World War II

by Reg Grant

  The scene in Hamburg, Germany, after bombing devastated the city in 1943. U.S. bombers attacked Germany by day and the RAF attacked by night.

  U.S. daylight bombing raids were at first launched from East Anglia in Britain. From 1943 onward, bases in North Africa and Italy brought targets such as the Ploesti oil fields in Romania within range.

  PROFIT AND LOSS

  The effectiveness of the Allied bombing campaign has been much disputed. Huge resources were devoted to it—the RAF alone dropped almost a million tons of bombs on Germany. The RAF and USAAF also paid a heavy price in lost lives. Yet, aside from the damage it caused, the bombing offensive forced the Germans to devote major resources to homeland defense—it occupied the cream of their air force. The death toll among bomber crews and civilians was:

  RAF Bomber Command aircrew:

  55,500 killed

  USAAF Eighth Air Force aircrew: 26,000 killed German civilians: 600,000 killed.

  THE BOMBING OFFENSIVE There was one way, however, in which the Allies could strike at the very heart of Germany. This was through air attack. From 1940 onward, RAF Bomber Command carried out raids on Germany. In 1942, the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) joined in the bombing campaign. Based in eastern England, the USAAF carried out its bombing raids by day, depending on the firepower of its high-flying bombers to hold off German fighter aircraft. The RAF bombed by night, relying on the cover of darkness to get through the enemy defenses.

  U.S. B-24 Liberator bombers turn for home after raiding a German airfield.

  The bombing offensive was on a massive scale. In mid-1942, the RAF carried out raids with more than a thousand bombers in the sky at the same time. The night raids were often inaccurate and the bombers suffered heavy losses, but they could have a devastating effect on cities. In one night in July 1943, an RAF raid on Hamburg, Germany, is thought to have killed over 40,000 German civilians. Bombing by day, the USAAF sought to be more accurate, trying to hit specific factories or other economic or military targets. Bad weather and the intensity of German antiaircraft defenses meant, however, that the U.S. bombers also often missed their targets and paid a high price. In August 1943, for example, the USAAF lost 60 bombers in a single day.

  As the war went on, Allied bombing became increasingly effective. Allied advances in the Mediterranean meant that bombers were able to operate from North Africa and Italy as well as England. The introduction of the P-51 Mustang long-range fighter as a bomber escort in 1944 at last gave day bombers a real defense against German fighters. Improvements in navigation and tactics made even night bombers reasonably accurate. Although German factories never ceased to function, when the Allies bombed sources of fuel supplies, especially the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, they had a crippling effect on the German war machine in the last year of the war.

  There was no let up in the air offensive as the war drew to a close. The Allied bombing of the city of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945 may have killed over 50,000 people. By then most German cities, including the capital, Berlin, had been reduced to ruins.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE TIDE TURNS

  British troops wade ashore during the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943. The long hard fight up the Italian peninsula, which continued for the rest of the war, was launched from this point.

  By 1943, Britain and the United States were eager to invade mainland Europe to create a “Second Front” that would bring relief to the Soviet Union, which was doing the bulk of the fighting against Germany. At a meeting held in Casablanca, Morocco, in January of that year, Roosevelt and Churchill chose Sicily as the target for their troops to reenter Europe—a much easier option than attempting landings on the north coast of occupied France.

  MONASTERY DESTROYED

  One of the most controversial decisions of the war was made by Allied commanders in February 1944 when they ordered the bombing of the 1400-year-old monastery of Monte Cassino.

  Commenting on the decision, U.S. General Eisenhower said: “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more, and the buildings must go.”

  —Quoted, Texas Military Forces Museum web site

  North Africa was cleared of Axis forces in May 1943 (see page 23). The following July, Allied troops—American and British Commonwealth in almost equal numbers—crossed the Mediterranean. Since they had established supremacy both in the air and at sea, the Allies carried off the landings fairly smoothly, but they had to overcome some stubborn resistance from German forces on Sicily. The island was in Allied hands by mid-August.

  The invasion of Sicily was the final blow to the prestige of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He was deposed and replaced by an Italian army officer, Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Although Badoglio assured the Germans that Italy would carry on fighting, he secretly sought peace with the Allies. An armistice between Italy and the Allies was announced in early September 1943, while the Allies invaded mainland Italy across the Straits of Messina from Sicily and by landing on the beaches at Salerno.

  The Germans, commanded by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, were swift to disarm Italian troops and take over the defense of the Italian peninsula. The Salerno landings were fiercely resisted by German panzers. Eventually forced to withdraw, the Germans pulled back in good order and stood firm along the Gustav Line, centered on the famous monastery of Monte Cassino. The advance of the Allied army—a multinational force including, among others, Poles, Indians, New Zealanders, and French North African troops—ground to a halt. Cassino did not fall until mid-May, three months after the monastery was bombed (see box above), and after intense fighting to clear a way for the Allied advance.

  Allied occupation of Sicily and then the invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943 brought hopes of swift progress. Instead, their advance stalled in front of Cassino. In spite of Anzio landings in January 1944, the Allies fought for two years to reach northern Italy.

  THE “SOFT UNDERBELLY OF EUROPE” Trying to get the advance moving again, the Allies landed a force at Anzio in January 1944, between the Gustav Line and Rome, but the Germans reacted swiftly and hemmed them in. The Allies did not enter Rome until the next June—and they still faced a further series of German defensive lines to the north. Once described by Churchill as the “soft underbelly of Europe,” Italy, now controlled by Nazi Germany, proved to be a heavily defended adversary.

  Soviet Katyusha multiple rocket launchers prepare to fire during the Soviet counteroffensive against the German invaders. Fired in volleys, the rockets could deliver a devastating artillery barrage.

  Although the fighting in Italy was fierce, it was dwarfed by the scale and savagery of the conflict on the Eastern Front. There, the Soviet offensive of the winter of 1942–43, which had brought victory at Stalingrad, had carried the Red Army forward to a line that pushed west of the city of Kursk. In July 1943, the Germans launched an armored counterattack against the Kursk salient, hoping for a crushing victory that would once more give them the upper hand. But for the first time the German armor and its air support had met their match. In the largest armored battle ever seen, with more than 2,000 tanks committed on each side, the German offensive was repulsed and a Soviet counterattack forced the Germans to retreat.

  Soviet troops advance through a Polish city in 1944. About one-fifth of the Polish population died during World War II.

  BACK TOWARD GERMANY From that point onward, the tide of war on the Eastern Front flowed in only one direction—back toward Germany. The Soviets now had tanks and aircraft as good as, or better than, those of the Germans, and their commanders used them with flair and intelligence. In September 1943, the Red Army reached the Dnieper River, and the following November they took the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. Soviet casualties were consistently much higher than those suffered by the Germans, but the Germans were increasingly outnumbered. About three million Axis troops faced more than six million Soviet soldiers at the end of 1943, and the Soviets had a s
imilar superiority of numbers in tanks and aircraft—about twice as many as the Germans.

  The siege of Leningrad was lifted in February 1944, and by May most of the Ukraine and Crimea were back in Soviet hands. The greatest remaining obstacle to the Red Army’s advance was German Army Group Center, which continued to occupy Belorussia. In June 1944, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, a massive, complex offensive that in five weeks drove Army Group Center hundreds of miles back across the prewar Soviet border and well into Poland.

  After the victory at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Soviet Red Army drove the Germans out of the Soviet Union. In the center, their advance came to a halt just short of Warsaw, Poland.

  SEEING THE ENEMY

  Journalist Alexander Werth saw German prisoners paraded through Moscow in the summer of 1944. He described the reaction of the people who gathered to see their enemies in the flesh: “The Moscow crowd was remarkably disciplined. They watched these Germans walk, or rather shuffle past, in their dirty green-grey uniforms… . I heard a little girl perched on her mother’s shoulder say, ‘Mummy, are these the people who killed Daddy?’ And the mother hugged the child and wept.”

  —Cited in the Faber Book of Reportage, John Carey, ed.

  At the end of July, the Red Army in Poland stopped its advance on the east bank of the Vistula, the river that runs through the Polish capital, Warsaw. The Soviets, hoping to keep Poland for themselves, did nothing to help the Polish Home Army’s uprising in the city (see pages 32–33), which was ferociously put down by the Nazis: more than 200,000 Polish civilians were killed. Instead, the Soviet advance continued further south. In the second half of 1944, Soviet forces invaded Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and reached the edges of Hungary’s capital, Budapest, by the end of the year.

  The beaches chosen for the D-Day landings were code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword.

  American troops wade ashore on Omaha beach during the Normandy landings.

  D-DAY LANDINGS

  Landing over 130,000 men on fortified beaches, the Allies expected heavier casualties on D-Day, June 6, 1944, than they actually suffered:

  Troops landed

  75,215 British and Canadian

  57,500 U.S.

  Casualties

  4,300 British and Canadian

  6,000 U.S.

  Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower talking to men of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division before the Normandy D-Day landings.

  The desperate situation of the Germans on their Eastern Front was matched by conditions in the West. On June 6, 1944—known as D-Day—the Western Allies began their long-awaited invasion of France with landings on the coast of Normandy. Carefully planned under the direction of Allied Supreme Commander U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, Operation Overlord was the largest seaborne invasion ever launched, involving 1,200 warships, 5,000 landing craft and troop transports, and 10,000 aircraft. Two artificial harbors (“Mulberries”) were towed across the Channel, so the army could be supplied and reinforced once ashore.

  A French woman takes a close look at a knocked out German tank in a Normandy town. The German panzers fought skillfully and tenaciously, but they were no match for an Allied air attack.

  UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, AND SWORD All the careful preparation was almost undone by the weather, which was so rough it seemed the invasion might have to be abandoned. Gambling on a brief break in the storms predicted by weather forecasters, however, Eisenhower embarked his U.S., British, and Canadian troops in southern England for a nighttime crossing to France. Airborne troops were dropped into Normandy under cover of darkness, and at dawn the seaborne troops landed on five beaches—code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

  The invaders had some key advantages. Their command of the air and the sea was such that the German air force and navy barely interfered. A clever Allied deception had convinced Hitler that the invasion would come in the area around Calais (a port around 155 miles [250 km] northeast along the coast), so that, even when news of the landings in Normandy came through, Hitler remained convinced that it was only a diversionary attack. Allied bombers destroyed communications links, making it difficult for the Nazis to swiftly order their reinforcements to Normandy.

  Yet the success of the landings was hard won. The coast was heavily fortified. On Omaha beach, the American 1st Infantry Division suffered heavy casualties and was very nearly driven back into the sea. When a beachhead was established, progress was still slow. Montgomery’s British and Canadian troops took more than a month to capture Caen, a town they had hoped to occupy on the first day of the invasion. The weather created problems: Low clouds blocked air operations and storms wrecked one of the Mulberry harbors in the third week of June. Capturing the port of Cherbourg at the end of the month was a step forward, but the failure to break through encircling German defenses meant that growing numbers of Allied troops and quantities of supplies were bottled up in northwest Normandy.

  U.S. paratroopers advance as shells explode around them during Operation Market-Garden, in 1944.

  In late July, while Canadian and British forces engaged the bulk of the German armored divisions, U.S. forces at last made the long-awaited breakout from Normandy, fanning west from Avranches into Brittany and east toward the Seine River. German troops launched a counterattack against Avranches, but suffered heavy losses. Canadian troops threatened to encircle the Germans from the north as they prepared to link up with Americans swinging up from the south near the town of Falaise. Many of the Germans managed to escape eastward before the “Falaise Gap” was closed on August 20, but now nothing could stop the Allies’ rapid progress. On the same day, the spearhead of the U.S. forces crossed the Seine.

  On August 15, a new front had been opened by Allied landings in Provence on France’s Mediterranean coast. The French Resistance was in open armed revolt, taking on the German army in many parts of France, including Paris. A Free French armored division was allowed the honor of liberating the city on August 25, preparing the way for Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle to form a new government to replace the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime.

  SUMMER 1944 In the heady days of summer 1944, it was easy to imagine that the war in Europe would be over by the end of the year. Two million Allied troops, 60 percent of them from the U.S., were advancing on Germany from the west while the largest part of the German army was still forced to remain facing the Soviets in the east. Montgomery’s British Second Army liberated the Belgian capital, Brussels, in the first week of September, by which time General George Patton’s U.S. Third Army had reached the Moselle River, only 99 miles (160 km) from the Rhine River.

  At this point, though, the Allies lost momentum. In Belgium, they captured the major port of Antwerp intact, with the help of the Belgian Resistance, but were unable to use it immediately because the Nazis remained in control of the Scheldt River leading into the port. Lacking river access to this port, the Allied armies struggled to get supplied from now distant Normandy ports, and their advance ground to a halt.

  The liberation of France was achieved in August–September 1944, but the attempted breakthrough into Germany via Arnhem was a failure.

  General De Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, heads a parade along the Champs Elysées after the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

  In a bold attempt to end the war quickly, on September 17, Montgomery launched Operation Market-Garden. Some 20,000 Allied airborne troops dropped into the occupied Netherlands by parachute and glider. They were to seize and hold a series of key bridges, allowing Allied tanks to drive across the Netherlands and into the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. The final river crossing, however, at Arnhem, proved impossible. British paratroops could not hold it and the armored column failed to reach them in time. This failure condemned the Allies to continue fighting through the winter into 1945.

  GERMAN WEAKNESS

  It has often been debated whether a more vigorous offensive strategy could have allowed Alli
ed troops to break through into Germany in the autumn of 1944. A German officer, General Westphal, wrote after the war: “The overall situation in the West was serious in the extreme … Until the middle of October [1944] the enemy could have broken through at any point he liked with ease, and would have then been able to cross the Rhine and thrust deep into Germany almost unhindered.”

  —Quoted in History of the Second World War, B. H. Liddel Hart

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ROAD TO BERLIN

  U.S. tanks struggle to cope with weather and road conditions in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, winter, 1944–1945.

  By the summer of 1944, many senior German army officers were desperate to end the war before it resulted in the total destruction of their country. They led a plot to assassinate Hitler, overthrow the Nazi regime, and sue for peace. On July 20, 1944, the conspirators planted a time bomb at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. Although the explosion injured the dictator, he survived. Almost all those who had plotted against him were arrested and brutally executed.

  FAITH IN VICTORY

  Hitler’s generals felt that the December 1944 Ardennes offensive was absurdly over-ambitious. According to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, ordinary German soldiers did not share this scepticism: “The morale of the troops taking part was astonishingly high at the start of the offensive. They really believed victory was possible—unlike the higher commanders, who knew the facts.”

  —Quoted in History of the Second World War, B. H. Liddel Hart

  It was far from certain that a non-Nazi German regime could have negotiated a peace deal, since the Allies had adopted a policy of “unconditional surrender”—meaning that the Germans must simply accept defeat and allow the victors to do with them as they pleased. It was certain, though, that with Hitler alive, peace was out of the question. Hitler would never agree to surrender, so the total conquest of Germany was the only sure path to end the war.