Eisenhower’s confidence, which had been badly dented during the winter months, now returned. His army was learning from its mistakes. Planning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, was well advanced, the Axis was about to be evicted from North Africa for good, and the supply system was at last working. The British were flabbergasted by the largesse of the American industrial titan. They were also shocked by the waste, although they had few grounds for complaint since they too were beneficiaries. But when it came to the inflated size of Allied Force Headquarters, with a staff of just over 3,000 officers and men, even Eisenhower was embarrassed.
By the beginning of May, the remaining Axis forces were compressed into the northern tip of Tunisia, including Bizerta, Tunis and the Cape Bon peninsula. Although they amounted to more than a quarter of a million men, just under half were German and the majority of the Italians were not fighting troops. Short of ammunition and above all fuel, Germans knew the end was in sight, making bitter jokes about ‘Tunisgrad’. Hitler’s refusal to evacuate his men to defend southern Europe did little for morale. They found it unbelievable that he was still sending reinforcements in April and May, all of whom would become prisoners too.
The Junkers 52 and large Messerschmitt 323 transports were easy prey for Allied fighters, waiting in ambush in the Mediterranean skies. Over half the Luftwaffe’s remaining transport fleet was destroyed in the last two months of the campaign. On Sunday, 18 April, four American fighter squadrons and a squadron of Spitfires jumped a group of sixty-five transports escorted by twenty fighters. In what became known as the ‘Palm Sunday turkey shoot’, the Allied fighters shot down seventy-four aircraft. While the Red Army was grinding down the overwhelming bulk of the German army, the western Allies were starting to break the back of the Luftwaffe. Air Marshal Coningham, the commander of the Desert Air Force, was furious at how little credit Montgomery gave to the RAF’s role in North Africa. The combination of the Allied air forces and the Royal Navy strangling the Axis supply line across the Mediterranean had contributed at least as much to the final victory as the ground forces.
The last phase of crushing the bridgehead did not, however, go easily. Montgomery battered away at the mountainous Enfidaville sector on the coast south of Tunis with little effect and heavy losses. The Eighth Army was behind the Americans in learning the harsh lessons of mountain warfare. Other attacks by the First Army further to the west were resisted in the fiercest fighting. The Irish Guards advanced through a cornfield in a dip to attack a German position under fire from machine guns, artillery and the new Nebelwerfer six-barrelled mortar. When a man fell hit by fire, a comrade would stick his weapon upright in the ground. ‘Rifle butts appeared everywhere marking the dead, dying and wounded,’ wrote a corporal. ‘I stopped by one poor guardsman who was calling for water. He had shocking wounds. I could see the shattered bones of his arm and he had a gaping wound in his side.’
The survivors of the attack charged the olive grove on the rising hill ahead, forcing the Germans to flee. But in one of the trenches the corporal and another two guardsmen heard German voices in a bunker. They both threw in grenades and stepped back. Afterwards, the corporal peered into the dark interior. ‘There must have been twenty Germans scattered about in there. They were all bandaged up already and those that were not dead were screaming their heads off. This place was where the retreating enemy had left their wounded. I turned away without the slightest compassion for them. They had done much worse to my dead and wounded comrades lying out there in the burning cornfields.’
Only Bradley’s II Corps due west of Tunis achieved a significant advance at the beginning of May. Finally recognizing his error at Enfidaville, Montgomery persuaded Alexander that a concentrated blow was required to end this battle of attrition around the perimeter. On 6 May, Horrocks with the 7th Armoured Division, the 4th Indian Division and 201st Guards Brigade launched Operation Strike from the south-west. Following an even more concentrated barrage of artillery than at Alamein, they pushed forward towards Tunis, splitting the pocket in two, while the Americans took Bizerta on the north coast. Led once again by the 11th Hussars in their battle-worn armoured cars, British troops entered Tunis the next afternoon. By 12 May it was all over. Nearly a quarter of a million troops surrendered, including twelve generals.
Hitler persuaded himself that he had been right to keep fighting in North Africa to the very end, so as to delay an Allied invasion of southern Europe and to keep Mussolini in power. On the other hand, he had again lost forces which he would badly need in future battles.
28
Europe behind Barbed Wire
1942–1943
The invasion of the Soviet Union affected German occupation policy across almost all of Europe. In the east, the intoxicating, but also frightening, idea of dominating millions of people increased the Nazis’ reliance on terror to achieve results. Despite the early hopes of some senior officers and administrators that they would win over nationalities, such as the Balts and Ukrainians, to the anti-Bolshevik crusade, Hitler was interested only in instilling fear for the sake of fear. As in the case of Poland, he felt that their countries should be wiped off the map altogether.
In spite of Hitler’s disgust at the idea of Slavs in Wehrmacht uniform, altogether nearly a million Soviet citizens served alongside the German army and the SS. Most were dragooned from the starvation of prison camps as unarmed Hiwi auxiliaries in German divisions. But even some of these ‘Iwans’ were taken on unofficially as full-time soldiers. A commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend later became proud of his Russian driver and bodyguard who accompanied him everywhere.
Well over 100,000 served, with widely differing degrees of enthusiasm and effectiveness, in General Vlasov’s Russian Army of Liberation, and in a ‘Cossack’ corps fighting partisans on Soviet territory and later in Yugoslavia and Italy. The Ukrainian police and concentration camp guards achieved a terrible reputation for cruelty. Himmler also turned to conscripting Latvians, Estonians, ethnic Caucasians and even Bosnian Muslims into Waffen-SS formations. He also formed a Ukrainian division in 1943, but it was called the SS Galicia Division so as not to provoke Hitler’s anger. A hundred thousand Ukrainians volunteered, of whom only a third were accepted.
The treatment of civilians in the occupied territories and of prisoners of war remained appalling. By February 1942, some 60 per cent of the 3.5 million Red Army prisoners had died of starvation, exposure or disease. Convinced Nazis did not just take pride in their pitilessness. Their dehumanization of victim categories–Jews, Slavs, Asiatics and Roma–was a deliberate form of self-fulfilling prophecy: to reduce them through humiliation, suffering and starvation to the level of animals, and thus ‘prove’ their genetic inferiority.
The chaotic rivalry between Hitler’s satraps in the east exceeded even that in Germany itself, between the Nazi Party and different organs of government. Alfred Rosenberg was appointed minister for the eastern territories, but he was thwarted at every turn. His Ostministerium was derided, partly because Rosenberg was one of the few civilian officials who wanted to involve former Soviet nationalities in the war against Bolshevism. Göring, in charge of the war economy, simply wanted to strip the occupied areas and starve their populations, while Himmler wanted to cleanse them by mass murder to prepare for German colonization. Rosenberg thus had no control over security, food supply or the economy, which meant no control at all. He even had no authority over Erich Koch, the Reichskommissar for Ukraine as well as Gauleiter of East Prussia. Koch, a brutal drunkard, referred to the local population as ‘Niggers’.
Herbert Backe’s Hunger Plan, which was supposed to kill off up to thirty million Soviet citizens, never went beyond the drawing board. Starvation was rife, but it was hardly organized as the Nazis planned. Military commanders evaded orders to seal off the cities to starve their populations, because the Wehrmacht needed to keep large numbers of Soviet workers alive to serve their needs. Backe’s idea of feeding both the Reich and the Weh
rmacht on the eastern front from local resources proved a far greater failure. Agriculture in the Ukrainian ‘bread-basket’ had virtually collapsed due to Soviet scorched-earth tactics, war damage, depopulation, the evacuation of tractors and partisan activity. Living off the land for the Wehrmacht meant the seizure of fodder and grain, and the indiscriminate slaughter of poultry and livestock with no thought for future supplies, let alone the survival of the civilians who produced it. The lack of rolling stock and motor transport meant that the bulk of even what food there was could not be distributed effectively.
Nazi ideas for the future constituted little more than a grotesque fantasy. The General Plan East envisaged a Germanic empire reaching to the Urals, with autobahns linking new cities, satellite towns and model villages and farms manned by armed settlers, with Untermenschen helots tilling the soil. Himmler dreamed of gemütlich German colonies, with gardens and orchards built across the former killing grounds of his SS Einsatzgruppen. And to provide a holiday centre the Crimea, renamed Gotengau, would become the German Riviera. The dominant problem, however, was how to find enough ‘re-Germanizable’ people to fill the eastern landmass. Very few Danes, Dutch and Norwegians volunteered. There was even a mad idea of packing Slavs off to Brazil and bringing back German settlers in their stead from Santa Caterina province. By the time of the defeat at Stalingrad and the withdrawal from the Caucasus, it had become clear that there were not nearly enough Germans, real, recycled or drafted, to fulfil the target of 120 million and thus satisfy Hitler’s and Himmler’s vision.
Ethnic cleansing and transfers of population throughout central Europe had been not only cruel but also incredibly wasteful in manpower and resources at a time when the war hung in the balance. Colonists proved incapable of farming the land as well as those they replaced, and so agricultural production declined disastrously.
An over-stretched German war machine found itself desperately short of manpower, so Fritz Sauckel, working with the armaments minister Albert Speer, travelled around the occupied territories and countries rounding up five million workers for factories, mines, ironworks and farms. The Reich became pockmarked with camps for this swelling mass of slave labour. German civilians watched these foreigners fearfully out of the corner of the eye, seeing them as an enemy within. Most senior Nazis were uneasily conscious of the paradox that, although they had reduced their own ‘racially undesirable’ population, they were now bringing hundreds of thousands into Germany itself.
Senior Nazi officials had promised a ‘Greater German economic sphere’ and a European economic union which would raise standards of living, yet contradictory policies and the compulsion to exploit their subject countries achieved the opposite result. Conquered countries were forced to pay for the costs of their occupation by German forces. Many businesses profited from close collaboration with their new masters, but in almost all countries, with the exception of a semi-independent Denmark, the population as a whole became far poorer. Most western European countries were forced to hand over between a quarter and a third of all their receipts, and Germany secured a large part of each country’s agricultural output to ensure that its own citizens did not go hungry. In the occupied countries, this produced a rampant black market and a vertiginous rise in inflation.
Almost from the start, Churchill had great hopes of turning European discontent under Nazi occupation into outright revolt. In May 1940, he had appointed Dr Hugh Dalton, a well-off socialist, to be minister for economic warfare and supervise the creation of the Special Operations Executive. Dalton was not popular in the Labour Party, but as an anti-appeaser he had done much in the late 1930s to move it away from its pacifist position. He had long been a great admirer of Churchill, although the prime minister did not reciprocate his feelings. He could not ‘stand his booming voice and shifty eyes’ and said of Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in the 1930s, ‘Extraordinary fellow, Van! He actually likes Dr Dalton.’
Dalton, a fervent admirer of the Poles, recruited Colonel Colin Gubbins, who had been a liaison officer with the Polish army during its battles in 1939. Gubbins later came to command SOE. Polish resistance was an inspiration for SOE. Even after the country’s surrender at the end of September 1939, Polish soldiers fought on in the Kielce district under Major Henryk Dobrzaski until May 1940, while others resisted in the area of Sandomierz on the upper Vistula. A Polish section had been set up in SOE, but its role was simply to work with the Polish army’s Sixth Bureau in London and provide support. No military mission was sent to occupied Poland, and as a result the Poles themselves ran everything. After the great contribution of Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain, SOE managed to persuade the RAF to convert a Whitley bomber with additional fuel tanks so that they could make the long round-trip from a base in Scotland. The first drop of Polish couriers took place on 15 February 1941. Parachute containers were also designed to drop arms and explosives to what became the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army.
Polish patriotism was perhaps romantic in some ways, but it remained astonishingly resolute through the darkest days of both Nazi and Soviet oppression. In addition to the mass and individual killings which followed the German invasion, over 30,000 Poles were sent to camps, many to the new camp of Auschwitz. Although Poland’s army was crushed in September 1939, a new underground resistance movement was created very soon afterwards. At its height, the Home Army reached nearly 400,000 members. The extraordinarily resourceful Polish intelligence services, which had provided the first Enigma machine, continued to help the Allies. Later in the war, the Poles even managed to spirit away a trial V-2 rocket which had landed in their marshes, and disassemble it. A specially adapted transport C-47 Dakota was flown to Poland and brought it back for examination by Allied scientists.
Both the Home Army and the intelligence networks reported to the Polish government-in-exile in London, which Stalin recognized reluctantly in August 1941 after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Home Army was always desperately short of weapons. At first it concentrated on releasing prisoners and sabotaging rail communications, which provided great but unacknowledged assistance to the Red Army. Armed attacks came later.
The Poles, released from Soviet labour camps to join the forces commanded by General Wadysaw Anders, never ceased to loathe their oppressors. And the London government-in-exile’s distrust of Stalin increased when it heard he was asking the British to recognize the frontier he had agreed with Hitler following the Nazi–Soviet pact. In April 1943, a crisis developed when the Germans announced to the world that they had discovered in the forest of Katy the mass graves of Polish officers, executed by the Soviet NKVD.
The Soviet regime had always denied that it knew anything of the whereabouts of these prisoners, and at the time even the Poles had not believed Stalin’s regime capable of such a massacre. The Kremlin insisted that the discovery was a German propaganda trick, and it must have been Nazis who had killed the victims. The Polish government-in-exile demanded an investigation by the International Red Cross, while the British were acutely embarrassed. Churchill suspected that the Soviets were capable of such an act, but he felt unable to confront Stalin, especially at a time when he had to admit once again that an invasion of France was impossible that year. Further disasters for the Poles soon followed in June. The Germans in Warsaw managed to arrest the commander and other leaders of the Home Army. But far greater tragedies for Poland lay ahead.
The summer of 1941 had seen some early attacks on German troops in the Soviet Union by Red Army soldiers cut off by the Wehrmacht’s advance. However, the first uprising against Nazi rule came in Serbia following the launch of Operation Barbarossa. This took the complacent German forces of occupation by surprise. Soon after their victory in the spring, a Leutnant had boasted in a letter home: ‘We soldiers are like gods here!!’ The rapidity of the country’s surrender that April had led them to expect little trouble, but they had not considered how many Yugoslav soldiers might have retained and hidden
their weapons.
Serbia came under the overall command of Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List’s headquarters in Greece. The three divisions of Generalleutnant Paul Bader’s LVI Corps were badly trained and under equipped. Ordered to respond with reprisals, they resorted mainly to shooting Jews who had already been rounded up. But executions of villagers close to the site of an ambush played straight into the hands of the Communist partisans, whose numbers rapidly swelled with those who wanted to take revenge for the death of family members.
Generalfeldmarschall Keitel at Führer headquarters demanded savage reprisals. The ratio was raised to a hundred Serbs for every German killed, in the belief that the ‘Balkan mentality’ only understood violence. In September, a major punitive offensive took place reinforced by the 342nd Infantry Division. The local German commanders again decided to start by shooting Jews who had been interned. So in mid-October 1941, some 2,100 Jews and ‘Gypsies’ were shot in retaliation for the killing of twenty-one German soldiers by Communist partisans. It was the first mass murder of Jews away from Soviet or Polish territory.
The partisan attacks were led by Josip Broz, alias Tito, an effective Comintern organizer during the Spanish Civil War. Tito, a strong figure of brutal good looks who had revived the Yugoslav Communist Party, believed in the need for Communists everywhere to help their comrades in the Soviet Union. The internationalism of the Party managed to avoid the worst ethnic and religious fault-lines in Yugoslavia, with Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians.
The rival resistance organization of tniks led by General Draža Mihailovi was almost exclusively Serb. The bespectacled, bearded and gloomy Mihailovi, who looked more like an Orthodox priest than a military man, could not hope to rival Tito’s charismatic leadership. He believed in building up his force ready for the day when the Allies would land, so that he could join them and restore the kingdom to young King Peter. He had rightly foreseen that Tito was going to use the partisan war to seize total power when the Red Army arrived. Mihailovi did not want to provoke reprisals, yet contrary to Communist propaganda his forces did take on the Germans at times. Other groups also calling themselves tniks co-operated closely with the Germans and the puppet government of General Milan Nedi, a confusion which later helped the Communists to blacken Mihailovi’s name in the eyes of the British.
The Second World War Page 58