Although the attritional warfare on the slim peninsula – which might have been specifically designed for a long retreat – had cost the Fifth Army 188,746 casualties and the Eighth Army 123,254, a total of 312,000, it had cost the Germans as many as 434,646.62 Yet despite constant inferiority of numbers in the air, and being always on the defensive, Kesselring and Vietinghoff had held up the Allies for nineteen months before the final collapse. It is hard to see what the continued Allied assaults from Rome to the Po Valley really achieved considering the cost, except that they kept many German divisions away from the Western Front, and some historians assert that ‘The Allied Italian campaign was a necessary component of the giant ring that squeezed the life out of the Nazi state.’63
The Italian campaign also provides a perfect illustration of how well the Germans could fight when not interfered with strategically by Hitler. Kesselring, Vietinghoff, Mackensen and Senger hardly made a serious error in their masterly withdrawal northwards up the entire length of Italy, and had Hitler permitted a retreat into the Alps they could have extricated their armies further. From the spring of 1944 the Allies had more than ten times as many warplanes in Italy as the Luftwaffe, but had the Nazis organized aircraft and tank production efficiently enough for the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht to be able to contest the skies and plains, there is no reason to suppose that they would have been expelled from the country in the first place. ‘May I give you a word of advice?’ the urbane General Senger joked to Michael Howard ten years after the war ended. ‘Next time you invade Italy, do not start at the bottom.’64
Back on 12 September 1943, Mussolini had been rescued on Hitler’s orders from the mountainside hotel in which he was being held, in a sensational German glider operation commanded by Colonel Otto Skorzeny. ‘The liberation of the Duce has caused a great sensation at home and abroad,’ crowed Goebbels to his diary two days later. ‘Even upon the enemy the effect of his melodramatic deliverance is enormous.’65 After meeting Hitler, Mussolini was set up as dictator of the so-called Republic of Salò, ruling from Gargagno on Lake Garda for nineteen months until the German collapse. Attempting to escape across the Swiss border on 26 April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci, her brother Marcello and fifteen others were captured by the Italian partisans. On Saturday the 28th Mussolini and Petacci were executed by sub-machine gun in front of a low stone wall by the gates of a villa outside the village of Giulino di Mezzegra on Lake Como, one of the loveliest beauty-spots in Italy. (It seems rather unItalian to murder an attractive and apolitical mistress, but such is war.) Their bodies were added to those of the other captured Fascists, loaded in to a removal van and driven to Milan, the birthplace of Fascism.66 There, the corpses of Mussolini and Petacci were kicked, spat upon, shot at and urinated over, and then hung upside-down from a metal girder in front of the petrol station in the Piazzale Loreto, with their names on pieces of paper pinned to their feet. It was remarked with surprise by the women present, who were joking and dancing around this macabre scene, that Clara Petacci wore no knickers and that her stockings were unladdered. (It was hardly her fault; she had not been given time to put her knickers on before she was taken away and shot.)
It is all too easy at this distance of time to forget that each casualty listed in these campaigns represents a tragic human story. In the Beach Head Cemetery 3 miles north of Anzio, for example, lies the grave of the twenty-five-year-old Sergeant M. A. W. Rogers of the Wiltshire Regiment, who won the Victoria Cross taking a German position on the north side of the Moletta river by bomb and bayonet on 3 June 1944, advancing alone against an enemy that occupied the high ground. The London Gazette recorded how, under intense fire, Rogers had penetrated 30 yards before he was:
blown off his feet by a grenade, and wounded in the leg. Nothing daunted, he ran on towards an enemy machine-gun post, attempting to silence it. He was shot and killed at point-blank range. The NCO’s undaunted determination, fearless devotion to duty and superb courage carried his platoon on to their objective in a strongly defended position.67
For all the glory of winning Britain’s greatest gallantry medal, his gravestone tells of the grief of his wife: ‘In memory of my beloved husband. May we be together soon, dear. Peace at last.’
PART III
Retribution
The winning war was over, the losing war had begun. I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of German officers and soldiers… When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. That is when the Germans become wicked.
Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, 1948
13
A Salient Reversal
March–August 1943
We have severely underestimated the Russians, the extent of the country and the treachery of the climate. This is the revenge of reality.
General Heinz Guderian, July 19431
Between Field Marshal Paulus’ surrender at Stalingrad in early February 1943 and the battle of Kursk five months later, the Soviets forced their way across the Donets river. Yet despite his men being massively outnumbered, sometimes by seven to one, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein counter-attacked between 18 February and 20 March, winning the third battle of Kharkov and recapturing the city on 14 March in one of the great military achievements of the war.2 Although the Soviet winter offensive had regained much of the territory lost the previous year, and inflicted around one million German casualties, Manstein had halted it.
Erich von Manstein was born in 1887, the tenth son of an aristocratic Prussian artillery officer, General Eduard von Lewinski, but he was given away at birth to his mother’s childless brother-in-law, the aristocratic Prussian infantry lieutenant-general Georg von Manstein, whose surname he took. Since both his grandfathers and an uncle had also been Prussian generals, and Paul von Hindenburg was married to his aunt, it was a natural career path for Erich to be commissioned into the cadet corps aged thirteen, and six years later into the 3rd Regiment of Foot Guards. His study at the Berlin War Academy was interrupted within a year by the outbreak of the Great War, in which he served bravely on both fronts, and he was severely wounded in Poland in November 1914. He then took a series of Staff positions until the end of the war, and stayed on in the Regular Army into peacetime, becoming head of the Operations Section of the General Staff (OKH) in 1935. The following year, by then a Generalmajor (brigadier-general), he became deputy to the Chief of Staff, General Ludwig Beck.
In the purge of the Army following the dismissal of General von Fritsch in February 1938, Manstein – who was known to despise the Nazis, largely on social grounds – was relieved of his post in the Staff and given command of the 18th Infantry Division. It was as chief of staff to General von Leeb that he took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and as chief of staff to General Rundstedt in the invasion of Poland the following year that he first distinguished himself as a fine strategist. By then he had also, much to Beck’s chagrin and contempt, stopped criticizing the Nazis, arguing that soldiers should stay out of politics, a stance that was to serve his promotion prospects well.
As has already been seen in Chapter 2, it was Manstein who, as chief of staff of Rundstedt’s Army Group A, in May 1940 masterminded the Sichelschnitt manoeuvre, also known as the Manstein Plan, which, by concentrating on attacking through the Ardennes, crossing the Meuse and fighting in the ideal tank country of the rolling plains of northern France, brought such a rapid victory in the west. Hitler showed his gratitude by promoting him to full general and awarding him the Knight’s Cross. In March 1941 Manstein was given the command of LVI Panzer Corps for Operation Barbarossa, in which he led the advance on Leningrad, advancing more than 50 miles a day and capturing vital bridgeheads. When in September 1941 a vacancy occurred for the command of the Eleventh Army in the Crimea – the previous occupant’s plane having crashed in a Russian minefield – Manst
ein was the obvious choice, and he captured Sevastopol on 4 July 1942 after a long and gruelling siege. Hitler telephoned ‘The Conqueror of Sevastopol’, as he called him, to announce his promotion to Generalfeldmarschall (field marshal).
It was as commander of Army Group Don in November and December 1942 that Manstein tried but failed to relieve Stalingrad, but he was appointed to command Army Group South nonetheless. ‘He was arrogant and intolerant at times, and something of a martinet,’ wrote the British field marshal Michael Carver, ‘but he was highly intelligent, with a clear, quick brain. Beneath a cold, reserved exterior, he was an emotional man, who kept his feelings under strict control… He was respected for the speed and sharpness with which he analysed the essentials of a problem, for the brevity and clarity of his orders, and for the calm, cool calculation by which he arrived at his decisions.’3 The greatest of all the strategists of the Third Reich, Manstein had a better understanding of mechanized weaponry than any of the German generals outside the tank school itself, and Keitel thrice urged Hitler to give Manstein his own job as chief of staff of OKW.4 This was ignored, but was one of the best pieces of advice the Führer ever received.
The city of Kursk lies 315 miles south of Moscow and straddles the main Moscow–Rostov railway line. By the spring of 1943 it was the centre of a Russian-held protuberance, or salient, jutting 120 miles wide and 90 miles deep into the German lines. Kursk had once been famed for its nightingales; bird-singing competitions had been hosted there since the nineteenth century. In July 1943, however, all that could be heard in the city were the decibels of war. Kursk had been captured by the Germans on 2 November 1941, after which the Wehrmacht shot 15,000 people, transported 30,000 for slave labour in Germany, destroyed 2,000 buildings and generally stripped the region bare, even transporting back to Germany thousands of tons of the region’s sticky, jet-black, highly fertile soil. Kursk was recaptured by the Russians soon after Paulus’ surrender.
After Stalingrad, Manstein had stabilized Army Group South’s front, and Army Group Centre under Field Marshal von Kluge, who had replaced Bock in December 1941, had retained Orel to the north. Mutually exhausted, both sides settled into a period of little activity, as fresh troops were brought up for the coming summer offensive. Yet time was not on the Germans’ side, with Lend-Lease distributing large quantities of equipment to the Russians, totalling by the summer of 1943 some 2,400 tanks, 3,000 planes and 80,000 trucks.5 An historian of the Eastern Front estimates that Western aid contributed 5 per cent of the USSR’s war effort in 1942 and 10 per cent in 1943 and 1944, invaluable help in such a close-run fight.6 The Americans provided the Russians with 15 million pairs of boots, for example.
Unfortunately for the Germans, even the most cursory glance at the map made it completely obvious where they would attack. A pincer movement directly to the north and south of Kursk would pinch off the salient, and thus lead to the capture of Rokossovsky’s Central Front in the north and General Nikolai Vatutin’s Voronezh Front to the south. That was certainly what would have happened in 1941, when the Germans were still capable of pulling off such coups. Hitler flew to see Manstein on the front line at Zaporozhe for three days on 17 February 1943, coming so close to the enemy that some T-34 tanks even got to within firing range of the airfield.7 Yet the Führer was now a very different man from the Supreme Warlord of the days before Stalingrad. As Guderian recorded of a meeting four days later: ‘His left hand trembled, his back was bent, his gaze was fixed, his eyes protruded but had lost their former lustre, his cheeks were flecked with red. He was more excitable, easily lost his composure and was prone to angry outbursts and ill-considered decisions.’8 This description matched Senger’s impressions during the Monte Cassino battle. Because the next move was so obvious to all, Manstein wanted to undertake it as early as possible, ideally in early March, but the go-ahead for Unternehmen Zitadelle (Operation Citadel) was postponed by Hitler until the ground had thoroughly thawed, and Zeitzler had called a Staff conference at OKH headquarters, which on 11 April submitted a plan for General Walther Model’s Ninth Army to attack from the north simultaneously with Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army from the south of the salient. Yet Hitler, who had put Manstein’s recapture of Kharkov largely down to the new Tiger I model E tank, of which he thought one battalion was worth a division of Panzers, wanted to wait until the Tiger had come fully on stream before launching the offensive. As only twelve were being produced per week at that time, this was a major impediment to the early action for which Manstein was pushing.
Internal dissension in OKH and OKW further exacerbated the problem, leading to further postponements of Zitadelle. Jodl opposed it outright because of the impending danger of Allied landings in the Mediterranean. Guderian, who was then inspector-general of tanks, responsible for overhauling Germany’s armoured forces, was equally opposed because he knew that the Russians were expecting and preparing for it. Kluge – who hated Guderian and in May even asked the Führer if he could challenge him to a duel – was very much in favour, as was Zeitzler who claimed it was his brainchild, at least until it went wrong. Model was dubious, but when he argued that the Stavka knew it was coming, Zeitzler responded with a weirdly circular argument, saying that the very fact that the Russians expected it ‘was an admission that the area chosen was of vital importance, and would result in a substantial part of the Russian armour being brought to battle’, where it could be destroyed.9 As time dragged on, Manstein slowly turned against the whole operation. Frederick von Mellenthin’s estimation was the correct one: that if it had been undertaken early it might have worked, but by the time of its actual launch Zitadelle had become ‘an operation in which we had little to gain and probably a great deal to lose’.10
At yet another conference on 3 May, Guderian and Speer spoke out against Zitadelle, Zeitzler and Kluge enthusiastically in its favour, and Manstein stated that it was hard to say whether its moment had not passed. Only a hundred Panthers had been delivered to the front, despite Speer having promised 324 by the end of May. Nonetheless, 13 June was agreed as the date the operation would take place. A week later a famous exchange took place between Hitler and Guderian, when the Inspector-General asked, ‘My Führer, why do you want to attack in the East at all this year?’ and Hitler replied: ‘You are quite right. Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over.’11 Although Keitel believed that Germany needed to attack Kursk, which was by then one of the best-defended fortresses in the world, out of prestige, Guderian pointed out that few people had even heard of the city.12 As Keitel ought to have learnt from Stalingrad, prestige is rarely a good enough reason for conducting a military operation.
Meanwhile, at the end of April the Stavka had sent Zhukov to the city to assume day-to-day control of the battle, always a sign that Stalin took a particular front extremely seriously. Zhukov had sent a report warning about the salient’s vulnerability on 8 April, but had persuaded Stalin not to follow his initial instinct of striking first. Writing to Stalin (codenamed Comrade Vasil’ev), Zhukov (codenamed Konstantinov) said: ‘I consider it inexpedient for our forces to mount a preventative offensive in the near future. It will be better if we wear out the enemy in our defence, destroy his tanks, and then, having introduced fresh reserves, by going over to an all-out offensive, we will finish off the enemy’s main grouping.’13 That was the plan the Stavka adopted, and it was substantially what was to happen.
Marshal Alexandr Vasilevsky went down to Kursk with Zhukov and together they easily spotted that the Schwerpunkt for the Germans was going to be the point between Belgorod and Kursk defended by Vatutin’s Voronezh Front, which they reinforced with the Twenty-first and Sixty-fourth Armies (renamed the Sixth and Seventh Guards Armies) that had been blooded at Stalingrad, and one of the best Soviet tank formations, the First Armoured Army. To the north, Rokossovsky’s Central Front was massively reinforced as well, until it consisted of no fewer than five infantry armies. As well as the 1.3 million men under Vatutin and Rokossovsky, leaving nothing to chanc
e Zhukov created a half-million-man Stavka Reserve Force under General Ivan Konev, later called the Steppe Front, consisting of five tank armies, several tank and mechanized corps and a number of infantry divisions.14 This front was, in the view of one historian of the Eastern Front, ‘the most powerful reserve accumulated by the Soviet Union at any time during the war’.15 If for any reason the Germans did manage to pinch off the salient, it would be able to form an entirely new front, preventing them from exploiting their victory eastwards.
With the attack postponed yet again from 13 June, by early July the Germans faced a forbidding task. In some sectors of the Russian defence, artillery regiments outnumbered infantry by five to one, with more than 20,000 guns trained on the oncoming Wehrmacht. These included over 6,000 anti-tank guns of 76.2mm calibre and 920 Katyusha multiple rocket launchers. Furthermore the cannon and armour-piercing bombs of Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft posed a mortal peril for the German tanks. By employing the entire civilian population of the Kursk region, as well as the Army, 3,000 miles of trenches were dug, and ‘countless miles of barbed wire and obstacles, some of which were electrified’, put in place, along with automatic flame-throwers.16 Overall, around 2,700 German tanks – more heavily armed and usually of higher-calibre weaponry – faced around 3,800 Russian. But it was down to the German tanks – as well as the huge Ferdinand self-propelled assault guns (Sturmgeschütze) – to try to break through the formidable Soviet defences. ‘The main defensive zones were three to four miles deep,’ recorded one historian,
consisting of battalion defence areas, anti-tank areas and support points, and systems of obstacles, consisting of three lines of trenches (up to five lines in most important sectors), interconnected by communication trenches. Second zones, six to eight miles from the leading edge of the zone, were laid out in similar fashion. Rear defence zones were situated at about twenty-five miles from the leading edge of the defence zones… The whole system consisted of no fewer than eight defensive belts existing over a depth of between 120 and 180 miles.17
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 50