The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  At dawn that day, British and Canadian troops landed near Reggio di Calabria. They were supported by warships and artillery fire across the Straits of Messina, but the landings were unopposed on that beautiful September morning, and the sea was calm. The British called it the ‘Messina Strait Regatta’. Other landings on the toe of Italy and at the naval base of Taranto soon followed. Admiral Cunningham took a risk by sending the 1st Airborne Division into Taranto on Royal Navy cruisers. The Italian fleet sailed to Malta to surrender, but the Luftwaffe managed to sink the battleship Roma with one of its new rocket-propelled bombs and kill 1,300 sailors.

  The whole Italian campaign would be dogged by misconceptions and wishful thinking. Because of some earlier Ultra intercepts, Allied Force Headquarters believed that in the event of an Italian surrender the Germans would pull back to the Pisa–Rimini Line in northern Italy. Hitler had since decided, however, that this would be tantamount to abandoning the Balkans behind the backs of his Croatian, Romanian and Hungarian allies. In addition the Italians, despite their earlier assurances to Bedell Smith, were not prepared to defend Rome against the Germans. A planned drop on Rome by the 82nd Airborne Division, to coincide with the main landings at Salerno, was mercifully aborted as the aircraft were taking off. The whole formation would have been wiped out if it had gone ahead.

  On 8 September Hitler, having spent too much time fretting over events in Italy, flew to Manstein’s headquarters in southern Russia to discuss the crisis on the eastern front. The Red Army had broken through between Kluge’s Army Group Centre and Manstein’s Army Group South. When he returned to the Wolfsschanze that evening, the Führer heard that the Italian armistice had just been announced and that the first wave of General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army had landed at Salerno, fifty kilometres south-east of Naples. His mood after hearing of Badoglio’s ‘treachery’ can be imagined, even though he had expected it. He summoned Goebbels and other Nazi leaders to a meeting the next day. ‘The Führer’, Goebbels wrote in his diary, ‘is determined to make a tabula rasa in Italy.’

  Operation Axis (formerly Alarich) was launched with ruthless rapidity. One of the first priorities for Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring was to seize Rome. German paratroopers marched in while the city’s inhabitants were still celebrating what they imagined was the end of the war for them. The King and Marshal Badoglio escaped just in time. The sixteen German divisions disarmed Italian troops, and destroyed any who resisted. Some 650,000 were seized as prisoners of war, most of whom were later sent for forced labour. Himmler soon instructed the head of the security police in Rome, SS Obersturmführer Herbert Kappler, to round up the 8,000 Jews in the city.

  While the Germans occupied Rome, they had sent forces to block off a possible Anglo-American landing in the Gulf of Salerno, which offered the obvious invasion site along that part of the Tyrrhenian coast. The recently created German Tenth Army was commanded by General Heinrich von Vietinghoff. He rapidly sent the 16th Panzer Division, the successor formation to the one destroyed at Stalingrad, to take up positions on the hills dominating the great bay. By that evening of 8 September, just after the Allied troops had celebrated news of Italy’s surrender on board their invasion ships, the first German troops were already in position to welcome them when they landed in the early hours of the following day.

  The unexpectedly strong resistance took the Allied troops aback. Only when minesweepers cleared a channel forward the next morning could warships come close enough inshore to identify tank concentrations and German gun batteries. Most of the things that could go wrong at Salerno did go wrong. Major General Ernest Dawley, the commander of the US VI Corps, only contributed to the confusion on land. He did not secure his left flank with the British part of the invasion force until ordered to by Clark three days later, by which time German strength had increased. The Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the 15th and the 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions reached the Salerno front one after another.

  British and Americans alike found themselves trapped in tobacco fields or in apple and peach orchards, or back on the sand dunes, where there was little cover apart from scrub and seagrass. Under the eyes of German gunners on the high ground, casualty evacuation was difficult by day, and aid men had to do their best with sulpha powder and field dressings.

  On the extreme left, only Lieutenant Colonel William Darby’s Rangers had enjoyed success after they had quickly advanced inland to seize key points on the Chiunzi Pass. This snaking road led over the mountainous base of the Sorrento Peninsula to Naples. From their positions they were able to direct the heavy naval guns in the Gulf, firing on maximum elevation, to bombard German supply convoys and reinforcements coming down the coast road from Naples.

  Clark, well aware that his invasion force could not hope to break out of this trap, pushed Dawley into sending the 36th Infantry Division of Texan National Guardsmen to seize a hilltop village on the morning of 13 September. The German response was savage and the Texans were badly mauled. Worse was to follow. General von Vietinghoff thought that the two Allied corps were about to re-embark, so he launched an attack with panzer units and self-propelled guns due south from Eboli. The fighting was so desperate and the German breakthrough so dangerous that Clark considered pulling out and Vietinghoff believed that the battle was as good as won.

  The Eighth Army’s advance north had not speeded up; its vanguard was still nearly a hundred kilometres to the south-east. Many delays were caused by bridges destroyed by the Germans in their withdrawal. Admiral Hewitt, the task force commander at Salerno, was appalled by the prospect of a re-embarkation. Early on 14 September he signalled Admiral Cunningham in Malta, who immediately despatched the battleships HMS Warspite and HMS Valiant to provide more heavy guns. Cunningham also sent three cruisers at full speed to Tripoli to fetch reinforcements. But in the meantime the situation had stabilized a little. A determined defence, with 105mm guns firing over open sights, had stopped the panzer charge, and Clark’s urgent request for a regiment from the 82nd Airborne to be dropped within the bridgehead was answered.

  General Alexander arrived on a destroyer on the morning of 15 September. In complete agreement with Admiral Hewitt, he cancelled any plans for evacuation. The Salerno bridgehead was soon secured by bomber support and the weight and accuracy of Allied naval gunfire. US Navy and Royal Navy warships inflicted heavy damage on the German tanks and artillery. Unfortunately, during a Luftwaffe raid at night, the Warspite fired its six-inch guns at one low-flying aircraft and hit the destroyer HMS Petard instead, causing heavy damage.

  Major General James Doolittle’s bombers smashed the town of Battipaglia just behind the German lines so thoroughly that General Spaatz sent the message: ‘You’re slipping Jimmy. There’s one crabapple tree and one stable still standing.’ But a new bombing doctrine was being born, which the Americans called ‘Putting the city in the street’. This meant deliberately smashing a town to rubble so that enemy reinforcements and supplies could not get through. This would become a key tactic the following June in Normandy.

  By this time, German intelligence had discovered Mussolini’s whereabouts. After holding him first on the island of Ponza and then on La Maddalena, Marshal Badoglio had him moved secretly to a ski resort north of Rome in the Apennines, known as Gran Sasso. Hitler, horrified by this humiliation of his ally, ordered a rescue attempt. On 12 September Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny, with a force of Waffen-SS special troops in eight gliders, crash-landed on the mountain. The Carabinieri guarding him did not resist. Mussolini embraced Skorzeny, saying that he knew his friend Adolf Hitler would not abandon him. He was flown out and brought to the Wolfsschanze. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant described him as ‘a broken man’. The Germans’ plan was to install him as figurehead of a so-called Repubblica Sociale Italiana, thus creating the fiction that the Axis was still in force to justify their occupation of Italy.

  On 21 September Free French forces landed on the island of Corsica, which the Germans had abandoned to reinforce the ma
inland. At Salerno, the German withdrawal had begun three days earlier. Kesselring had told Vietinghoff to pull his army gradually back to the line of the River Volturno north of Naples. Clark finally sacked his corps commander General Dawley, and the British on the left of the beachhead attacked north to seize the base of the Sorrento Peninsula and prepare the advance up the coast to Naples. After the Coldstream Guards had taken a hill there in a night attack, the platoon commander Michael Howard described the scene. ‘We stood to at dawn. In the first grey hints of light we buried the German dead. These were the first corpses I had handled: shrunken pathetic dolls lying stiff and twisted, with glazed eyes. Not one could have been over twenty, and some were little more than children. With horrible carelessness we shovelled them into their own trenches and piled on the earth.’

  By 25 September the Eighth Army and Clark’s Fifth Army had joined up and established a line across Italy. The American forces at Salerno had suffered some 3,500 casualties and the British 5,500. The Eighth Army advancing on the Adriatic side seized the Foggia Plain with all its airfields to be used for bombing southern Germany, Austria and the Ploesti oilfields. Clark’s Fifth Army in the west pushed past Mount Vesuvius, and on 1 October the King’s Dragoon Guards in their armoured cars led the way into Naples under the ubiquitous washing lines stretched across the streets. But there were no sheets hung out to dry. Naples was without water because the Germans had blown the aqueducts, in revenge for the resistance shown to their brutal occupation. They had wrecked as much of the city as they could, including ancient libraries, sewers, electricity stations, factories and above all the port. Time bombs were left in other major buildings to explode over the following weeks. Already the war in Italy was beginning to replicate the horrors of the eastern front.

  The Bletchley Park intercept which indicated that Hitler planned to evacuate most of Italy was not followed by other signals revealing that Führer headquarters was changing its mind, largely under pressure from Kesselring who wanted to defend the country from south of Rome. Rommel’s advice to pull back was discarded partly because Hitler feared the effect it would have on his Balkan allies, but also because the Allied invasion was floundering. Yet Hitler’s determination to hold Italy, and his conviction that the British would invade the Balkans and the Aegean, meant that a total of thirty-seven German divisions would be tied down in the region while the Wehrmacht was fighting for its life on the eastern front.

  Goebbels and Ribbentrop urged Hitler to initiate peace talks with Stalin, but the Führer angrily rejected such an idea. He would never negotiate from weakness. General Jodl of the OKW recognized the mad logic in which they were trapped by the Nazi mantra of ‘final victory’. ‘That we will win, because we must win,’ he noted soon afterwards, ‘means that world history has lost all sense.’ Since there was now no hope of negotiating from strength, the implication was all too clear. Germany would fight on until its total destruction.

  33

  Ukraine and the Teheran Conference

  SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1943

  After the Red Army had recaptured Kharkov on 23 August 1943, the German army faced a crisis in the south. The defensive line along the River Mius was broken, and on 26 August Rokossovsky’s Central Front smashed through on the boundary between Army Group South and Army Group Centre. On 3 September, Kluge and Manstein asked Hitler to appoint a commander-in-chief for the eastern front. Hitler refused and still insisted that the industrial area of the Donbas should be held even if a withdrawal from the Mius was now necessary. Once again Hitler promised reinforcements, but by now Manstein knew that he could not believe him. It was also the day that British troops landed on the mainland of Italy in the south.

  Five days later, following a teleprinter signal from Manstein on the scale of the Soviet attack, Hitler flew to Army Group South’s headquarters at Zaporozhye. Manstein’s briefing was so stark that even Hitler felt obliged to authorize a retreat to the River Dnepr. This was his very last visit to the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. On his return to the Wolfsschanze at the end of that ill-fated day, he heard about the Allied landings at Salerno and the imminent capitulation of the Italian army.

  After Hitler’s reluctant decision, the German army had to race back to the Dnepr to avoid being cut off. The Red Army, although also weakened by the Battle of Kursk, pushed on at all speed to seize bridgeheads over the river before the Germans had a chance to establish an effective defence. This immense river was supposed to form the basis of a defended line running from Smolensk to Kiev and then on down to the Black Sea. Like most great Russian rivers running from north to south, it had an unusually high western bank which formed a natural rampart.

  In their retreat across eastern Ukraine the Germans tried to carry out a ruthless scorched-earth programme, but they did not have time to destroy as much as they had intended. Landsers, having stuffed their pockets and packs, almost wept as they watched their own supply dumps going up in flames. Harried by Shturmovik fighter-bombers by day, they pulled back across the Dnepr under cover of night and the early-morning autumn mists.

  Stalin promised the award of Hero of the Soviet Union to the first soldier across the river. On improvised rafts made from oil barrels and planks, in small boats and even by swimming, Red Army soldiers threw themselves at the challenge. In the event, four sub-machine-gunners became Heroes of the Soviet Union, after storming the west bank on 22 September. ‘There were cases’, Vasily Grossman wrote in his diary, ‘when soldiers transported regimental field guns on wooden gates, and crossed the Dnepr on groundsheets stuffed with hay.’ Vatutin’s forces seized bridgeheads north and south of Kiev in the third week of September. Soon troops were across at forty different places, but most were too small for launching further attacks inland. One group, whose boat sank, reached a peasant hut. The old woman there welcomed them: ‘Children, sons, come in to my place,’ she said. Having helped them warm up and dry their tattered uniforms, she gave them samogon, a home-brewed vodka.

  In many places, Soviet casualties were heavy. A follow-up group had to deal with the corpses. ‘We collected those who were killed or had drowned,’ recalled a member of one squad, ‘and we buried them in trenches, fifty men in each. So many soldiers had died there. The German bank was steep and well fortified while our boys were advancing from an open space.’

  In an attempt to increase the bridgehead at Velikii Burin south-east of Kiev, three airborne brigades were parachuted on to the west bank of the river. But Soviet intelligence had failed to identify a German concentration in the area, of two panzer and three infantry divisions. Many of the paratroopers fell on positions occupied by the 19th Panzer Division and were massacred. The most successful bridgehead was Litezh, north of Kiev. A Red Army rifle division managed to slip across the Dnepr in a marshy area the Germans had considered impassable. Seizing the opportunity, Vatutin took a huge risk which paid off. He reinforced the bridgehead with the 5th Guards Tank Corps. Many T-34s were lost in the bogs, but enough got through by driving at full speed.

  To the north, Smolensk itself was finally taken after hard fighting at the end of the month. The Rzhev Offensive, which had begun the push west on this part of the front, left complete devastation in its wake. The Australian correspondent Godfrey Blunden was taken round. ‘Some peasant families of old men, women and children had returned and were camping in wigwams. In several places they had hung out their washing on lines between trees as if it were normal to have a washing day in this desecrated no-man’s land. There is some lesson in human persistence in the way these people come back to their old homes, but one could not help wondering how they would survive the coming winter.’ He was shaken to discover that ‘a little wizened old woman’ whom he met was in fact ‘a girl of thirteen’.

  In the south, General F. I. Tolbukhin’s Southern Front cut off the Seventeenth Army in the Crimea, which had by then evacuated the Kuban bridgehead in the Caucasus. Rokossovsky’s Central Front had punched a large salient due west of Kursk, and in October w
as approaching Gomel on the edge of Belorussia. For Stalin, and of course for Vatutin, the true prize was the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. By the end of October, Vatutin had infiltrated, night by night, Lieutenant General P. S. Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army and the 38th Army into the Litezh bridgehead. Brilliant camouflage, deception operations elsewhere and a lack of Luftwaffe air reconnaissance led the Germans to overlook this particular threat. When the two armies burst out of the bridgehead they were able to encircle Kiev, which fell on 6 November, the day before the celebrations in Moscow of the anniversary of the Revolution. Stalin was exultant. Vatutin wasted no time in pushing forward other armies to seize Zhitomir and Korosten. Despite the mud of the autumn rasputitsa, his armies soon created a salient 150 kilometres deep and 300 kilometres wide.

  As they advanced, they encountered desolation and a peasantry mute from suffering. ‘Old men, when they hear Russian,’ Vasily Grossman recorded, ‘run to meet the troops and weep silently, unable to mutter a word. Old peasant women say: “We thought we would sing and laugh when we saw our army, but there’s so much grief in our hearts, that tears are falling.”’ They recounted their disgust at the way German soldiers walked around naked, even in front of women and young girls, and ‘their gluttony, their ability to eat twenty eggs in one go, or a kilo of honey’. Grossman met a young boy, barefoot and in rags. He asked where his father was. ‘Killed,’ he answered. ‘And your mother?’ ‘She died.’ ‘Have you got brothers or sisters?’ ‘A sister. They took her to Germany.’ ‘Have you any relatives?’ ‘No, they were all burned in a partisan village.’