
of control
in the
south
of China into Manchuria, even though these troop movements inevitably provoked local clashes with Mao's soldiers. Despite the best efforts of the
clashes
were destined
to swell into outright conflict
589
and
American mediators, sporadic
b) Jul)
1946 into full-scale
civil
EPILOGUE
war.
An American attempt
aid merely
by denying the
to bring hostilities to a close
enhanced the chances of the communists, who returned
nationalists military
to the offensive
when
General Marshall was recalled by President Truman in January 1947. The) were shortly to
war
carry the
which had
of the Yellow River
to the valley
as well as
Manchuria, reviving the agony
50 million Chinese homeless and 2 million orphaned as result of Japanese
left
occupation.
The
brought to
Allies
trial
over 5000 of the Japanese
who had waged
the Pacific
War
and the 'China Incident' and executed 900 of them, in most cases for their mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war. At the
Tokyo
trial
of major war criminals, however, twenty-five of
condemned
Japan's leaders were arraigned for general war crimes and seven were
to
death; the)' included Tojo and Koiso (his successor as Prime Minister) and might have
included Konoye, had he not evaded arrest by taking poison. The Tokyo
by the
much
larger
Nazi leaders were tried between
one defendants
at
was inspired
trial
and more widely publicised Nuremberg Tribunal, before which the
November
1945 and October 1946. There were twenty-
Nuremberg, one defendant (Bormann)
tried
and
absentia
in
five
corporate accused - the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS/SD, the Gestapo and the General
one, other or
two were
all
of
(a)
Staff.
Of the
individual defendants,
crimes against peace,
(b)
war crimes,
acquitted, eight sentenced to terms of
(c)
who were
charged with
crimes against humanity,
imprisonment varying from
to ten
life
condemned to death. The last included Goering, who managed poison and commit suicide on the eve of his execution; Kaltenbrunner of the
years and eleven
to
acquire
SS
(Himmler having committed suicide on
capture);
of the occupied
three governors
and the administrator of the forced labour regimes, Frank, Rosenberg,
territories
Inquart and Sauckel; the two generals from Hitler's operations
murdered ensured
their
condemnation; Ribbentrop;
Keitel
and Jodl,
raiders in
uniform
staff,
endorsement of the 'Commando Order' of 1942 directing Frick, the
Seyss-
whose to
be
author of the Nuremberg
decrees against the Jews; and Streicher, Nazism's principal mouthpiece of anti-Semitism. At
of subsequent
a series
trials
largely for the perpetration
Numbers of other war courts in the countries
The lawyers;
legal
of lesser war criminals, another twenty-four were executed, of
atrocities, thirty-five
criminals
where
were
the)
were acquitted and
also later arrested, tried
had committed
imprisoned.
114
and sentenced by national
their offences.
philosophy of the Nuremberg system continues to be debated by academic
but both
at
the time of the
trials
and thereafter the
natural
justice
of the
proceedings and of the verdicts has been universally accepted by the citizens of the against
states
which German) and Japan waged war. Some 50 million people are estimated to as a result of the Second World War; it is in the nature of war-making that an
have died
exact figure can never be established. By far the
combatant
and
states
a further 7
most grievous
was borne by the Soviet Union, which
million civilians; most of the
latter,
majority, died as a result of deprivation, reprisal
590
suffering
lost at least 7 million
among
men
the
in battle
Ukrainians and White Russians in the
and forced labour.
In relative terms,
THE LEGACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
among
Poland suffered worst population,
some
the combatant countries; about 20 per cent of her pre-war
6 million, did not survive. About half of the war's Polish victims were
Jewish, and Jews also figured large in the death
including the Baltic
states,
deaths of a quarter of a million Greeks and
and
military
civilian,
and
intensity
were
far
Before June 1940 and after
half
were
November
Italy
war accounted
guerrilla
for the
The number of casualties,
and the Netherlands,
and 200,000 Dutch
Slavs. In three
were heavy.
casualties
1942 the French army lost 200,000 dead; 400,000
killed in air raids or concentration
civilians,
and
million Yugoslavs.
of war-making where Germans fought and oppressed
ferocity
were
Civil
higher in eastern than in western Europe - an index of the
European countries, however, France,
civilians
a
of other eastern European countries,
tolls
Hungary and Romania.
citizens,
camps.
all
Italy lost
but 10,000 of
over 330,000 of
them
civilians,
whom
died
as a
of bombing or deportation.
result
The Western the major
allies.
victors suffered proportionately
The
armed
British
and absolutely much
forces lost 244,000
imperial comrades-in-arms suffered another 100,000
Canada
37,000, India 24,000,
were
civilians
killed
New
than any of
casualties
fatal
(Australia
23,000,
Zealand 10,000, South Africa 6000). About 60,000 British
by bombing, half of them
direct civilian casualties; their military casualties, battle deaths,
less
men. Their Commonwealth and
London. The Americans suffered no
in
which contrast with
1.2
million Japanese
were 292,000, including 36,000 from the navy and 19,000 from the Marine
Corps.
Germany, which had begun the war and fought
it
almost to Hitler's
'five
minutes past
midnight', paid a terrible price for war guilt. Materially her cities and towns stood up to bombing more stoutly than the flimsy Japanese population centres. Nevertheless, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden had effectively been reduced to rubble by 1945, and many
smaller places had been brutally damaged.
When
the cultural losses of the
have occurred on German
European
libraries
been stored
and
in
Second World War
Zoo
flak
are reviewed,
much
the treasures of the Kaiser
was devastated, but
it
was
under bombardment and delights
were burnt
to the ground;
Warsaw destroyed block by block
like
in
the
Blitz; classical
Leningrad
Tsarkoe Selo (now, thankfully, completely
baroque Dresden was burnt
out; the
Old
City
of
(again miraculously re-created since 1945 by reference to
the paintings of Bernado Belotto); the Old City of Vienna badly 1945;
spared most of Europe's
Italy,
largely a nineteenth-century city;
of London's pre-eighteenth-century fabric was burnt
restored)
Wilhelm collection had
caves in Wales. Architectural treasures, by their nature, could not be
beautiful creations. Berlin
suffered
to
tower, and the pictures from the British National Gallery-
protected. Fortunately, the course of the fighting, except in
most
most can be seen
Forethought had assured the preservation of the Great
art collections;
in the Berlin
had spent the war
territory.
damaged
in the fighting
of
Budapest on both banks of the Danube ravaged; the centre of Renaissance Rotterdam
incinerated; William the Conqueror's medieval
Caen
laid
flat.
Yet historic Paris,
Rome,
Athens, Florence, Venice, Bruges, Amsterdam, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and almost
591
EPILOGUE
all
the other great European temples of architecture remained untouched.
Germany, by
In
contrast, not only the large but also the small historic cities suffered
Potsdam, the Versailles of the Prussian kings,
fearful destruction, including
Freiburg-
Jiilich,
im-Breisgau, Heilbronn, Ulm, Freudenstadt, Wiirzburg and Bayreuth, the centre of the
Wagner the
festival. In
Ruhr and
German)-, was
the west the twenty-eight towns
environs
its
bombed
destroyed during
all
and
out;
which make up the
came under heavy Breslau, the largest
German
defence against the Russian advance
its
industrial centre
city in the east,
in the spring
was
of
of south
attack: Stuttgart, the captial
effectively
of 1945.
The German people paid a greater human than material price for initiating and sustaining war against their neighbours between 1939 and 1945. Over 4 million German servicemen died at the hands of the enemy, and 593,000 civilians under air attack. Although more women than men were killed by Allied bombing - a ratio of 60:40 - the
numbers of women
in the Federal
Republic in 1960
of 126:100. The male-female disproportion in the Soviet
even
Union, where
in Russia did the
visited
among
still
the
exceeded those of men by
women outnumbered men
by
a third after
the war; but not
population undergo the horrors of forced migration which defeat
on the Germans
in 1945.
The uprooting of the Germans from the east comprised two phases, both the
their effect:
first
a ratio
generation' was not as severe as
'lost
was
panic
a
flight
from the Red Army; the second
tragic in
deliberate
a
expulsion of populations from regions of settlement where Germans had lived for generations, in
of
human
some
concentration camps. Terrified
Germans
The
places for a thousand years.
suffering almost without parallel in the
it
encountered on
at
home
the thought of what the territory, the
Baltic coast.
Some
left
home
en masse
Red Army would do
to the
first
population of East Prussia, already swollen
by refugees from the areas of German settlement
by the Bagration offensive,
of January 1945 was an episode Second World War - outside the
flight
in
Poland and the
Baltic states displaced
and, in bitter winter weather, trekked to the
450,000 were evacuated from the port of Pillau during January; 900,000
others walked along the forty-mile causeway to Danzig or crossed the frozen lagoon of the Frisches Haff to reach the waiting ships -
one of which, torpedoed by
a
Russian submarine
tomb for the largest number of victims ever drowned in a The Wehrmacht put up a fight of almost demented bravery to cover the
with 8000 aboard, became a
maritime
disaster.
rescue of refugees; Richard von Weizsacker, son of the state secretary of Hitler's Foreign Ministry and today President of the Federal
German
Republic,
won
the Iron Cross First
Class in the battle of the Frisches Haff. It seems possible that a million Germans died in the flight from the east in the early months of 1945, either from exposure or mistreatment. In the winter of 1945 most of the remaining Germans of eastern Europe - who lived in Silesia, the Czech Sudetenland, Pomerania and elsewhere, numbering some 14 million altogether - were systematically
collected
and transported westward,
largely
Germany. The transportees who arrived were
592
into
the British
destitute
zone of occupation
and often
in the last
in
stages of
THE LEGACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
deprivation.
Of
those
who
complete
failed to
journey,
this terrible
is
it
calculated that
250,000 died in the course of the expulsion from Czechoslovakia, 1.25 million from Poland
and 600,000 from elsewhere
Europe
east
Europe. By 1946 the historic
in eastern
German population of
of the Elbe had been reduced from 17 million to 2,600,000.
The expulsions, often conducted with criminal
brutality,
settlement the victors had agreed between themselves 1945. Article 13
of its protocol stated
that the 'transfer to
the
at
were not
Prussia to Poland (the other half
went
under the
Germany of Germans remaining
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be undertaken'; the Western Allies agreed to a realignment of the
illegal
Potsdam Conference of July
German
at
in
Potsdam, moreover,
frontier, giving half
of East
to the Soviet Union), together with Silesia
and
Pomerania. These readjustments, balanced by the enforced cession by Poland of its eastern province to Russia, had the cartographic
of moving Poland
effect
a
hundred miles
westward; demographically, they ensured that post-war Poland would be wholly Polish,
German populations of
the expense of displacing the
new western
its
at
borderlands.
The Potsdam agreement, to a far greater extent than that of Yalta, determined the future of European government in the post-war years. The concessions made to the Soviet
Union by
Britain
and the United
and polemicists
politicians
communist
Poles.
Europe
role
made
fait
communist puppet than
accompli.
that the
administration,
particularly
the time, the
at
Stalin's plans for the
ensured
It
post-war Warsaw
the
in
a
have been widely condemned by Western
aftermath as a 'betrayal',
As Roosevelt and Churchill recognised
victorious advance into Poland
eastern
States at Yalta
the
in
of the
Red Army's
most important country
Poles'
Potsdam took post-war arrangements far further By endorsing the resettlement westward of eastern Europe's Germans - both
that.
'Lublin committee'.
those of the borderlands of Deutschstum in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the
and
prevailed
solved central
Baltic states at
at a
-
it
at
the beginning of the ninth century,
two generations
for
to
come.
Soviet Union's subsequent refusal to co-operate in the staging of free elections
consolidating
1918,
more
intellectual enterprise in the
stroke the largest of the 'minority problems', and ensured Soviet domination of
throughout the zones of occupation
identified
and
returned ethnic frontiers in Europe largely to those that had
the creation of Charlemagne's empire
and eastern Europe
The
the
'Iron
Curtain'
by Winston Churchill
Germany had the additional effect of non-communist Europe Fulton speech in 1946. The post-war settlement of
in post-1945
between communist and
in his
by creating self-governing 'successor
states'
out of the
tsarist,
Hohenzollern and
Habsburg empires which had dominated the eastern half of the continent before greatly diversified
its
political
Europe west of the Elbe was to relapse into autocracy,
by
in
would have no effective which would be dominated by the
'London
scattered settlements of German commercial, agricultural Slav
anti-
to
complexion. Potsdam ruthlessly simplified remain
conforming
a polity
of democratic
to a single political
Stalinist Russia.
593
states; east
it.
1914,
Post-1945
of the Elbe
it
was
system dictated and dominated
EPILOGUE
The imposition of Stalinism
east
which had transfixed Europe since lasting peace, either in
United
States, Britain
of the Elbe
Europe or
after
did not solve the problem of how to establish a
in the
wider world. The United Nations, which the
and the Soviet Union had agreed
successor to the League of Nations
German problem',
1945 solved 'the
It
1870.
at
Tehran
more
to establish as a
effective
and which came into being
in 1943,
San
at
Francisco in April 1945, was intended to be an instrument of international peacekeeping,
with
its
own
authority of
general staff commanding forces contributed by the its
of
States, the Soviet
its
member
states
under the
Security Council (comprising representatives of Britain, the United
Union, France and China
as
permanent members). The Soviet Union's
opposition to the establishment of the general
and
staff,
subsequent use of
its
veto to
its
block peacekeeping resolutions, quickly emasculated the Security Council's authority. Stalin's
foreign policy,
commitment as
an
effort to
which may be interpreted
to the fomentation
of revolution
either as a
in the capitalist
realistically,
of the Berlin blockade
in 1948 apart, in the
directly threatened the stability
of Europe
states
of
did not directly challenge the United
of military attack,
Nations' role. His sponsorship of an anti-democratic
which
more
or,
entrench the Soviet victor) of 1945 by keeping the anti-communist
western Europe under threat
institution
resumption of Bolshevik
world
coup
in
Czechoslovakia and his
post-war years he took no step
as constituted at Yalta
and Potsdam. His
challenge to the Western position in the world was to be laid elsewhere - in the
above all, in Korea, where he was to endorse an aggression by communist north against the non-communist south in June 1950. The Soviet Union, indeed, demobilised its military forces in Europe as quickly, if not
Philippines, in Malaya and,
the
as
completely, as did the United States and Britain theirs after August 1945. By 1947 the size
of the Red Arm)" had been reduced by two-thirds; the remaining force sufficed
to
outnumber the occupation forces of the Americans and the British many Arm) of the Rhine numbered only five divisions in 1948, the American army in Bavaria only one - but, though its continuing preponderance was to drive the North
times - the
British
Americans and Western Europeans into
a
North
Atlantic alliance in 1949, the disparity did
not tempt the Soviet leadership to risk extending
There are many explanations
for this.
One
its is
power west of
the Elbe.
that Soviet foreign policy, for
all
its
coarseness and brutality, was directed by a distinct legalism, which constrained Russia to the spheres of influence defined
monopoly of nuclear weapons, decade
at
Yalta
and Potsdam. Another
persisting in
thereafter, deterred the Soviet
contestably the most convincing,
is
its strict
Union from
that the
form
is
that the
American
until 1949 but effectively for a
foreign policy adventures.
A
third,
trauma of the war had extinguished the
and
will
of
the Soviet people and their leadership to repeat the experience.
The
legacy of the First
World War was
vanquished, that the costs of war exceeded
War,
it
'Every
its
to persuade the victors,
rewards.
The
though not the
legacy of the
Second World
may be argued, was to convince victors and vanquished alike of the same thing. man a soldier', the principle by which the advanced states had organised their
594
THE LEGACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
armies, and in large measure their societies, since the French Revolution, achieved
culmination in 1939-45 and, in so doing, inflicted on the countries which had lived by
its it
a
banish the concept of war-making from their political philosophies. The United States, least damaged and most amply rewarded by the war which left it in 1945 industrially more productive than the rest of the world put together tide
of suffering so severe
would be Asia,
as to
able to muster sufficient national consent to fight
Korea and Vietnam.
in
unscathed
in
terms of
Britain,
human
if
which had
not material
also
loss,
two
costly, if small,
come through
would preserve
wars
in
the war relatively the will to fight a
succession of small colonial wars, as France, another country comparatively untouched by severe loss of life,
showed
its
would do
soldiers at direct risk;
of
as well.
By
contrast, the Soviet
putative enemies in the post-war era, its
judgement. Not
a
1939-45,
a single
German
the fierce face
soldier, despite the Federal Republic's
death grows more, not
is
today
bound by
less,
enemy
action since
May
which outlaws recourse
No
War was
had done,
to
foolish
end
enough
all
1945,
it
its
number
vitiate,
that
resumption of
and the likelihood
remote. Japan, the most reckless of the warmakers of
a constitution
of national policy in any circumstances whatsoever.
war
all
recent venture into Afghanistan, costing a quarter of the
conscription in 1956, has been killed by
'a
for
lost by the United States in Vietnam, appears to reinforce, not
lives
of such
Union,
eschewed confrontations which put
to claim, as those
of the
wars'. That, nevertheless,
First
may have been
595
to force as an instrument
statesman of the Second World
its
that
it
abiding
was being fought effect.
as
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fifty
Bibliographies of the Second
None
is
Books on the Second World
World War abound.
comprehensive, nor
is
that surprising,
titles in Russian alone had appeared by 1980. Excellent working bibliographies may be
since 15,000
found, nonetheless, in most good general histories of the war, such as the revised edition of Total
Wax by
P.
Calvocoressi, G.
Wint and
J.
Pritchard
(Lodon, 1989). Rather than supply an equivalent of such bibliographies, I have decided to offer a list of fifty
books available in English which together provide a comprehensive picture of the most important events and themes of the war, which are readable and from which the general reader can derive his own picture of the war as a guide to deeper reading. The list inevitably reflects my own interests and prejudices and is certainly not complete; it does not, for example, contain a title on the Polish campaign of 1939 or on the Scandinavian or Italian campaigns; it is thin on the war at sea in western waters and on the war in the air; and it is biased towards the fighting in Europe rather than m the Pacific. These distortions are, however, in most cases caused by gaps in the literature. There are still no books which meet the criteria I set myself on the Polish or Italian campaigns. If this judgement seems a depreciation of the remarkable work of the American, British and
Commonwealth
Official Historians,
may it
please
be noted that I have nevertheless included several volumes which appear in those series, and have omitted others purely for reasons of space. I have included no books in foreign languages, though I would have dearly liked to include the war diary of the Oberkommand der Wehrmacht, the daily record of Hitler's operations staff. Its full title is: P.
Schramm,
Kriegstagebuch des
OKW
der
Wehrmacht,
Munich, 1963. The place of publication of the titles cited is London, unless otherwise stated, and the edition, including those in English translation, is the most recent. An indispensable guide to the campaigns is Colonel Vincent J. Esposito's The West Point Atlas of
vols
1-8,
American Wars, vol tains
2,
New York, 1959; the atlas con-
meticulous maps of the main theatres of whether American troops were engaged
War
how
he directed Germany's war effort is David which has been deserted as 'the autobiography Hitler did not write' and is certainly among trie half-dozen most important books on 1939-45. Robert O'Neill's The German Army and the Nazi Part)-, 1966, is an essential portrait of both institutions and their relationship in the pre-war years. Two books on the relationship between Hitler and German government and army in the war years which will always be read are: W. Warlimont, Inside Hitler's Headquarters, 1962, by one of his operations officers, and A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 1970; Speer was Hitler's armaments minister from 1942 and a technocrat of brilliant intelligence who nevertheless allowed himself to become a court favourite. H. Trevor-Roper is the author of two indispensable works: Hitler's War Dirctives, 1964, and his eternally fascinating classic, Irving's Hitler's War, 1977,
The Last Days of
Hitler,
1971.
Contentious though
it is,
A.J. P. Taylor's The Ori-
World War, 1963, cannot be bettered as an introduction to that subject. On the beginning of the war in the west an outstanding work of historical drama is Alistair Home's To Lose a Battle, 1969; Guy Chapman's Why France Fell, 1968, metic-
gins of the Second
ulously analyses that persisting conundrum. Some of the consequences are described in Robert Paxton's too little known Parades and Politics at Vichy, Princeton, 1966, a study of 'the French officer corps under Marshal Petain', which is also a brilliant dissection of the dilemmas of resistance and collaboration. The best account of the aftermath of Hitler's victory in the west is Telford Taylor's The Breaking Wave, 1967, which is also an account of his defeat in the Battle of Britain. Whether or not Hitler had ever seriously contemplated invading Britain, by the autumn of 1940 his thoughts were turning eastwards. Martin van Creveld, in Hitler's Strategy, the Balkan Clue, Cambridge, 1973, describes the stages through which his thinking proceeded and provides one of the
most original of all analyses of strategy and foreign policy in the historiography of the war.
A brilliant
monograph on a critical aspect of the Balkan campaigns
is
The Struggle
for Crete,
by I. M. G. of the British
1955,
Ste-
fighting,
wart, the medical officer of one
or not, complemented by clear narratives on the
talions
facing page.
descent.
for
the
the
The
best biography of Hitler,
ality
stands
War,
is still
at
the centre of the of Alan Bullock:
that
Tyranny, 1965.
Complementing
it
whose personSecond World Hitler, a
Study
as a picture
in
of
bat-
overwhelmed by the German airborne
The fighting in the Western Desert, Germans an appendix to their advance to
Mediterranean, has been
much
written
of,
but
nowhere better than in Correlli Barnett's The Desert Generals, 1983.
596
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Balkans was the prelude to Hitler's attack on Russia. Overtowering all other writers in English on the war in the east (probably in is John Erickson, who has published three magisterial works: The Soviet High Command, 1962, The Road to Stalingrad, 1975 and The Road to Berlin,
Russian also)
1983; the last
two
are over-complex at the oper-
ational level but magnificent in their portrayal of
the
Red Army and the Soviet peoples at war. The of the war waged by the Germans, and of its
reality
self-defeating nature,
slight
but
vital
is
conveyed
in A. Dallin's
New York, 1957. A monograph on how devastated
scholarly German Rule
in Russia,
was sustained is Joan Beaumont's Comrades in Arms, 1980, which, though devoted to British aid to Russia, also tells much of Russia's resistance
the far greater American aid Hitler's
embroilment
effort.
in Russia, together with
America's entry into the war which shortly followed it, cast the strategic initiative for the first time to the Allied side. Two key monographs
which outline its
own
tinental
Britain's efforts to
make strategy on
acount are Michael Howard's The Con-
Commitment, 1972, and The Mediterranean StraWorld War, 1968; the latter frankly
tegy in the Second
acknowledges
British reluctance to
American enthusiasm
meet on
for a direct assault
North-West Europe. Splendid documentary
sur-
veys of joint Anglo-American strategic decisionmaking from the moment of American entry are provided in two volumes of the great American Official History, E. Snell's Strategic Planning
for
Coali-
Washington, 1953, and M. Matloff, same title but for 1943-4, Washington, 1959. An associated volume, investigating how particular strategic choices (not all Allied) were made, is Command Decisions, Washington, 1960, edited by K. tion Warfare, 1941-2,
we now know
the Japanese ciphers. Two detailed studies of Ultra in action are P. Beesly's Very Special Intelligence, 1977, about the Battle of the Atlantic, and R. Bennett's Ultra in the West, 1979, about the North-West
Europe campaign. American's war in the Pacific has produced an enormous literature. The most illuminating inis Richard Storry's A Modern Japan, 1960, by a scholar who served as an intelligence officer with the British army in South-East Asia and had taught in Japan before its disastrous decision to make the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. H. P. Willmott's Empires in the Balance, 1982, surveys the strengths and strategies of the Pacific antagonists before and during the first year of the war and is particularly wellinformed on the Japanese side. The best general history of the war in the Pacific, which also finds room for accounts of events in China and Burma,
troduction, for a westerner,
History of
Ronald Spector's Eagle against the Sun, 1988, enand brilliantly compressed. It would be unfair not to include a volume from Samuel Elliot Morison's Official History of United is
thrallingly written
States Naval
making of Allied strategy - sometimes of tactics - was guided by Britain's ability to read German secure communication (Ultra) and the Americans' ability to that the
read the Japanese (Magic), it is inevitable that this list should contain several titles on both activities. By far the most important is the first volume of the Official History, by F. H. Hinsley (and others), British Intelligence in the Second World War, 1979; it contains the essential information on the breaking of Enigma, the German cipher system, and on the establishment and early use of Ultra, the intelligence derived from it. Additional but vital technical details are supplied by Gordon Welchman, a pioneer at the cipher-breaking centre at Bletchley, in The Hut Six Story, 1982. Ronald Lewin provided broad but highly reliable accounts of the in-
597
Operations in World War II; in fact Midway and Submarine Operations,
his fourth, Coral Sea,
Boston, 1949, provides superb and moving accounts of those two crucial battles and is a justification in itself of the official historiography programme. The most important survey of the politics of the Pacific War, which is also a monu-
ment of diplomatic Thome's Allies of a Kind, States, Britain
which
R. Greenfield.
Because
fluence both of Ultra and Magic in Ultra Goes to War, 1978, and The American Magic, New York, 1982; the latter also explains how the Americans complemented Bletchley's achievement by breaking
history,
is
Christopher
1978, subtitled 'The
and the War
exactly describes
its
United
against Japan, 1941-5'
content.
Japan's defeat ultimately derived from the disparity between its economic resources and those that the United States could deploy, as Admiral
Yamamoto had warned the Imperial government would be the case. An essential survey of the economic factors underlying the course of the war is Alan Milward's War, Economy and Society, 1939-45, 1977, which encapsulates his many monographs on national wartime economies. A separate large monograph to which I frequently turn for illumi-
nation of how economies adapt to the particular needs of war-making is a volume in the British Official Histories, The Design and Development of Weapons, 1965, by M. M. Postan and others; it does not, however, deal with the British contribution to the atomic weapons programme, nor is there,
indeed, any single book which satisfactorily
BIBLIOGRAPHY
covers the development and use of the atomic bomb in the Second World War. The effort to destroy economies by conventional bombing has
least, a
produced an enormous
war.
literature;
I
power
to shock, to instruct
and to warn
that later publications lack.
memoirs of the the thousands of soldiers' stories, I am haunted by one from the Pacific War, With the Old Breed, Novato, California, 1981. E. B. Sledge, now a professor of biology, fought the campaign with the 1st Marine Division. His account of the struggle of a gently-raised teenager to remain a Finally there are the personal
particularly
Max Hastings' Bomber Command, 1987, for its study of the effects of the campaign both on the Germans and the crews who took part. Germany's reciprocal effort to attack the Allied war economy through its U-boat campaign has also been amply recounted; Peter Padfield's biography of the admiral who created and directed the U-boat fleet, Donitz, The Last Fuhrer, 1984, is an outstanding study, as well as a riveting 'Portrait of a Nazi War Leader'. I have chosen only one book among the thousands written on the North-West Europe campaign, Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe; I use the original 1952 edition, though there has been a re-issue. Wilmot, a war correspondent, effectively invented the modem method of writing contemporary military history, which combines political, economic ana strategic analysis with eye-witness accounts of combat. Though many of his judgements have been challenged, and some demolished, his book remains for me the supreme value
Among
human being in circumstances which reduced comrades - whom he nevertheless loved to 'twentieth-century savages' is one of the most arresting documents in war literature, all the more moving because of the painful difficulty someone who is not a natural writer found in recreating his experience on paper. A brilliant litercivilised
ary achievement, by contrast,
is
Wartime, 1977, by
the Yugoslav intellectual who belonged to Tito's entourage, negotiated with Stalin, fought as a Partisan but eventually fell out with his master and rejected the 'heroic' ethos which had driven so many men of passion and ability to create the
M.
Djilas,
where irregular and resistance campaigns assume a greater significance than
World War. The last two have chosen relate the experience of women, that half of the wartime generation whose fate was to bear so much of the tragedy it brought. The Berlin Diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov, 1985, the memoirs of an Anglophile white Russian whom circumstances cast into the heart of Nazi Germany at the outbreak of the Second World War, present an extraordinary picture of human resilience under bombing attack, of the strange normalities that persisted even as the shadows drew in and of the high-spirited disdain for the clods of Nazi bureaucracy that a beautiful girl of noble birth could openly display throughout the wartime years. Christabel Bielenberg, an Englishwoman married to one of the July conspirators
Stalingrad or Normandy. Resistance forms, never-
against Hitler,
an essential ingredient of the story of the war. The best general survey is H. Michael's The Shadow War, 1972, and the best particular study of the most important resistance campaign, that in
in The Past
tragedy of the Second
books
achievement of Second World War historiography, combining a passionate interest in events with a cool dissection of the material realities which underlay them. It was the book which first awoke my interest in the war as history and which I come to admire more rather than less as time passes.
Wilmot correctly perceived that the war was one of 'the big battalions', an important corrective to the already
burgeoning Anglo-Saxon interest in
clandestine operations. That interest has swollen since, to a point
I
same
disdain; her account, published in 1968, of her brave and eventually successful effort to rescue her husband from the Gestapo, shows how narrowly an enemy of the regime, even if a woman, had to measure disdain against deference in preserving her loved ones from destruction. This list might have been decupled in length; but at fifty booKS I cut it short. With this extension: in Armed Truce, The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-6, 1986, Hugh Thomas has written what is not only an essential guide to the war's aftermath but also a great work of modern history, meticulous in its use of sources and enthralling in the sweep of its narrative. No history of the war itself, and certainly not mine, can match it in quality or
theless,
is F. W. Deakin's The Embattled Mountain, W. Rings has provided a highly original account of the other side of the story, the German
Yugoslavia, 1971.
run a European empire, in Life with the The horrors of the blackest side of that empire were first objectively obsessed by G. Reitlinger in The Final Solution, 1953; though the historiography of the Holocaust has since been greatly elaborated, and while his book is largely concerned with the Jews, rather than the many other groups systematically massacred by the Nazi extermination apparatus, it retains, for me at effort to
Enemy, 1982.
authority.
S98
is
felt
the
Myself, first
INDEX ABDA
262-4
580-4 Barbarossa 173-208 decision 136-41, 147, 173-4 Moscow 192-6, 202-6 ballistic missiles
Adachi, General Hatazo 298 Afghanistan 595 Africa 320-45 Italian invasion 131, 143-4, 147-9 320-1, 346
and Red Army .174-80 Stalin's reaction 180-90
aircraft
of Britain 88-102
Battle
winter 196-201 Chief Marshal Sir Arthur 64 Bartov, Professor Omar 184 Battle of Britain 88-102 Bayerlein, General Fritz 394 Beaufre, General Andre 70-1 Bedell Smith, General Walter 356-7
bombers 415-35 carrier 269-70
German
UK
Barratt, Air
59, 92-4, 160-1
92-4, 214-15, 421-2
US 423, 424, 430 USSR 161 aircraft carriers 253-6,
268-9
Alamein, Battle of 336-7 Albania 151 Aleutian Islands 293 Alexander, Field Marshal
Sir
Harold 264-5,
313, 318,
335, 348, 359-61, 366-8, 501
Amann, Max 30 amphibious warfare 561-2 Andrews, Lieutenant-Colonel L.W. 168
Belgium 58, 61, 64-6, 70, 76, 282 Bell, Bishop of Chichester 435 Belotto, Bernardo 591 Benes, Eduard 40 Bennett, Ralph 501 Bergonzoli, General Annibale 148 Beria, Lavrenty 181, 190, 453 Berlin 591
bombing of 428
Anschluss 38-9
siege of 516-33
Antonescu, General Ion 364-5, 474, 504 Antonov, General A.I. 521 Anvil, Operation 356, 361-2, 377-8 Aosta, Duke of 321-4 appeasement policy 40
Soviet advance 510-15 Soviet occupation 593-4
Bessemer, Henry 16 Bidwell, S. 368 Billotte, General Gaston 67-8, 77
Ardennes offensive 439-47
Bismarck 113
armies
arms
12-17, 19-24
17, 23,
Germany
Bismarck Sea 297-9 Blaskowitz, General Johannes 411, 446 Bletchley Park, Code and Cipher School
578-9 211-12
technology 399-403 Armstrong, J.A. 492 Arnim, General Jiirgen von 341-3 Atlantic, Battle of 104-23 Atlantic Charter 542 Atlantic Wall 370-2 atomic weapons 578, 582-4 Auchinleck, Field Marshal Claude 313, 330-5 Aung San 263-4 Austria, annexation of 38-9 Autumn Mist, Operation 441-7 Avalanche, Opertion 350-3
111-12,
163-4, 497-9 Blitzkrieg
US in
54-87
style 406-7,
409
USSR 407
Blomberg, Field Marshal Werner von 38 'Blue' plan 221-5
Bluecoat, Operation 404 Blumentritt, General Gunther 70, 373, 383
Anthony 496 campaign 389-95 Bock, Field Marshal Fedor von
Blunt, bocage
58-9, 78, 127, 130,
134, 138, 181, 184, 189, 194-8, 202, 206, 221-4,
458
Bolero, Operation 316 bomb, atomic 578, 582-4 B-Dienst 111, 115,
Ba
bombing, strategic 91, 415-35, 579-80 Bor-Komorowski, General Tadeusz 404 Boris, King of Bulgaria 147, 364, 504 Bormann, Martin 127, 512, 528-9, 590 Bose, Subhas Chandra 280, 549
498-9
Maw
280 Badoglio, General Pietro 349-50 Bagramyan, Marshal Ivan 510 Bagration, Operation 390-1, 407, 479-82 Balck, General Hermann 509 Baldwin, Stanley 88, 418
Bradley, General
Balkans 362-8, 504-10 invasion of 142-60, 174 see also countries
by
Omar
390, 397, 403, 405, 407, 410,
438, 444-5
Bramall, Lieutenant
Edwin
381
Brauchitsch, Field Marshal Walther
name
78, 127, 138. 174, 193,
599
206
von
54-7, 76,
INDEX
Braun, Eva 526-8 Braun, Werner von 580-2 Brest-Litovsk 184 British Expeditionary Force (BEF) 56,
and Ethiopia 324 and French strategy
on Freyberg 61, 67,
ideology 486
77-81
and and and and and and and and and and
Brooke, Field Marshal Sir Alan 62, 80, 313, 316. 332, 375, 455 Brooke-Popham, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert 258 Broz, Josip see Tito Bruce, Captain Henry 383 Buckner, General Simon Bolivar 573
Budenny, Marshal Semyon
175-6, 190-1,
228
Bulgaria 135-6, 147, 150-1, 364-5, 504-5
Bullock, Alan 25 Burgess, Guy 496
Burma
123, 263-5, 280-1, 547-51,
560
intelligence 496-501
invasion of Italy 349-50, 368 Japanese entry into war 240, 254-6, 310 Overlord 375, 392. 455 Pacific
war
and and and war and
Butt Report 420
resistance 483-6
Roosevelt
codes
Captain 21 23 Cartwheel, Operation 297-307 Casablanca Conference 297, 317-19. 341, 425 'Case Red' 78 'Case Yellow' 55-7 Cassino, Battle of 354, 356, 358-60
Thomas
593
420-1
supplies 104 Tobruk 331-2
US
entry into war 311
aims 538
Mark
340, 352-3, 356-61, 367-8
see
ciphers
Collier, Basil 261
394 Cologne, 'Thousand Bomber' raid 422-3 concentration camps 285, 285-9 conscription 20-2 Coral Sea, Battle of 271-3 Corap, General Andre 67. 70, 74 Coventry 500 Crete 134. 160-72, 500 Creveld, Professor Martin van 143, 157 Collins, General Joe
casualties 591-3
cavitron valve 579-80
Chamberlain, Neville 40-1 Chang Chung-hui 280
Chapman, Professor Guy 64
Crimea 195, 197, 221-6 Cnpps, Stafford 179-80 Cunningham, General Alan 313, 322-4, 331 Cunningham. Admiral Sir Andrew 327
Chennault, General Claire 547-8, 554
Cherbourg 390-1 Cherwell, Lord (Professor Frederick Lindemann) 420 Chetmks 156, 492-4 Chiang Kai-shek 243-5, 264, 271. 542, 547-8, 560.
Czechoslovakia
589 China 123, 542
Daladier,
40-1, 488, 506-7, 593-4
Edouard 40
Dalton, Hugh 483 Darlan, Admiral Jean Francois 340-1 de Gaulle, General Charles 60, 64, 76-7,
armies 547-8 and Burma 264 civil war 589-90
Christian,
542
Clausewitz, Karl von 501-2, 554
Caprilli,
81, 85-6,
324-6, 397, 414, 489
242-5, 281. 547-9, 560. 589
supplies 244, 547-8 Choltitz. General Dietrich
bombing
strategic
Clark, General 388-9, 391
and Japan
311, 538-9,
Stalin 179-80, 227-8, 311, 317, 366, 508,
Yugoslavia 152 ciphers 111-14. 163-4, 496-502 Citadel, Operation 347, 464-8
Byron, George Gordon, Lord 146, 488
Carlyle,
301
Poland 542-3, 593
strategy 312-19
Burns, James MacGregor 538-41 Busch, Field Marshal Ernst von 481 Busse, General Theodor 525 Butcher, Commander 381
Caen
64, 77, 84-5
162
Degrelle,
Leon
518,
Denmark
50-1,
283
525
Dentz, General Henri 325-6 Devers, General Jacob 501 Died, General Eduard 51, 481 Dietrich, General Sepp 157, 409. 441 Dill, General Sir John 154 Dollmann, General Fnednch 390
von 414
Gerda 528
Walter 177, 399, 562 Chuikov, General Vasili 178. 230-1. 234. 236-7. 521. Christie.
523. 527, 528-9
Winston Spencer and A-bomb 578 and army command 312-13, 335 and Atlantic Charter 542 on Clark 361 and Crete 168. 170 and Egypt 149
Churchill,
Donitz, Admiral Karl 105-8, 114-22, 214, 523, 526,
533
Donovan. Colonel William 152 Doolittle, Colonel James 270-1, 429-30 Doorman, Admiral Karel 261-3 Dornberger, Walter 580-2
600
INDEX
Douhet, Giulio 89-91, 417, 579 Doumenc, General Aime 63, 70-1 Dowding, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dragoon, Operation 356, 361-2, 377-8
Fretter-Pico, General Maximilian 509 Freud, Sigmund 20 Freyberg, Major-General Bernard 162, 164, 168,
98, 101
170-1, 358,
Dresden 434, 591
Frick,
500
Wilhelm 590
Dulles, Alan 578
Friedeburg, General Hans
Dunkirk 78-81 Dynamo, Operation 78
Friesner, General
von 533
Johannes 365
Frisches Haff 592
General Werner von 38 plan 136-7 Fromm, General Friedrich 439 Fuchs, Klaus 584 Fuller, Major-General J.F.C. 397 Fritsch, 'Fritz'
Eagle,
Operation 95
Eaker, General Ira C. 359, 425 East Indies 261-2, 306-7
Eberbach, General Hans 408 Ebert, Friedrich 27 economies, national 103-4, 212-19 see also production Eden, Anthony 80, 312, 322 Edwards, Paul 219 Egypt 131, 143-4, 147-9 Eichelberger, General Robert 296-7 Eichen, Lieutenant Sidney 390 Einstein, Albert 582-4 Eisenhower, General Dwight D. 317-19, 341-2, 350,
Galland, Lieutenant General Adolf 96, 101-2
Gamelin, General Maurice 61-4, 67, 73, 77, 397 Gavin, General James 390 Gehlen, Colonel Reinhard 477, 480 Genda, Minoru 253, 256 George VI, King of Great Britain 87 Georges, General Alphonse Joseph 63-4, 67, 70-1, 76-7 Gericke, Captain Walter 166, 171
Germany
375-7, 405, 414, 438, 444-5, 518-19 Ellis,
Major
Earl
aircraft 59, 92-4, 160-1
562
Engels, Friedrich 12-13, 15
arms 211-12
Enigma cipher machine 112, 163-4, 497, 499 Erickson, Professor John 176, 180, 192, 200, 209-10,
army
63, 173-4 casualties 592-3
economy and production
452, 460-1, 466-8, 482, 512-13, 525-6, 529-32
104, 212, 219, 282-6
marshalate 127-30 post-war 591-3 rockets 580-4
espionage 496-7 Ethiopia 149, 321-5, 344 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 323
tanks 59-60, 215, 398-9, 402, 408-9
U-boats 104-23 Falaise Gap, Battle
of 396-414
Falkenhorst, General Nikolaus 'Final Solution' 288-9
Gilbert Islands 257, 302
von 50
Giraud, General Henri 66, 340-1 Goebbels, Josef 237, 394, 428, 439, 459, 461, 528-9, 536-7
Finland 47-9, 136, 206-7, 480-1, 505 Fischer, Fntz 10 Fletcher, Admiral Frank John 272 Flower, Desmond 100-1 Flowers, Thomas 499 food 15-16, 104 Foote, Alexander 180 Formosa 566 Fortitude, Operation 373 France
army
60,
Blitzkrieg
Goering,
33, 41, 80, 91, 94-6, 101, 127, 139,
590 462 Goodwood, Operation 391-2, 404 Gordov, V.N. 229 Gort, Field Marshal John 63, 78-81 Golikov, Marshal
F.I.
Graf Spee 49-50, 105
Graham, D. 368 Gransard, General
62
P.P.J.
71
Graziani, Marshal Rodolfo 147, 327-8, 351
54-87
Greece 134, 143-6, Guadalcanal 291-3 Guam 256
casualties 591
invasion 48, 71-87
occupation 282-3, 372 resistance 484 surrender 85-7 Franco, General Francisco 131 Frank, General 590 Frederick II, King of Prussia (the Great)
Hermann
161, 459, 522, 526,
149-51, 156-8, 507-8, 588, 591
350 Guderian, General Heinz 54, Guariglia, Raffaele
57, 60, 76-8, 84, 138,
182-4, 193-206, 215, 396, 402, 458-65, 504,
Guzzoni, Alfredo 348-9 155, 261,
536-7
Hacha, Emil 40
Haganah 588-9 Hague Convention 186
Free French forces 324-6, 331, 489 Freikorps 27-30
601
522
INDEX
Haile Selassie,
Emperor 322-4
Soviet offensive
and and and and and and and and and
Haider, General Franz 55-8, 76, 85. 136-8, 154, 184, 192-5. 201, 221, 226-7
Lord 62 Halsey, Admiral William 271, Hamburg 426-7. 434 Harding, General John 359 Halifax,
297, 300-1. 554, 556-9
Harpe, General Josef 511 Hams, Air Chief Marshal Arthur 415-17, 421-2. 425-7, 429, 435 Hart, Admiral Thomas 265 Hassell, Ulrich von 65 Hausser, General Paul 409
37, 284-9, 439. 482, 504. 522.
526, 590
Emperor
Hirohito,
35,
514
Italy
240-1, 536-7
USSR
129-30, 135-41
Volksgrenadiers
503-4
war supplies
211-12
130, 364-5, 505-6, 509-10, 591
Iceland 111 Ichi-Go offensive 548-9, 554, 560 Iida, General Shojira 264, 549 Imamura, General Hitoshi 297-8 imperialism 25-7, 486-8
347-51
and appeasement 40 Ardennes campaign 439-42. 450-1 army command 63, 312, 452, 541 and Barbarossa 174, 186, 192-5, 201, and Battle of Britain 91-5, 101-2 and and and and and and
USA
390-1. 402-3. 408-11.
Anschluss 38-9
bomb
U-boats 107
Huntziger, General Charles 70-1, 86 Husky, Operation 347-50
436-7
and Allied invasion of
bombing 419
tanks 402, 408-9
Hungary
249, 584-5
Hiroshima 578. 584 Hitler. Adolf and Allied invasion 369-78,
strategic
Yugoslavia 151-7 Chi Minh 589 Hodges, General 446 Hoepner, General Erich 60, 197-9, 201, 206 Homma, General Masaharu 266 Hong Kong 256-7 Hopkins, Harry 316-17, 540 Horthy, Admiral 154, 365, 505-6 Hoth. General Hermann 60, 184, 193-4, 199, 201, 223-4, 468-9 Hudson, Captain D.T. 492-3 Hull, Cordell 245, 250
Heydte. Baron von der 167 Higgmgs Company of New Orleans 562
Hindenburg, General Paul von Hinsley, Professor Harold 498
Berlin 510-12, 516-17, 522-8
Ho
Hess, Rudolf 30, 33, 173, 180 Heusinger, Colonel Adolf 194 Heydrich, Reinhardt 288, 488. 507
Himmler, Heinnch
on
Stalingrad 234-7, 459-61
Indo-China 249, 589, 595 see also countries by name Indonesia 262-3, 589
206-8, 215
plot against 394-5
industrialisation 16-17
Bulgaria 150
industry-
'Case Red' 78
Germany
'Case Yellow' 55-7, 64
occupied countries 282-5
UK
concentration camps 285 Crete 160, 172 Czechoslovakia 40-1 death 528
140-1, 486-7,
218-19
USSR
136-7, 209-10
intelligence
and Crete landings 163-4 Czechoslovakia 488 espionage 496-7 of Japanese strategy 245-9, 254 'Lucy' network 180, 468, 496-7 Overlord 373-4. 379 Poland 488-9 U-boats 111-14
537-8
and USSR
and intelligence 496 and Kursk 464-8, 471-8, 480-2 and Manstein Plan 57-9, 67, 76 and Mussolini 347, 486
180-1
Iran 330 Iraq 326 'Iron Curtain' 593-4
Edmund 67 David 141 Ismay, General Sir Hastings Lionel 453 Ironside, Field Marshal Sir
Nazi revolution 34-6
and North Africa 131, and Plan 'Blue' 221-7 and Poland 41-7
429-30
214-19
USA
and Died 51 and Freikorps 29-30 French defeat 86 and the generals 36-44 and Graf Spee 49-50 and Greece 131-2, 143-7 and Hungary 406. 509 ideology 29-30, 104,
211-12,
149, 328, 336, 341-3,
Irving,
459
Italy
campaign
Putsch 31-4
Allied
and rockets 581-2 and Scandinavia 49-51
casualties 591
in 350-68
invasion of Africa 321
602
INDEX
invasion of Greece 144-5 Mussolini's rise 345-6 Winter Position 353-8 World War I 344-5
Iwo Jima
Korten, Giinther 417 Koryzis, Alexander 157 Krebs, General Hans 522, 528-32
Kretschmer, Otto 106, 123 Krueger, General Walter 555, 560 Krupp, Alfred 17 Kucnler, General Georg von 477
563, 566
Jacob, Ian 539
Kulik, G.I. 176-8
Japan
Kuomintang 547
A-bombing 584-5 and China
Chiang Kai-shek
see also
Kurita, Vice-Admiral
242-5, 281, 547-9, 560, 589
Takeo 556-9
Kursk 347, 454-5, 462-71
defeat 546-60, 584-5 Doolittle raid 270
economy
103-4, 212-14
Leyte Gulf 554-60
landing
Okinawa
Lattre
561-73
craft 377, 386-7,
562-3
de Tassigny, General Jean de 84
preparations for war 245-50
Laval, Pierre 150, 341, 411
production 555
Leahy, Admiral William 575 Lebrun, Albert 64, 85 Leclerc, General Philippe 325, 414, 589 Leeb, Field Marshal Ritter von 58, 127-30,
strategic
bombing of 576-8
strategy 240-50
Java 262-3, 589
Jeschonnek, General Hans 59, 417 Jews 288-9, 588-9 Jodl, General Alfried 130, 136-8, 161, 194, 203, 226-7, 236, 370, 440-1, 458, 464, 522, 533, 590 Juin, General Alphonse 360 Junge, Traudl 528
Miklos 365 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst 590 kamikaze tactics 561, 566-73 Kantaria, Meliton 528 Keitel, General Wilhelm 46, 86, 127,
Leese, General Oliver 313, 359
Lelyoshenko, General D.D. 206 LeMay, General Curtis 434, 576 Lend-Lease 112, 122, 215-16, 311, 539 Leningrad 197-8, 591 Leopold, King of Belgium 66 Lettow-Vorbeck, General von 320 Leyte Gulf, Battle of 554-60
Kallay,
Libya 147-8, 321, 327-9 Liddell Hart, Basil 397, 421
Lindemann, Professor Frederick (Lord Cherwell) 161, 365,
421
440,
Field Marshall Wilhelm 127, 226-7 Lohr, General Alexander 162, 366
458, 522, 590
List,
Kenney, General George 298 Kesselring, Field Marshal Albert
London, bombing of 96, 420,
57, 59, 91, 127, 342,
S.
191,
Lossberg, Colonel
218
Kipling,
Manfred 123 Rudyard 19, 24
Commander Kenneth
128, 130, 136
Luftwaffe 59, 91-102, 417 Liittich, Operation 408-9
Kirponos, General Mikhail 178, 180-1, 191-2, 196 Kleist, Field Marshal Ewald von 54, 138-9. 192, 196, 223, 226, 235-6, 396, 464, 473, 476-8 Kluge, General Giinther von 127, 187, 193, 206, 391, 394-5, 408-9, 473
Knowles,
Bemhard von
Lossow, General Otto von 32-3, 38 Lovett, Robert A. 430 Lucas, General John P. 357-8 Luck, Hans von 392 'Lucy' network 180, 468, 496-7 Ludendorff, General Erich 32-3
Kielsmansegg, Captain Graf von 76 Kiev 191-2, 196 Kimmel, Admiral H.E. 261 King, Admiral Ernest 290, 301, 312-12, 316, 377, 554, 563 King, General Edward 266 Kinzel,
582, 591
Lorrain, Claude 367
351-7, 361, 366, 519
Khrushchev, Nikita
181, 191-5,
197-8
Lutyens,
Edwin 24
MacArthur, General Douglas 265-6,
290-1, 297-8,
587 McClusky, Lieutenant-Commander Wade 278 Machiavelli, Niccolo 540 McNeill, Professor William 13, 17-18, 21 Madagascar 324 Maercker, General Ludwig von 27-8 301, 306-7, 317, 554, 563, 576-7, 585,
111
Koenig, Pierre 325, 331 Koga, Admiral Mineichi 300-1 Kohima 550 Koiso, Kuniaki 563, 578, 590 Konev, Marshal Ivan 178, 206, 453, 469, 477-81, 510-15, 518, 521-3, 533 Konoye, Prince Fumimaro 241, 244, 248, 279, 590 Korea 595
'Magic' 245-50, 271, 299, 498, 501, 578 Maginot Line 56, 59-67, 84-5
Malaya 257-9, 280 Malenkov, Georgy
603
190,
453
INDEX
Malinovsky, Marshal R.Y. 461, 509. 518, 584 Malta 161 Manchuria 243, 280-1, 546-8, 584, 589 Mannerheim, Marshal Carl Gustav 47, 196, 206-7,
Nagasaki 578, 584
Nagumo, Admiral Chuichi
480, 505
Mannheim
419
Mansbridge, Major-General E.C. 589 Manstein, Field Marshal Erich von 56-8, 182, 197, 221-6, 459-64, 471-3,
Manteuffel, General Hasso
Mao Zedong
von
71, 138,
476-8
441,
525
248, 547-8, 589
Marcks, General Erich 378-8 Marianas Islands 306-7, 555 Marita, Operation 147, 151 Market Garden, Operation 437 Marshall, General George C. 290, 312-19, 349, 375, 541, 584, 589-90 Marshall Islands 303-6 Marx, Karl 14 Matsui, General Iwane 548 Matsuoka, Yosuke 244-5
Maxim, Hiram
16
Mekhlis, L.Z. 176, 453 Mende. Karl Heinz 87
occupation 279-89 Asia 279-81
Marauders 548-9, 560 Metaxas, General John 144, 149 Michael, King of Romania 365, 504 Merrill's
Middleton,
Midway
Eastern Europe 284-9, 488-9 Western Europe 281-4 O'Connor, General Richard 147-8, 328, 337 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), USA 495
Drew 67
271-8, 501
Okinawa 563, 566-73, 574 Oldendorff, Admiral Jesse 558-9 Osterkamp, General Theodor 95 Overlord, Operation 319, 369-95 bocage campaign 389-95 deception plans 373-8 forces 378-82 German confusion 382-7 Panzer response 381, 387-9 Overstraeten, General Robert van 66 Overy, Dr Richard 88-9 Ozawa, Admiral Jisaburo 307, 556-9
Mihailovic, Draza 156, 492-4 Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw 482 :
Mikoyan.
A.I.
253-6, 274-8
Nazi Party 30, 34-6 Nehnng, General Walther 341 Netherlands 58, 64-5, 591 East Indies 262-3, 589 Neuhoff, CSM 167 New Guinea 271-2, 293-7, 560 Newbold, Douglas 321 Niedermair, John 562 Nimitz, Admiral Chester 274-5, 290-3, 297, 301-4, 548, 554. 563, 573 Nishimura, Vice-Admiral Shoji 558 Nobel, Alfred 17 Noel, Leon 86-7 Nomura. Admiral Kichisaburo 248, 250 Norman, Max 499 Normandy 373, 376 see also Overlord Norway 49-51, 373 Nuremberg 590
209
Milch, Field Marshal Erhard 59, militarisation 12-30
91.
127
Milward, Professor Alan 103
Minsk 187 Mirkovic, General Bora 151-2 Mitchell. General William 89 Mitscher, Admiral Marc 306-7, 567
Model. Field Marshal Walther
196, 409, 441, 465-71,
478, 481-2, 519
Mohnke. SS Brigadefuhrer Wilhelm Mohr, Jochem 106
527-8
Molotov, V.M. 43, 131, 135-6, 190. 200 Molotiv-Ribbentrop Pact 43, 47, 129, 135, 146, 180. 489 Monte Cassino 354. 356, 358-60 Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard 50, 67, 172,
Pacific
East Indies 261-5
313, 317. 335-57, 374-6, 389-97. 403-7, 414.
Japanese occupation 279-81 Japanese strategy 251-3 Malaya 256-61 Midway 269-78
436-8, 445-6
Pearl
Harbor 253-6
Dr Theodor 523 Morgan, General Sir Frederick 375 Morgenthau, Henry 537
Pahlavi,
Moscow
Palestine 588-9
Philippines 265-7
Morell.
US
136-7. 192-6, 202-6
Mountbaten, Admiral Lord Louis 549 Mufti of Jerusalem, the 322, 325
counter-attack 290-307
Reza Shah 330
Papagas, General Alexandros 149, 155, 156-7
Mussolini. Benito 28. 38. 43. 84-5, 131-2, 145, 143-9.
paratroops 160-1, 172 Crete 164-72
320-1. 327, 343-51, 486 Mutaguchi, General Renya 549-51
Paris, liberation
Overlord 382 410-14
Park, Air Vice-Marshal Keith 101
Pas de Calais 373, 375
604
INDEX
Romanenko, General P.L. 176-7 Romania 130, 146, 150, 364-6, 504, Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin 46,
Patch, General Alexander 361-2, 446, 518
George
Patton, General
340-2, 348, 362, 373, 405-9,
436-9, 444-5, 518-9
of Yugoslavia 151 Paulus, General Friedrich von Paul, Prince
136, 223-4, 228, 230,
and Churchill
Harbor
Peenemunde
death 536-7
581-2
and intelligence 496 and Japan 248-50, 254, 538
Percival,
Pienaar,
Dan
538-9, 542
251, 253-6
General Arthur 258-61 Petain, Marshal Philippe 77, 84-7, 411, 487 Peter, King of Yugoslavia 151 Philby, Kim 496-7 Philippines 265-7, 280-1, 560 Phillips, Admiral Sir Tom 256
71-7, 83-7, 149,
329-52, 372-4, 383-8, 395, 398, 459, 498, 501 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 540-1
234-7 Pearl
591
Lend-Lease
131, 150, 327, 341,
311,
539
neutrality 84, 251, 538-9
and Overlord 375 and Pacific war 301 and Stalin 542-3, 593 and strategy 312, 316-18, 536-43 and U-boats 251, 538-9
321
General Sir William 324 Poland 542-3, 593 casualties 591
Rosa, Salvator 367 Rosenberg, Alfred 590 Rowehl, Theodor 179
invasion of 43-7
Royal Air Force (RAF)
Piatt,
resistance 483-4, 488-9
Bomber Command
and USSR 482, 489, 593-4
Fighter
Popov, General M.M. 459, 461-2, 469 Popov, V.S. 184 population growth 13-15 Portal, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles 318 Potsdam Conference 578, 593-4 Pownall, Admiral Charles 302
Command
415-35
91-102
Rubarth, Hans 73 Ruby, General Edouard 64, 73 Rundstedt, Field Marshal Gerd von 56-9, 78, 84, 127, 174, 181, 191-6, 203-6, 370-4, 383, 390-1, 441,
519 Ryti, Risto
505
Prien, Giinther 123
Marshes 182 production, war 17, 209-19, 282-6 Puttkamer, Admiral Karl-Jesko von 523 Pripet
Saint-L6 393-5, 405
Marquess of 435 Salomon, Emst von 27 Salisbury,
Sangro, battle 354-6 Sassoon, Siegfried 62 Sauckel, Fritz 284, 590 Schaub, Julius 523 Schelde estuary 436-8
Quadrant Conference, Quebec 318-19 Quisling, Vidkun 49, 95, 487
Rabaul 297-301 radar 92, 421, 579-80 Raeder, Admiral Erich 49-50, Ramsay, Admiral Bertram 80 Rashid Ali 322, 325-6
128, 139
Red Army
174-80, 220, 451-4, 473-6 purges 137, 161, 174-6 Red Orchestra 496-7 Reichenau, Field Marshal Walther von 127, 206 Reinhardt, General Hans 60, 511 Reitsch, Hanna 523 resistance 483-96
Reynaud, Paul
77, 84-5
Rhine, crossings 437-8, 518-21 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 43,
131, 135, 240-1, 523,
590
Richthofen, General Wolfram von 226, 231, 236 Ritchie, General Sir Neil 313 Ritter
von Greim,
Field Marshal Robert 523, 526
rockets 580-4
Rodimtsev,
A.I.
230
Rohm, Captain Emst
30, 32-3,
Rokossovsky, Marshal K.K.
37
178, 192, 200, 206, 234-6,
453, 466-71, 481, 514, 521, 533
Schepke, Joachim 123 Schlieben General Karl Wilhelm von 390 Schlieffen, Field Marshal von 58, 67, 136 Schmundt, Rudolf 57, 128, 130, 195, 227 Schomer, Field Marshal Ferdinand 478, 503, 510, 526 Schulze-Boysen network 496 Schuschnigg, Kurt von 39 Sealion, Operation 91, 101, 128, 131 Seeger, Alan 25 Senger und Etterlin, Frido von 348, 358 Serbs 151-2, 156 Serrigny, Bernard 84 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur 39, 590 Sherrod, Robert 303, 566 Shima, Vice-Admiral Kigohide 558 Shirer, William 127-8 Sho-1 plan 556 Shtemenko, General S.M. 479 Sicily, Allied invasion 346-50 'Sickel Stroke' 58-9, 78 signals intelligence 111-14, 163-4, 245-9, 497-502 Simovic, General Dusan 152
60S
INDEX
supplies, war. Battle of the Atlantic 103-23 Surigao Strait 558 Suzuki, Admiral Kantaro 576, 578
Singapore 259-61 Skorzeny, Colonel Otto 351, 365, 446, 506 Sledgehammer, Operation 316 Slessor, Air Marshal Sir John 418 Slim, General William 264, 550-1, 560 Smuts, Jan 321-2. 332 Sokolovsky, Marshal V.D. 178, 473, 529 Somaliland 149, 321 Sorge, Richard 179. 203, 496-7 Spaatz, General Carl 415, 429-30, 578 Spain 88-9, 131 Spears, General Edward 85 Special Operations Executive (SOE), UK 483-4, 488, 492-5, 507 Speer,
Dr Albert
Svoboda, General Ludwik 507 Syria 325-6
Takagi, Admiral
German
UK US
Hugo
Tedder, Air Chief Marshal
Hans 387
91, 127,
Ten-Ichigo plan 566
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 23 Terauchi, General Count 549-50
Stalin, J.V.
Thailand 263, 281, 549 Thesiger, Wilfred 323
227-8. 311, 317, 366, 508
Thoma, Ritter von 143, 196 Thomas, Lieutenant W.B. 165 Thummel, Paul 496 Timoshenko, Marshal S.K. 176,
counter-attack 464-5, 477-82
Second Front
and Finland 47-9 and German invasion
311, 317,
369
180-1, 189-91, 195, 199-200,
221, 227-30
206, 224, 228, 454,
and Hungary 509 and intelligence 496-7 and Japan 575
Tiso, Tito,
Red Army command 178-9, 454. and Roosevelt 542-3 and siege of Berlin 521-3, 528-9
515, 518
541
Torch, Operation 316, 318, 337-8 Totalise, Operation 404-5
450-5
transport
Stalingrad 227-37, 459-60 219,
von
182, 394-5, 482,
497
490
Stewart, I.M.D. 167 Stilwell,
General Joe 263-4, 542, 548-51, 560
Stokes, Richard 435
bombing
91, 415-35, 576-80 590 Stresemann, Gustav 33 Stroop, General Jurgen 489 Student, General Kurt 161-2, 165-8, 170-1, 173 Stulpnagel, General Heinrich Graf von 395 Stumme. General Georg 336 submarines, 104-23, 579 Sukarno, Dr 280 Sultan, General Daniel 560 Suner, Serrano 131 super-weapons 578-85
strategic
16,
178
Trenchard, Sir Hugh 418 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 536 trials, war crimes 590 Trident Conference, Washington 318-19 Tripartite Pact 130, 135, 143, 150 Trotsky, Leon 175-6, 228 Trott, Adam von 428 Truman, Harry S, 575, 578, 584, 590 Truscott, General Lucius 358-60 Tsolakoglu, General George 157 Tukhachevsky, Marshal 175-6
and Tito 494, 508 war aims 537-8, 543
John
Joseph 506 Marshal 362-4, 366, 492-4, 508
211, 402 Togo, Admiral 253, 255 Toio, General Hideki 243-4, 248-50, 279, 563, 590 Tolbukhin, Marshal F.I. 366, 471, 474, 478, 508-9,
post-war foreign policy 593-4 purge of generals 137, 161, 174-6
Staufienberg, Colonel Claus
178, 181, 190-4, 203,
479
Tobruk 148, 331-2 Todt, Dr Fritz 130,
Germany 43
and Poland 482, 489, 593-4
Steinbeck,
Arthur 415
Ten-Go plan 563-6
Sprague. Admiral Clifton 558 Spruance, Admiral Raymond 272, 563 Stackelberg, Karl von 74, 83
and A-bombs 584 and Churchill 179-80,
Sir
Tehran Conference 375, 480 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 25
378
spies 496-7
strategy-
399 399
Taylor. A.J.P. 10
Sperrle, General
pact with
214,
321-2,
Tarawa 30T3
127, 211, 402, 417. 429, 440, 523.
Speidel, Lieutenant-General
for
59-60, 215, 398-9, 402, 408-9
Soviet 137, 178, 399
526, 581
demand
Takeo 262
tanks 396-7, 579 Blitzkrieg 59-85
Streicner, Julius
Tunisia 341-3 Turing, Alan 499 Turkey 145-6
U-boats 104-23 ciphers 111, 499
U-Go
offensive 549-51 Ultra intelligence 114, 163-4, 179, 497-502
606
INDEX
Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
advance on Berlin 510-18, 521-33 and the Balkans 507-10 Barbarossa
173-208
(q.v.)
Vlasov, General A.A. 192, 206, 533 Volksgrenadiers 439,
503-4
Voronov, Marshal N.N. 236 Voroshilov, Marshal K.E. 175-6,
190-1, 228,
453
and Bulgaria 136 590
casualties
counter-offensive 228-9, 454-5, 460-71 German retreat 476-9 industry 136-7, 209-10 intelligence 180-1
Lend-Lease 122, 215-18, and Poland 482
Red Army
311
174-80, 220, 451-4, 473-6
resistance 490-1
supplies 121-2, 209-10, 215-18 tanks 137, 178, 399 war production 209-10
United Kingdom (UK) aircraft 92-4, 214-15,
Battle
of
Burma
421-2
Britain 88-102
Field Marshal 15 256 Waller, Lieutenant-Colonel R.P. 158 Wan Waithayakon, Prince 280 Wang Ching-wei 280, 547 Warlimont, General Walter 138, 161m, 395 Watson-Watt, Robert 92 Wavell, Field Marshal Sir Archibald 147-9, 170, 259, 262, 312-13, 321-2, 327-32 Wedemeyer, General Albert C. 318, 542, 560 Weichs General Maximilian von 224 Weidling, General Karl 526, 529 Weizsacker, Richard von 592 Welchman, Gordon 499
Wake
Welles, Sumner 180 Wenck, General Walther 523-5
549-51
casualties 591
Crete 162-72
economy and production 214-15 German bombing of 419, 422-3 Greece 146-9, 157-60, 507-8 Lend-Lease 112, 218 Malaya 258-62 North Africa 321-4, 327-42 SOE 483-4, 488, 492-5, 507 strategic
Wade,
bombing
415-19
tanks 214, 399
United Nations United States of America (USA) aircraft carriers
Westphal, General Siegfried 65-6 Weygand, General Maxime 77, 83, 85, 325-6 eygand Line 83-5 Wiese, General 411 Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands 65 Wilson, Field Marshal Sir Henry 157 Wilson, Gunner Charles 386 Wingate, Major-General Orde 323-4, 549-50 Winn, Captain Rodger 111 Witzleben, General Erwin von 127 Wolff, General Karl 533 World War I 10-11, 25-7, 344-5
268-9
casualties 591
economy and production Marine Corps
Navy
218-19
Yalta
302-3, 574-5
241, 252, 255-6, 271,
278, 299
Yamashita, General Tomoyuku 259-61, 555 Ybarnegarey, Jean 85 Yegorov, Mikhail 175, 528
neutrality 112, 537-9
OSS 495 tanks 321-2, 399
Upham,
Conference 542-3, 593
Yamamoto, Admiral Isoruku
291-3, 302-7, 554, 561-6, 591
urnaium 582-4
Yeremenko, Marshal A.I. Young, Desmond 372
Uranus, Operation 234-7 Ushijima, General Mitsuru 567, 573
Yugoslavia 146, 151-7, 362-4, 508, 591 resistance 492-5
V-l bombs 581-2, 584 V-2 rockets 581-2 Vasilevsky, A.M. 224, 229, 453-4, 469, 479 Vassilchikov, 'Missie' 428 Vatutin, General N.F. 178, 200, 234, 459-62, 465-6, 476-8 Vercors 484
Zangen, General Gustav von 438 Zeitzler, General Kurt 227, 236, 464-7, 477-8, 504 Zhukov, Marshal GK. 176-81, 190, 197-8, 202, 206,
Charles 162
234
229, 234, 243, 453-5, 469, 476-80, 510-29, 533,
534
Versailles Treaty 36-7
Vichy government 86-7,
178, 195-6, 229,
131, 282, 340-1
colonies 280, 320-1, 324-5, 340-1 Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy 350 Vietinghoff, General Heinrich von 353, 367
Vietnam 595
607
Picture Credits Gus
Britton 106, 108[below], 116;
Bundesarchiv, Koblenz 41. 45[below], 46, 159, 166, 204-5,331,373,382,462; E. T.
Archive 298, 487;
Goldie Collection 90[above], 99 [above], 117, 120, 286, 365, 425, 433, 434-5, 522[above 579; ,
Hulton-Deutsch Collection 477; Imperial War Museum 79, 82, 97, 98[left], 99[centre and below], 113, 148, 323-4, 334-6, 382[below], 403, 429, 493, 553, 585[above], 586;
Robert Capa/Magnum Photos Ltd 414-5;
Eugene Smith/Magnum Photos Ltd
536-7, 566-7;
Novosti Press Agency 124-5, 178, 201, 229, 237, 451-2, 474, 516-7, 527, 532-4;
Popperfoto 45.
50, 72, 100, 126, 257. 273. 277, 359, 407, 426, 524, 585[belovv], 588-9;
Robert Hunt Picture Library 52-3,
68, 69,
90[below], 98-9, 108[above], 145, 185, 188-9, 259, 304-5, 308-9, 362, 366, 395, 402[below], 402-3[above], 465, 522[below], 545, 561, 575; Taylor Photo Library 216-7, 276[left], 277[below];
John Topham Picture Library
217;
U.S. National Archives 276[nght], 295, 302, 554-5,
570, 572;
608
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
45 456 6
Boston Publi D74i
BRIGET
BRANCH
L]
The Date Due Card in the pocket indicates the date on or before which this book should be returned to the Library. Please do not remove cards from this pocket.
c
.^^"~-
^Jr^~x. ^^ m.
w
o 3C (0
S @
Mi
W^
?
G many years Senior Academy at Sandhurst and is now the Defense Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of many books on military history, John Keegan was
for
Lecturer at the Royal Military
including The Face of Battle, Six Armies in Normandy, and The Mask of Command. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Jacket design by Neil Stuart Jacket photography by Dennis Potolvr
/ZPX VIKING PENCUIN INC.
VIKING
40 West 23rd Street New York, N.Y. 10010 Prinl
1
i s
J
S^SVS^ "Truly magnificent in the
scope
of
its
coverage and the quality
of
its
exposition. Another
dazzling effort from the best military historian of our generation"
— Tom Clancy, author
of
Clear
and Present Danger
!
>>**«--
Wfc,
ISBN 0-670-82359-7 '
"
,,MI
'/ 9
780670"823598
900 00
