World War II, 1939-45
4.5. Closing the Ring
on the whole it functioned well. To be sure, the British found their American cousins arrogant and overbearing—“overpaid, oversexed, and over here,” as the saying went—whereas the Americans often suspected their wily allies of trying to lead them by the nose. On the other hand it was General Eisenhower, as SHAEF commander, who at one point issued a directive to the e ect that while he did not mind his subordinates calling one another “sons of bitches,” he would mind if anyone spoke of Americans or British in general as members of such a group.
Relations with Stalin were more di cult, and cooperation with him was never close. At times it seemed as if the Soviets were playing a deliberate game of hard-to-get, now showing a friendly face, now refusing to cooperate. Many of the problems were due to the fact that the Second Front was so late in coming. Furthermore, the need to work with the USSR itself gave rise to di erences within the Western alliance, Churchill being much more suspicious of Stalin than Roosevelt was. Still, as long as the war lasted, these di erences were never allowed to disrupt the alliance. Instead, there was some actual cooperation (as, for example, when the Soviets coordinated their 1944 summer o ensive with the Normandy landings), and when critical Allied supplies reached the Soviets.
The summer of 1942 opened with another German o ensive in Russia, complete with a gigantic battle of encirclement in the Ukraine. Next came a rapid, almost bloodless, pursuit that brought the Wehrmacht all the way to Stalingrad. Operationally speaking, it was a very great achievement. Strategically, as the small number of Soviet prisoners showed, it led nowhere. Having su ered heavy losses during the winter, the Wehrmacht at this time simply no longer had what it took to defeat a mobilized Soviet Union. After the failure of its o ensive at Kursk in July 1943, it no longer even had the wherewithal to launch a large-scale o ensive, the more so because Allied landings rst in North Africa, then in Sicily and in Italy, forced Hitler to redirect forces away from the Eastern Front to assist his ally. By the end of 1943, the Soviets, relying on a crushing
superiority in everything from infantry to tanks and artillery, had recaptured two-thirds of the territory lost in 1941.
If ever there was a savage war, this was it. Hitler, of course, intended it to be a war of conquest aimed at the extirpation of Bolshevism, the permanent occupation of much of Russia as far as the Urals, and the extermination of anyone who stood in the way.
To carry out these aims, he had engaged in years of race-hatred propaganda. On the eve of the invasion, he explicitly told his generals that the Geneva Convention, as well as any other
“chivalrous” ideas they might have, would not apply.”6 The USSR on its part had never signed the convention, and Stalin’s o er to respect it soon after hostilities broke out was left unanswered. The results were there for everybody to see.
Both sides fought with enormous ferocity, sometimes, as at Stalingrad, to the point of literally using hands and teeth. Entire formations were wiped out not once but time after time.47 Both sides murdered certain categories of prisoners, such as commissars or SS men, out of hand. Each, in turn, also herded millions of captives into camps where they were either left to freeze and starve
—among Soviet POWs there were outbreaks of cannibalism—or put to work under such terrible conditions that few survived. Individual war crimes, whether committed in quest of information or out of sheer hatred, abounded.
All these horrors were compounded by atrocities against the civilian population. The Germans shot and gassed Jews, obliterated entire villages suspected of assisting “partisans,” and deliberately set out to starve the population of European Russia. In their turn, from entering Germany, the Soviets retaliated by raping practically every woman aged ten to sixty”8 By comparison, the toll taken by special units such as the NKVD and the Gestapo of members of their own armed forces and civilian populations accused of crimes or suspected of disloyalty was minor. Still, it certainly ran into the tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands killed.
In 1943, as in 1944–45, major Soviet o ensives usually opened with some of the more massive artillery bombardments and air strikes the world has ever seen. It is true that the Red Air Force had no heavy bombers and never became very good at interdiction, either. However, it did provide the ground forces with e ective close support, the more so because the Luftwa e’s best ghter pilots were kept busy defending the skies of the Reich. The bombardments and air strikes were followed by equally massive waves of infantry shouting “hurrah” and, if the German generals’ postwar memoirs may be believed, often roaring drunk. A sector of the front having been torn open, the armored divisions, their backbone formed by the cheap, badly nished, but reliable and e ective T-34 tanks, would pass into the breach on their way to the rear. In the summer of 1944, it was by these methods that the Soviets brought about the collapse of Army Group Center, the largest single German formation of all.
As in 1917–18, the Germans dug in and formed deep defensive lines, often taking over entire villages where positions were heavily forti ed and well camou aged. These forti cations not only permitted a stationary defense, but also served as a starting point for counterattacks—a form of war in which the Germans, thanks to generally superb training, great exibility, and good coordination, excelled. They used large numbers of tank destroyers, a weapons system that had the advantage of being cheaper to build than a tank, and could carry a heavier gun. Originally, tank destroyers—
known to the Germans as Sturmartillerie, storm artillery—were developed to provide re support for attacking infantry. Their low pro le, though, made them equally useful on the defense, given that they could be easily hidden and that they could be moved from one position to the next much more readily than towed anti-tank guns could. Right to the last months of the war, the Wehr-macht’s tactics were superior, often in icting far more casualties than it took.
Ultimately, though, the Germans were being forced back, it was only logistical constraints that really compelled the Red Army to halt, and then only temporarily.
In November 1942, the Allies invaded Northwest Africa. The decision was dictated as much by Roosevelt’s need to show the US electorate that something was being done as by strategic considerations. At the time American, and even more so British, commanders felt a long time would pass before they would be ready to tackle the Wehr-macht’s main forces in France.
Despite initial resistance, defeating the French Vichy forces in Morocco and Algeria didn’t prove too di cult. Doing the same to the quarter million German troops in Tunisia was a di erent matter, and several months of very hard ghting had to pass before the job was completed. Still, from beginning to end the Germans, whose rear was also being threatened by Montgomery’s Eighth Army coming up from Libya and whose supplies were being sunk as they tried to cross the Mediterranean, did not stand a chance. If, during all the years that World War II lasted, there was one occasion when quantity prevailed over quality, surely this was it.
What was true of the Tunisian campaign was equally true of those that followed in Sicily and Italy.49 In Sicily, the Germans put up a stubborn resistance and were only forced to give up after the American general George Patton out anked them by land and by sea. Even so, they succeeded in extricating most of their troops as well as much of their equipment. Churchill’s original idea in pressing for these invasions was that they would draw German forces away from northwestern France, where he and the Americans hoped to land eventually. In the event, the opposite happened: The campaign demanded more Anglo-American troops than expected.
The mountainous Italian terrain provided the defenders with countless strong positions, including many rivers that wound so much that they had to be crossed several times. On the other hand, it seldom allowed large armored forces to be used in exploitation and pursuit. It also helped nullify, or at least reduce, the e ects of Allied air superiority—which, had the country been at, would have been devastating. These facts of life neither Italy’s decision to change sides in September 1943, nor two Allied attempts to out ank
the Germans by landing in their rear at Salerno and Anzio, could change.
Though the ghting was very tough, by and large these campaigns did not witness the large-scale atrocities so characteristic of the Russo-German War. The “strategic” bombing campaign against Germany’s cities, which got into gear during the same period, was a di erent matter. Even if it is true, as has been claimed,50 that Churchill was the rst to give the order to deliberately bomb civilians as part of a plan to ease the pressure on the ghter command, then one should by no means overlook the fate that Warsaw and Rotterdam had already su ered at the hands of the Luftwa e.
During the rst two and a half years of the war, the attacks on Germany’s cities, mounted rst by the RAF and then by the RAF and the US Army Air Force together, were insigni cant. In 1941, losses among British pilots actually exceeded the number of Germans killed. Thereafter, better aircraft, better auxilliary technologies such as airborne radar, better methods, and the sheer number of heavy, four-engined bombers, bombing Germany by night and by day, started making their impact felt. Tens of thousands of civilians, some of them indeed working in arms factories (the British chief of bomber command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, justi ed his campaign by claiming it “dehoused” workers, lowering their morale and disrupting production) but most not, were blown to pieces, asphyxiated, cremated, or buried. Hundreds of thousands more were wounded, and millions lost their homes. When US troops entered Aachen in October 1944, they found it deserted even by the birds.
This, then, was total war with a vengeance. It did not content itself by killing enemy soldiers at the front. Instead, it did what it could to slaughter and destroy whatever supported them in whatever way, however indirect. Men, women, old people, young people, all su ered together and perished together, often in the most horrible ways as the places in which they tried to shelter were transformed into red-hot ovens.
But what impact did strategic bombing have on the German war e ort? Allied commissions that looked into the question soon after the war distinguished between civilian “morale” and “behavior,”
claiming that, while the former had su ered, the latter remained more or less intact and enabled production to go on, even expand.
Subsequent commentators were less sure. It is true that, taken as a whole, German armament production continued to rise until the summer of 1944, when it fell for the rst time. By that time, though, Germany’s own synthetic oil plants had been destroyed (and Romania had changed sides), causing the war e ort to literally grind to a halt. In 1944, bombing cost Germany 14 percent of its armament production, including 20 percent of its tanks, 35 percent of armored vehicles, 31 percent of aircraft, and 45 percent of trucks.
By 1945, production of all armaments was down 48 percent.51
These direct losses apart, the bombing campaign forced the Germans to disperse and bury what remained of their industry, at what cost in labor, transportation, and raw materials can easily be imagined. Fighting back also required massive resources. As a result, a third of all guns produced were used in anti-aircraft defense.
Meanwhile the Luftwa e, forced onto the defense, all but disappeared from the skies above the ghting fronts. On the Allied side, the losses su ered by the aircrews were very heavy relative to their own numbers, but compared with the gigantic number of men killed at the front they were tri ing.
On June 6, 1944, after having mounted a massive deception campaign, the Americans and the British landed in Normandy. At that time the Third Reich, though faced with the Soviet steamroller on the Eastern Front and su ering badly under air attack, was still intact. Because of the vagaries of the weather, and sti German resistance, the invasion itself was a close-run thing. Though they were grievously short of air support, the German forces in France were much stronger than they had been in the previous year. Only a series of errors on Hitler’s part prevented additional armored divisions from being sent to seal o the beachhead and counterattack. Conversely, not for nothing did General Eisenhower
prepare a note that he intended to publish in case of failure and in which he took the blame upon himself. Had Operation Overlord failed, the German high command could have moved as many as a million troops, including some of its very best, to the Eastern Front.
At the very least, the war would have been prolonged and the subsequent peace, if there had been a peace, assumed a di erent form. There is, of course, another possibility. Instead of Hiroshima, some German city such as Heidelberg or Goettingen might have become the rst victim of the atomic bomb. Both were still intact, and so would have been suitable targets.
The landings themselves combined airborne operations—both by paratroopers and by gliders—with seaborne assault. On the rst day alone seven divisions, the minimum gure considered acceptable by the invasion commander General Montgomery, were put ashore. By the end of July, the gure had grown to thirty-six divisions, nineteen American and seventeen British. The Americans alone needed an average of twenty-two thousand tons of supplies per day.
Still, the Western Allies never quite succeeded in imitating the Blitzkrieg methods pioneered by their opponents. Perhaps this was because they enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in numbers, which slowed them down and paradoxically caused them to proceed cautiously in the hope of saving lives. Perhaps it was because many of their generals were inclined toward attrition and not very good at orchestrating the cooperation of all forces available; that, at any rate, was how it was interpreted by the Wehrmacht’s senior commanders both at the time and later on. Perhaps, too, it was because they met an enemy “as hard as steel” who did not yield an inch.
In any case, operations tended to be heavy-handed and slow.
O ensives such as Operation Goodwood, July 1944,52 were preceeded by massive air and artillery bombardments, by which the commander of the U.S. Army Service Forces, General Lesley McNair, who was visiting the front, was killed. The advance went according to an elaborate timetable, leaving little room for junior commanders to seize eeting opportunities. As had already happened in Sicily in
the previous year, even when the Allies engaged in maneuvers, as at Falaise, they were hesitant to close the ring and thus enabled the Germans to extricate many of their ghting men. For these reasons, and because of logistical di culties of the kind described above, the front froze. From mid-September 1944 to late January 1945, almost the only important move that took place was the German countero ensive in the Ardennes.
A blow-by-blow account of the nal agony is not required in the present context. Su ce it to say that the Germans did not surrender with their forces largely intact as they had in 1918. Instead their troops, out of fear for the enemy and for the SS, who executed anyone they considered a deserter, continued to ght to the end.
Faced with such tenacious resistance, both in the west and in the east the Allied operations proceeded on an enormous scale. During the battle of Berlin alone, the attacking Soviet armies are said to have numbered two and a half million men, forty-one thousand artillery pieces and mortars, and sixty-two hundred tanks.53 The two and a half months’ erce ghting that took them from the Oder to the German capital cost them no fewer than a thousand tanks—
amazingly without that loss making the slightest di erence to the outcome or, indeed, reducing the Soviet order of battle to any appreciable extent. On the Anglo-American side, such was the surplus of materiel that factories were being switched back to civilian production months before the war ended.
Such massive armaments could only have been made available by the methods of mass production as rst developed by Detroit and then imitated by the Soviets in particular. Yet on the whole, quality was not sacri ced. It is true that di erent countries approached things in somewhat di erent ways; the Soviet preference for quantity, for example, di ered from the German emphasis on quality. Yet in these countries, as well as all the rest, each new tank, combat aircraft, aircraft carrier, and submarine represented the latest available technology and incorporated the latest available inventions. Compared with what had existed only a few years earlier, practically every new weapon elded was much more
advanced and powerful. The British Spit re, the most famous ghter of all, went through eight di erent versions—an average of more than one per year—that caused the power of its engine to more than double; yet before the war ended it was already being replaced by the even more advanced Tempest. To adduce but one more, rather trivial example, when the Germans in 1944 came to man the West- wall, the construction of which dated back to 1938–39, they found that the bunkers were too small to take the latest anti-tank guns; yet it was only those guns, rather than the door-knockers available in 1939, that stood any chance of penetrating the other side’s armor.
Thus, the most intensive research and development did not proceed at the cost of mass production but simultaneously with it;
as a result, obsolescence was extremely rapid. This became even more evident after the war when the Soviets, perhaps because their economy was smaller, made an e ort to gather their weapons and store them in huge depots. There they helped augment the order of battle, at any rate, on paper; over the coming decades, they were often sold at rock-bottom prices to clients all over the third world who thus acquired the capability to ght one another on the cheap.
The Americans also sold many of their surplus weapons to their Western European Allies (West Germany, once it joined NATO, included). Unlike the Soviets, though, often they did not even bother to evacuate the rest, leaving them to rust instead.
Nothing is more indicative of the speed of technological development than the fact that the atomic bomb, the largest and most expensive R&D project in history by far, took only three years from the moment the green light was given in 1942 to the moment it produced the rst mushroom cloud. Before we can tell that story, though, it is necessary rst to see how the war in the Far East proceeded.