Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  Because of improved shortwave radio communications, Eighth Army units at the front could now call in fighter-bomber squadrons for direct attacks upon enemy panzers, motorized divisions, and troop clusters. If aircraft losses to ground fire were high, replacements were always arriving. Most important of all, RAF tactical airpower, so miserable or nonexistent in the first three years of the war, was coming of age. Air Vice Marshal G. G. Dawson was transforming the air force’s hitherto lamentable record in repair and maintenance; above all, the coordinated tactical air doctrines developed by the Western Desert Air Force under Air Marshal Arthur Coningham—that is, with a central command linked by radar and radio both to army headquarters and to the attacking squadrons—proved so obviously effective that it became standard practice for both the Sicily and Normandy operations later.17

  Under this aerial umbrella, knowing that further reinforcements were flowing up the Suez Canal each week, and having resisted Churchill’s demands for action until he was fully ready, Montgomery unleashed a barrage of a thousand-plus guns on October 23, 1942. If, as most experts would concede, artillery was the queen of the battlefield during the slug-it-out fights that characterized the second half of the Second World War, then the Allies’ advantage in numbers and firepower was about as great as their aerial superiority (specifically, 2,300 British artillery pieces against 1,350 Axis artillery, of which 850 were very feeble Italian guns). Moreover, the Eighth Army’s gunner regiments were at last concentrated in strong groupings rather than being scattered up and down the front. Montgomery’s reinforced and varied army (British, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, Polish, and Free French divisions or brigades) could deploy three times more soldiers than Rommel’s combined Italian and German troops, and his tank force of more than 1,200 vehicles, including 500 of the more powerful Shermans and Grants, far eclipsed the German-Italian armored regiments in firepower, range, and armor. But the depth of the German minefields slowed things down greatly, and the Eighth Army’s painstaking drive to clear them gave Rommel good clues as to where to position his relatively few but terrifyingly effective 88 mm antitank platoons.

  This time the sheer weight of Montgomery’s pressure meant that the Axis lines just buckled under the relentless pressure; more and more British tanks were knocked out by German mines, bazookas, and the 88 mms, losing at a rate of four to one, but they still kept coming, and they could sustain their losses more easily. The Italian tanks were blown away, the lighter German tanks swiftly destroyed, the artillery barrage continued, the daytime air strikes intensified. By the end of the epic battles of November 2, during which the British had seen almost two hundred of their tanks lost or disabled, they still had another six hundred in hand; Rommel had thirty. Then the German retreat began, often leaving large numbers of less mobile Italian forces behind. The discipline of the Afrika Korps over the next few days in deploying alert and hard-fighting rear guards while the bulk of their transport units filtered through cannot but command admiration, but the blunt fact was that the Germans had lost in the most decisive battle for North Africa.18

  During the night of November 7, as Rommel used the drenching rains to cover his westward withdrawal from the coastal position of Mersa Matruh, massive Allied invasion forces were arriving off the Moroccan and Algerian coasts to implement Operation Torch. In that larger sense, the German-Italian forces in North Africa were now caught in a gigantic pincer movement, with Eisenhower’s forces pushing the defenders to the east and Montgomery’s divisions chasing them back to the west until they ended up, surrounded, in Tunisia in early 1943. This was how the German blitzkrieg ended, at least in the Mediterranean theater.

  Yet the Wehrmacht still fought on. Part of the reason the British Eighth Army only gingerly followed up—rather than earnestly pursued—the retreat of the Afrika Korps along that very familiar Sidi Barrani–Tobruk–Benghazi route was that Rommel’s diminished cohorts would suddenly turn and bite, or would set up prepared positions from which they would give the Commonwealth forces a good drubbing. Then Rommel would retreat a bit more, just as Allied commanders were bringing forward massive aerial and armored forces to assault a force that was no longer there. Perhaps the British and American commanders (or most of them) accorded the Germans too much respect, but the record shows that there was good reason to do so.

  The Germans perhaps might have significantly delayed what was later termed the “clearance of Africa” if Hitler had earlier given Rommel the divisions he belatedly ordered into Tunisia on learning of the Torch landings, or if Rommel had been freed from the complications of being formally under Italian command and from the rivalry of his coequal General Hans-Juergen von Arnim in the final months.19 To be sure, the massive Allied air, land, and sea superiority really made the outcome in North Africa all but inevitable, but if a German defeat had been much later, there could have been serious knock-on effects for the planned invasions of Sicily and Italy, and possibly a revival of Anglo-American disagreements about when to launch the second front in France. The Fuehrer’s erratic interventions (tolerating the Arnim-Rommel rivalry, trickling in reinforcements, sending units to guard against an Allied invasion of Greece) were by now giving the Allies unexpected benefits.

  As the Western Allies moved into southern Europe, the German military record on the ground would remain impressive (see chapter 4). The German command chose not to contest the massive Allied landings in southern Sicily, but then held on in the northeastern mountains of that island against repeated assaults by Patton’s forces. When the time was ready to go, they smartly slipped away across the Straits of Messina, but they also chose not to stand in the vulnerable “toe” of Italy, where they might be outflanked; instead, they withdrew farther north, the better to resist. And the able Kesselring (after persuading a dubious Hitler that such a strategy was feasible) was preparing successive lines of defense between the Mediterranean and Adriatic coastline and running all the way up that lengthy, rocky, difficult Italian peninsula. When the Anglo-American armies tried to foreshorten this campaign by landing behind the front, the German response (Salerno, Anzio) was ferocious. All such counteroffensives by the Wehrmacht could be contained only by an overwhelming abundance of Allied force: total control of the air, the massive use of battleship and cruiser bombardments, and the bringing in of more and more army divisions. More Allied casualties were suffered in the battles in Italy than in any other campaign in the West.20

  ANGLO-AMERICAN ARMIES ADVANCE IN NORTHERN AFRICA AND SOUTHERN ITALY

  British Empire and American land forces first begin to push back the Wehrmacht through offensives launched from each end of the lengthy North African coastline. Following those victories, they moved on to Sicily and then into the entire length of Italy.

  Click here to download a PDF of this map.

  Hindered by meager supply lines, poor intelligence, loss of aerial support, and the constant damage inflicted by Hitler’s obsessions and interventions, the Wehrmacht’s divisions on the Italian and, later, northwest European fronts showed great resilience right up to the end of the war. The tenacity and operational effectiveness of a seasoned German army regiment or division had no equal in the Second World War. Only superior numbers could beat them. Some years ago the American military expert Trevor Dupuy attempted a systematic analysis of all the main battlefield encounters between German, British, and U.S. army units during the North African, Italian, and northwest Europe campaigns. Division for division, and without much exception, the German units overall had a 20 to 30 percent combat superiority (though even that may be too generous toward the Western armies).21

  Yet a “superior numbers” argument is not enough. By the end of 1943 the British were introducing into the North African struggle a remarkable number of force improvements: superior radar, superior decryption, a much better orchestration of tactical airpower, much better coordination between the army and the RAF, unorthodox Special Forces units (the Germans and Italians had none), aircraft that were more powerful and more
adaptable, the mine-flaying tanks and the acoustic mine detectors, and, sitting above this all, a far better integrated command-and-control system than at the time of the Crete and Tobruk disasters. They had worked it out at last, and Montgomery—and his publicity team—were the beneficiaries of much hard work and deep thought. Even before the epic struggle in the wastelands of Russia, it seemed the German blitzkrieg could possibly be defeated by superior numbers, positioned in depth; but those numbers also needed more advanced weaponry and a superior organization. It had taken the British Army and RAF a long time, and Churchill’s relief was enormous.

  The Clash of Giants

  The 1941–45 war that raged along the broad western regions of the Soviet Union—the Great Patriotic War, or the Ostfeldzug—was, the most widely read encyclopedia entry claims, “the largest theatre of war in history.” The struggle was

  characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life variously due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. The Eastern Front, as the site of nearly all extermination camps, death marches, ghettos, and the majority of pogroms, was central to the Holocaust. Of the estimated 70 million deaths attributed to World War II, over 30 million, many of them civilians, died on the Eastern Front. The Eastern Front was decisive in determining the outcome of World War II, eventually serving as the main reason for Germany’s defeat.22

  Given this image of colossal contest and gigantic military effort, the reader may well inquire what role there could be here for the problem solvers, the scientists and engineers and organizers, the men in the middle. Their roles were in fact critical once one begins to peel away the layers of explanation as to how the USSR defeated the all-powerful Nazi war machine, and the second half of this chapter will attempt to explain why. Yet there is no denying that it was in the Russo-German War of 1941–45 that brute force showed itself to its extreme and provides its own easy explanation as to why the Wehrmacht lost.

  This struggle was unique in its grand combination of mechanized destructive power with Asiatic-horde-like warfare. The existential struggle between Teutons and Slavs was now entwined with an increasingly complicated and ever-changing technological competition. No longer a clash between roughly equal military technologies, such as cavalry, pikemen, and archers, all at the same stages of development, the Ostfeldzug was a struggle between two vastly more complicated systems. Both combatants reached deep into their own very advanced technological and productive resources to bring forth newer or improved weapons that, they hoped, would sweep the foe away. And as each brought his newer weaponry to the front, he brought with it a few million more men to handle those weapons.

  THE RAPID GERMAN EXPANSION IN THE EAST, JULY–DECEMBER 1941

  But did the Germans stretch too far?

  Click here to download a PDF of this map.

  Consider the numbers involved in the opening campaign of Operation Barbarossa and as it was waged from June 1941 into the spring and summer of the following year. Not including significant additions from satellite and volunteer military units from countries such as Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Finland, the German high command (OKW) sent around 110 divisions, including 14 fast-moving panzer divisions, eastward in the greatest invasion of all time; additional divisions waited behind for their turn to fight. The successive encirclement operations showed that blitzkrieg could work even across expanding battlegrounds: the defender’s air force was smashed on the ground, the forward lines buckled under heavy artillery and infantry attack, and then the panzer armies drove through at two widely separated points, wheeled toward each other, and closed the circle. When Smolensk fell in early August, 310,000 Soviet troops were captured; the seizure of Kiev in mid-September brought in no fewer than 600,000 prisoners, 2,500 tanks, and 1,000 guns; and the so-called Vyazma pocket, holding out to the west of Moscow, collapsed in mid-October when 670,000 surrendered, with 1,000 tanks and 4,000 guns.23

  What could stop this continued attack, slaughter, and surrender?

  First, the weather. In the summer months of 1941 the German assault took its usual form: the Luftwaffe wiped out the unready Red Air Force squadrons on the ground and then turned to help the panzers by strafing and bombing enemy troops; armored columns punched holes through the confused foe, wheeled together for the encirclement (and surrender), then, reinforced by fresh fuel and ammunition, struck farther eastward. But by October and November it had really slowed down. There was simply nothing that the Nazi blitzkrieg could do against the autumn muds, followed by the extraordinarily early onset of extreme frosts and snow—the coldest winter, ironically, since Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and with German troops still clad in summer uniforms. By the end of October, Army Group South was virtually out of fuel, diesel engines would not start, artillery was frozen, and soldiers were crippled by frostbite. By the time spring came, the ground conditions only got worse, because of that notorious Russian weather condition called rasputitsa—the surface snow had now melted, but the resulting water could not drain away because the soil below was still deep frozen. Two feet of unfrozen soil quickly turned into a mud bath into which both the German and Soviet armies sank every spring during this great conflict. Some 500 miles from their starting point, with lines of communication difficult to sustain even in the best weather, the Wehrmacht really was literally stuck in the mud.

  The second reason the Barbarossa assault faded was simply that the Red Army fought back—not well, not skillfully, not enough to throw back the onslaught, but sufficiently to slow it down. The Russians burned their own barns and bridges, destroyed or poisoned their wells, and pulled back their cattle and horses just as they pulled back their factories; the enemy would get nothing. Third, they would soon throw more troops into the fight, either the hastily assembled new divisions or the experienced cohorts being transferred from the Far East now that it was becoming more certain the Japanese would strike southward and not against Russia’s distant eastern provinces. There was probably nothing more frightening to a German soldier in December 1941 than to be lying exhausted and freezing in a trench west of Moscow and then to spot regiments of white-clad ghosts, the hardened troops from the Mongolian Front, advancing through the swirling snow.

  In other words, while the Wehrmacht’s gains were immense—they had advanced 625 miles by December—they had not produced a breakthrough. From the first fighting until the last, the Germans, so superior in their tactical-operational skills, seem to have persistently underestimated the strength of the opposition. Their intelligence record here can only be described as abysmal, which is perhaps likely to happen when an army thinks of their foe as primitive—even when they faced a general such as Georgy Zhukov, who had badly hurt Japan’s Kwantung Army in Soviet-Japanese border fights two years earlier. Signals intelligence doesn’t seem to have helped, because the Soviets kept wireless messages to a minimum, and there were no spies to inform them of the many fresh divisions being raised and trained well behind Moscow. Thus, however hard the Wehrmacht hurt the defending forces in those early months, there turned out to be no endpoint, no culmination, no collapse of France. A mid-August 1941 entry in the diary of Franz Halder, the army’s chief of staff, nicely captures this dilemma: “We underestimated Russia: we reckoned with 200 divisions, but now we have already identified 360.”24 Even if Soviet divisions were smaller in size than their Wehrmacht equivalents at this time, the numbers are breathtaking.

  This was the story all through 1942 and into 1943: the Germans increased their efforts to encircle and then destroy the growing Soviet armies, but without success. All the German military language about breakthrough (Durchbruck) or encirclement (Einkreisung) suggests that the enemy’s lines were thinly held or could be outflanked. But a defensive position 1,100 miles long and 200 miles deep, full of broken bridges, poisoned wells, booby traps, and ruined crops—plus a climate of summer heat, autumn muds, winter snows, and then spring muds—was not a thin, fragile wall at all. The primitiveness of road com
munications in Russia and the endurance of local inhabitants long used to the harshness of their daily existence all worked against the invaders.

  As in the Mediterranean theater, the Wehrmacht’s difficulties were compounded by Hitler’s repeated and disastrous alterations in the axes of attack after the early failure to take Moscow. Assuming that the siege of Leningrad (from September 1941 on) in the north would continue, even if always stalemated by the city’s fanatical resistance, the main strategic choice for the German high command was between a renewed thrust toward Moscow and a new offensive along the southern front toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. The debate among historians today over the merits of a German drive toward the enemy’s capital city versus a bold and wider stroke across the Don and the Volga is as fierce as the 1942 disagreements among the German generals; what is not in dispute is that Hitler’s follow-up directive that there should be both a Stalingrad offensive and a massive move toward Baku—that is, two offensives in the south—was an act of reckless and colossal overstretch. Among other things, how did one keep munitions streaming between, say, the factory in Leipzig and an outlier city in the Caucasus such as Grozny? How did one provide air cover all that way when the Luftwaffe was beginning to lose its critical fight against the RAF both in western Europe and in North Africa and the Mediterranean? Moreover, Germany was now going against a Stavka and its generalissimo who had regained their nerve and were turning the campaigns over to professional generals—many of them much younger than their German equivalents.