Throughout that terrible retreat, Hitler’s allies cursed the Luftwaffe, which dropped supplies only to German units. Corti wrote: ‘We watched those aircraft avidly: we found their form and colour repugnant and alien, like the uniforms of German soldiers … If only the familiar outline of some Italian plane had come into sight! If only the slightest thing had been dropped for us, but nothing came!’ Italians’ misery was compounded by censorship at home which kept their families in ignorance of those perishing in the snow: ‘Back in the distant patria nobody knew of their sacrifice. We of the army in Russia lived out our tragedy while the radio and newspapers went on about other things altogether. It was as if the entire nation had forgotten us.’
Corti recoiled from the spectacle of Germans massacring Russian prisoners, though he knew that the Red Army often did likewise to its own captives. ‘It was extremely painful – for we were civilised men – to be caught up in that savage clash between barbarians.’ He was torn between disgust at the Germans’ ruthlessness, ‘which at times disqualified them in my eyes from membership of the human family’, and grudging respect for their strength of will. He deplored their contempt for other races. He heard of their officers shooting men too badly wounded to move, of rapes and murders, of sledges loaded with Italian wounded hijacked by the Wehrmacht. But he was also awed by the manner in which German soldiers instinctively performed their duties, even without an officer or NCO to give orders. ‘I … asked myself … what would have become of us without the Germans. I was reluctantly forced to admit that alone, we Italians would have ended up in enemy hands … I … thanked heaven that they were with us there in the column … Without a shadow of a doubt, as soldiers they have no equal.’
Again and again, German tanks and Stukas drove back pursuing Russian armour, enabling the retreating columns to struggle on, amid murderous Soviet mortaring. One Italian soldier’s testicles were sliced away by a shell splinter. Thrusting them in his pocket, the man bound the wound with string and trudged onward. Next day at a dressing station, he lowered his trousers; fumbling in his pocket, according to Eugenio Corti’s account, he proffered to a doctor ‘in the palm of his hand the blackish testicles mixed with biscuit crumbs, asking whether they could be sewn back on’. Corti survived to reach the railhead at Yasinovataya, and thence travelled through Poland to Germany. A hospital train at last bore him home to his beloved Italy. At the end of 1942 an Italian general asserted that 99 per cent of his fellow countrymen not merely expected to lose the war, but now fervently hoped to do so as swiftly as possible.
In January 1943, the German line in the east suffered a succession of crippling blows. On the 12th, in the far north, the Russians launched an attack which, at the end of five days’ fighting, opened a corridor along the shore of Lake Ladoga that broke the siege of Leningrad. A simultaneous assault further south recaptured Voronezh and wrecked the Hungarian formations of Hitler’s armies. In late January, Soviet forces closed on Rostov, threatening German forces in the Caucasus, which were soon confined to a bridgehead at Taman, just east of the Crimea. On 31 January, Paulus surrendered the remains of Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Zhukov became the first wartime Soviet commander to receive a marshal’s baton, soon joined by Vasilevsky and Stalin himself. On 8 February the Russians entered Kursk, and a week later Rostov; they took Kharkov on the 16th.
Stalingrad transformed the morale of the Red Army. A soldier named Ageev wrote home: ‘I’m in an exceptional mood. If you only knew, then you’d be just as happy as I am. Imagine it – the Fritzes are running away from us!’ Vasily Grossman was disgusted by what he perceived as the gross egoism of Chuikov and other commanders, vying with each other to claim credit for the Red Army’s victories: ‘There’s no modesty. “I did it, I, I, I, I, I …” They speak about other commanders without any respect, recounting some ridiculous gossip.’ But, after the horrors and failures of the previous year, who could grudge Stalin’s generals their outburst of triumphalism? The struggle for Stalingrad had cost 155,000 Russian dead, many of them consigned to unmarked graves because superstition made frontoviks, as Russians termed fighting soldiers, reluctant to wear identity capsules, the Red Army’s equivalent of dog tags. A further 320,000 men were evacuated sick or wounded. But this butcher’s bill seemed acceptable as the price of a victory that changed the course of the war.
The Allied world rejoiced alongside Stalin’s people. ‘The killing of thousands of Germans in Russia makes pleasant reading now,’ wrote British civilian Herbert Brush on 26 November 1942, ‘and I hope it will be kept up for a long time yet. It is the only way to convert young Germans. I wonder how the Russians will treat the prisoners they capture … it will show whether the Russians are really converted to civilised life.’ The answer to Brush’s speculation was that many German prisoners were killed or allowed to starve or freeze, because the contest in barbarism had become unstoppable.
The Red Army achieved stunning advances in the first months of 1943, gaining up to 150 miles in the north, to halt beyond Kursk. Soviet generalship sometimes displayed brilliance, but mass remained the key element in the Red Army’s successes. Discipline was erratic, and units were vulnerable to outbreaks of panic and desertion. Command incompetence was often compounded by drunkenness. Captain Nikolai Belov recorded scenes during an attack that were not untypical:
The day of battle. I slept through the artillery bombardment. After about 1½ hours, I woke and ran to the telephone to check the situation. Then I ran up the communication trench to 1st Rifle Battalion, where I found its commander Captain Novikov and chief of staff Grudin dashing about with pistols in their hands. When I asked them to report, they said they were leading their men to attack. Both were drunk, and I ordered them to holster their weapons.
There were piles of corpses in the trenches and on the parapets, among them that of Captain Sovkov, whom Novikov had killed – I was told that he had shot a lot of [our own] soldiers. I told Novikov, Grudin and Aikazyan that unless they joined the forward company, I would kill them myself. But instead of advancing towards the river, they headed for the rear. I gave them a burst of sub-machine-gun fire, but Novikov somehow found his way back into the trench. I pushed him forward with my own hands. He was soon wounded, and Grudin brought him in on his back. Both of them, notorious cowards, were of course delighted. Assuming command of the battalion myself, in the evening I crossed the Oka river to join the leading company of Lieutenant Util’taev. When night fell, I advanced with three companies, but the assault failed.
The fundamental cause of the disasters which befell the German armies in Russia in the winter of 1942–43 was that they had undertaken a task beyond their nation’s powers. The Wehrmacht was saved from immediate disaster only by the generalship of Manstein. Hitler had said grudgingly back in 1940, ‘The man is not to my liking, but he is capable.’ Manstein was almost certainly the ablest German general of the war. In March he stabilised his line, launched a counter-attack which retook Kharkov, and checked the momentum that had borne forward the Soviet spearheads from the Volga to the Donets, thus securing Hitler another breathing space.
But for what? The balance of advantage on the Eastern Front had shifted decisively and irrevocably against Germany. The power of the Soviet Union and its armies was growing fast, while that of the invaders shrank. In 1942, Germany produced just 4,800 armoured vehicles, while Russia built 24,000. The new T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans then deployed save the Tiger, began to appear in quantity – Chelyabinsk, one of Stalin’s massive manufacturing centres in the Urals, became known as Tankograd. That year also, Russia built 21,700 aircraft to Germany’s 14,700. The Red Army deployed six million men, supported by a further 516,000 NKVD troops. In the winter fighting of 1942–43, Germany lost a million dead, along with vast quantities of materiel.
The Wehrmacht’s combat performance remained superior to that of the Red Army: until the end of the war, in almost every local action the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But their tactical sk
ills no longer sufficed to stem the Russian tide. Stalin was identifying good generals, building vast armies with formidable tank and artillery strength, and at last receiving large deliveries from the Western Allies, including food, vehicles and communications equipment. The five million tons of American meat that eventually reached Russia amounted to half a pound of rations a day for every Soviet soldier. Allied food shipments probably averted a starvation catastrophe in the winter of 1942–43.
Of the Red Army’s 665,000 vehicles in 1945, 427,000 were American-built, including 51,000 jeeps. The US provided half the Red Army’s boots – loss of livestock made leather scarce – almost 2,000 railway locomotives, 15,000 aircraft, 247,000 telephones and nearly four million tyres. ‘Our army suddenly found itself on wheels – and what wheels!’ said Anastas Mikoyan with a generosity uncharacteristic of Stalin’s ministers. ‘When we started to receive American canned beef, fat, powdered eggs and other foodstuffs, this was worth a lot of extra calories.’ Mikoyan believed that Lend-Lease supplies shortened the war by a year to eighteen months.
It was plain to Hitler’s commanders that victory in the east was no longer attainable. The only issue for Germany was how long its armies could withstand Russia’s relentlessly growing strength. When spring prompted the melting of the Volga’s ice, among a host of horrors revealed by the thaw were the bodies of a Russian and a German, victims of Stalingrad, clasped in a death embrace. Yet already that German’s living compatriots were more than three hundred miles westward, embarked upon a retreat that would never be reversed.
Living with War
1 WARRIORS
The experience of war was extraordinarily diverse. The Eastern Front, where 90 per cent of all Germans killed in combat met their fate, overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler. Between 1941 and 1944, British and American sailors and airmen fought at sea and in the sky, but relatively small numbers of Western Allied ground troops engaged the Axis in North Africa, Italy, Asia and the Pacific. Much larger Anglo-American forces spent those years training and exercising: when 1st Norfolks went into action at Kohima in June 1944, for instance, it was the battalion’s first battle since leaving France through Dunkirk in May 1940. Many other British and American units experienced equally protracted delays before joining the fray. The conflict was a pervasive circumstance for the peoples of Britain and its white dominions, and to a lesser extent the United States, but it imposed serious peril and hardship on only a relatively small minority of men ‘at the sharp end’ of ground combat. At sea, fatalities in most naval battles were counted in hundreds. In the sky, aircrew suffered high proportionate losses, but these were dwarfed by those of the eastern land campaign.
The Soviet Union suffered 65 per cent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 per cent, Yugoslavia 3 per cent, the USA and Britain 2 per cent each, France and Poland 1 per cent each. About 8 per cent of all Germans died, compared with 2 per cent of Chinese, 3.44 per cent of Dutch people, 6.67 per cent of Yugoslavs, 4 per cent of Greeks, 1.35 per cent of French, 3.78 per cent of Japanese, 0.94 per cent of British and 0.32 per cent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 per cent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 per cent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 per cent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 per cent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 per cent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily – the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen. Some 3.66 per cent of US Marines died, compared with 2.5 per cent of the US Army and 1.5 per cent of the US Navy.
A modest number of those fighting contrived to enjoy the war, usually when their own side was winning – Germans and Japanese in the early years, Americans and British thereafter. Young people who relished adventure found this readily available. Lt. Robert Hichens of the Royal Navy wrote in July 1940: ‘I suppose our position is about as dangerous as is possible in view of the threatened invasion, but I couldn’t help being full of joy … Being on the bridge of one of HM ships, being talked to by the captain as an equal, and knowing that she was to be in my sole care for the next few hours. Who would not rather die like that than live as so many poor people have to, in crowded cities at some sweating indoor job?’ Hichens was killed in 1942, but he was a happy warrior.
Special forces – the ‘private armies’ regarded with mixed feelings by more conventional warriors – attracted bold spirits careless about risking their lives in piratical enterprises by land and sea. Between 1940 and 1944, partly because Churchill’s soldiers were unable to confront the Wehrmacht in Europe, British raiding units conducted many small operations of a kind the US chiefs of staff mistrusted, though American Airborne and Rangers later played conspicuous roles in the north-west Europe campaign. The prime minister promoted raids on German outposts to show aggression, test tactics and equipment, and sustain a façade of momentum in the British war effort. Probably the most useful of these took place on the night of 27 February 1942, when a small contingent of the newly formed Parachute Regiment assaulted a German radar station on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre on the French coast.
The objective was reconnoitred by local French Resistance workers before 120 paratroopers led by Major John Frost dropped into thick snow, secured the position against slight resistance from the surprised Luftwaffe radar crew, and held it while an RAF technician, Flight-Sergeant Charles Cox, coolly dismantled key components of its Wurzburg scanner. The force then fought its way down to the beach for evacuation by landing craft, having lost only two men killed and six taken prisoner. The captured technology proved invaluable to British scientific intelligence. Churchill and the chiefs of staff were impressed by this first test of their paratroops, and endorsed a big expansion of such units. The Bruneval raid, trumpeted by Allied propaganda, was indeed a fine example of daring and initiative, aided by luck and an unusually feeble German response.
Such operations worked best when carried out by small forces pursuing limited objectives; more ambitious raids achieved more equivocal outcomes. A month after Bruneval, 268 commandos landed at Saint-Nazaire, while an old destroyer rammed the gate of the port’s big floating dock. Next day, five tons of explosive detonated as planned aboard the destroyer, demolishing the lock gates and killing many German sightseers as well as two captured commando officers who had concealed their knowledge of the impending explosion. But 144 of the attackers were killed and more than two hundred army and naval personnel were taken prisoner. During the big assault on Dieppe in August 1942, the Germans suffered 591 ground casualties, but two-thirds of the 6,000 raiders, mostly Canadian, were killed, wounded or captured. By 1944, when Allied armies were deployed in major campaigns, British commando and airborne forces had been allowed to outgrow their usefulness, absorbing a larger share of elite personnel than their battlefield achievements justified. In the earlier war years, however, they made a useful moral contribution and delighted their participants.
Many professional soldiers welcomed the career opportunities Hitler provided. Those who survived and displayed competence gained promotions in months that in peacetime would have taken years; commanders unknown outside their regiments one summer could achieve fame and fortune by the next. In five years Dwight Eisenhower – admittedly an exceptional example – rose from colonel to full general. ‘One of the fascinations of [the] war,’ in the words of British Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, ‘was to see how Americans developed their great men so quickly … Ike grew almost as one watched him.’
Britain’s Sir Bernard Montgomery advanced from being a lieutenant-general in August 1942, unknown outside his service, to become an army group commander and national hero just two years later. At lower levels, many regular officers who entered the war as lieuten
ants became colonels or brigadiers by their mid-twenties. Horatius Murray, for instance, in 1939 after sixteen years’ service had only attained the rank of major, but finished the war as a lieutenant-general. On the other side, the Wehrmacht’s Captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder remembered his campaign experience ‘with gratitude’, despite being wounded three times. Likewise Major Karl-Günther von Haase, who survived captivity in Russian hands: ‘In the early war years we were proud to belong to the German army. I look back on my military career not without satisfaction.’
Some people found that bearing their share of their nation’s struggle for conquest or freedom rendered sorrows tolerable, ennobled loneliness and danger. But the humbler their personal circumstances, the slighter seemed the compensations for sacrifice. William Crawford, a seventeen-year-old Boy Second Class serving aboard the battlecruiser Hood, wrote home miserably: ‘Dearest Mum … I know it’s wrong to say but I sure am fed up. I feel kind of sick, I can’nae eat and my heart’s in my mouth. We struck bad weather today. Talk about waves as big as houses, they’re crashing over our bows … I wonder if it would do any good Mum if you wrote to the Admiralty and asked them if there was no chance of me getting a shore job at Rosyth. You know, tell them you have got two sons away and that. Be sure to tell them my age. If only I could get off this ship it would not be so bad.’ Crawford, however, was still aboard Hood when she was sunk with almost all hands in May 1941.
All Hell Let Loose Page 44