Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  On the morning of 12 July Rotmistrov set up his headquarters on a hill overlooking the main site of battle. ‘From a solid dug-out in an apple orchard, with trees half-burnt and half cut down’, Rotmistrov viewed the scene below on the undulating plain, broken with small groves and tree-lined ravines, an area in peacetime of rich farmland. On the fringes of the plain, hidden in woods and high grass, lay his tank force. At 8.30 in the morning, as the two rival air forces battled in the cloud above, he ordered the repeated codeword ‘steel, steel’ sent out to the tanks.67 It was the signal to move. Below him through the grass and crops he saw the T-34s race from their hiding-places. By chance, at exactly the same time the German tanks moved on the far side of the plain. Two vast armoured forces rushed into a head-on collision. Nothing could be done to avoid it. It proved impossible to control the ensuing battle. The tanks swirled around in a sea of exploding shells, crashing willy-nilly into their attackers. The T-34 crews took advantage of the mêlée to attack at point-blank range, blasting the Tigers and Panthers at the side and rear, where the ammunition was stored. When Soviet tankmen ran out of shells they rammed German vehicles, or attacked them on foot with grenades. From on high dive-bombers from both sides tried to sort out friend from foe. Amidst the fury of battle fierce thunderstorms could barely be heard. The plain was littered with the burning hulks of tanks from both sides. The 3 square miles below Rotmistrov turned black from green. Everything was on fire: woods, fields, villages. Even up on the hill the air stank of soot and smoke.

  While the two tank forces stayed locked in combat, barrel to barrel for eight hours, Soviet forces south of Prokhorovka blocked an attempt by other Panzer divisions, hastily brought up from reserve, to push through to the east of the town. Still more Soviet divisions were sent west of the town to prevent 11th Panzer corps from outflanking the great tank battle and attacking 5th Guards tank army from the rear. Rapid Soviet redeployment frustrated each German assault. Though minor gains were made against Soviet positions here and there, Soviet tank forces began to push back the Panzer divisions at the critical points of the battlefield. Illuminated by fire, the battle continued on through the evening. With the coming of deep night the firing gradually ceased. Both sides withdrew to lick their wounds. The following night Zhukov came to visit Rotmistrov. The two walked out on to the plain, through the corpses and the wrecked machinery of war, the tanks burning fitfully in the summer rain. Zhukov was visibly moved. He removed his cap, and stood, for some moments, in thought.68

  The German failure to seize Prokhorovka marked the end of Citadel. German forces continued to probe Soviet defences for several more days, but they had been decimated in the gruelling armoured confrontations. Over three hundred German tanks were destroyed on the 12th alone. The crack divisions were exhausted. SS Totenkopf was so severely battered that it had to be withdrawn from combat to recuperate. Over half its tanks and vehicles lay lifeless on the steppe. Other divisions suffered even more. The 3rd Panzer division had thirty tanks left out of three hundred; 19th Panzer was left after the battle with just seventeen.69 The struggle for Kursk tore the heart out of the German army. Heinz Guderian, Inspector of Armoured Forces in 1943, described the failure of Citadel as a ‘decisive defeat’. The losses at Kursk could not quickly be restored, and the balance of armoured vehicles had tipped decisively to the Soviet side. On the whole of the eastern front in August the German army could muster only 2,500 tanks and self-propelled guns against 8,200 on the Soviet side.70

  Soviet success at Kursk, with so much at stake, was the most important single victory of the war. It ranks with the great set-piece battles of the past – Sedan in 1870, and Borodino, Leipzig and Waterloo from the age of Napoleon. It was the point at which the initiative passed to the Soviet side. German forces were certainly capable of a sustained and effective defence as they retreated westward; but they were now too weakened and overstretched to inflict a decisive defeat on their enemy. The Red Army at Kursk demonstrated that it was a formidable modern fighting force.

  The day after Prokhorovka Hitler cancelled Citadel. Three days before, an Anglo-American force landed in Italy. A real threat now existed of a frontal assault on German-held Europe across the English Channel. Faced with dangers in east and west, even Hitler could see that timely retreat in the face of defeat at Kursk was a necessary course. But no one on the German side could have predicted what followed. In the months before the Kursk battle the Soviet Supreme Command carefully planned a massive counter-offensive to be launched once the defensive stage of the campaign was over. The scale and geographical extent of the plan was concealed from German intelligence by careful use of camouflage and misinformation, at which Soviet forces had become much more adept. Even before the battle for the south of the Kursk salient was over, the neighbouring Soviet fronts in the north, the Western and Bryansk fronts, tore into the rear of the German forces grouped around Orel. German defensive lines, constructed in depth like those in the Kursk bulge, gave way before the onslaught, overwhelmed by numbers. German Panzer reserves were thrown in to stem the tide, but by 5 August Orel was again in Soviet hands and the whole German force was in retreat.

  On the south of the salient von Manstein began to pull back German forces as more intelligence reached him about huge Soviet reserves moving westward. Stalin, anxious to speed up the timetable again, was all for pursuing the beaten enemy at once. ‘With the greatest reluctance’, Zhukov recalled, Stalin had to accept the need for careful preparation.71 Reserves, fuel, ammunition and the whole array of rear services were brought up behind the armies. The knock-out punch that was held back throughout the bitter Kursk battles was to be released only when Zhukov was ready. As German forces tried to recuperate and dig in around Belgorod and Kharkov, the Soviet steamroller was fired up. On 3 August the southern offensive, Operation ‘Rumyantsev’, was ready. The Voronezh front constituted the Soviet battering ram, mirroring the combined tank and air offensive employed by their enemy. Within hours a hole 30 miles deep was gouged out of German lines. By 5 August Belgorod was captured. A little over two weeks later Konev’s Steppe front pushed through to Kharkov, where under cover of darkness Soviet soldiers rushed in to liberate the city. In recognition of the liberation of Orel and Belgorod, Stalin ordered military salutes to be fired in Moscow as each city was freed, the first of many. It was these battles, fought against the Panzer armies still smarting from the combat at Kursk, that completed the operations Zhukov had first suggested in April. The next stage was to capitalise on the destruction of German forces by driving westward into the Ukraine and towards Byelorussia.72

  The German front in the east was forced, after Kursk and the seizure of Kharkov, to fall back along its entire length. Between August and December the Red Army gave the retreating enemy no rest. Stalin urged the Soviet armies forward across the vast battlefield stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. German forces simply lacked the manpower and equipment to hold fast against an enemy with larger resources and an increasingly confident grasp of large-scale mobile operations. By October they were pressed back to the Dnepr river. Stalin promised to award the coveted title Hero of the Soviet Union to the first soldiers to cross it. In September the broad river barrier, which Hitler had insisted would be the final rampart against Bolshevism, was breached in several places. Early in November an attack in strength was made across the river which routed the German force concentrated around the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and the city was seized on the 6th. Though Red Army commanders still made mistakes, and Stalin drove his armies on to the point of exhaustion, the traffic was almost all one way, against a demoralised and under-armed enemy. There was a long way to go to take the fight into Europe and to reach Berlin, but Kursk had unhinged the German front irreversibly. Von Manstein ordered the best that could be hoped for: an active defence to wear down the Soviet attackers, a strategy that was maintained through the long, wounding trek back to the Reich.

  At the height of this pursuit Stalin agreed for the first time to meet both his
Alliance partners, Churchill and Roosevelt, at Teheran to discuss face to face the course of the war and Allied strategy. On 24 November his train left Moscow for the south. The following day it rolled into Stalingrad, a city of ghosts, draped in snow. No attempt was made to survey the ruins; Stalin ate dinner in his carriage and thirty minutes later the train pulled on. From Baku the party flew to the Persian capital, where on 28 November the conference assembled in the Soviet Embassy. At each sentry post stood a Soviet, an American and a British soldier, side by side.73 The Soviet delegates came in a mood of evident self-assurance. They were the victors of Stalingrad and Kursk, and had defeated the overwhelming bulk of German armed power. Stalin was in a position to give advice, and to make demands. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to launch a western attack on Europe in May of the following year. Among the formalities of the conference was the presentation to Stalin of a gift from the British King, George VI, of a gleaming Sword of Honour for the victory at Stalingrad. In front of a room full of officials and soldiers, and in the presence of the American President, Churchill handed the sword to Stalin, who raised it to his lips and kissed it. Roosevelt was visibly moved as the sword was solemnly escorted from the room by a Soviet guard of honour.74 A few days later Stalin returned to Moscow. He told Zhukov that Roosevelt had given his word that the Allies would attack German-held France in the spring. ‘I believe he will keep his word,’ Stalin continued, ‘but even if he does not, our own forces are sufficient to complete the rout of Nazi Germany.’75

  * * *

  Soviet victory in the campaigns at Stalingrad and Kursk effectively determined the outcome of the war. There is little dispute on either the German or Soviet side that this was the major turning-point. But there is a great deal of argument about the reasons for it. The conventional view has been to blame Hitler for gross strategic mismanagement, or to ascribe Soviet success to crude weight of numbers. Manstein in his memoirs blamed defeat in 1943 on ‘the extraordinary numerical superiority of the enemy’. General von Mellenthin, veteran of the tank battles he later described, wrote that defeats ‘were not due to superior Russian tactical leadership’, but to ‘grave strategic errors’ and ‘the gigantic Russian superiority in men and material’.76 The underlying assumption is not that Soviet forces won the contest in 1943, but simply that the German side lost it.

  From everything now known about the eastern front from the Soviet side such an explanation is no longer tenable. Hitler may well have appeared a liability to German commanders, but until the failure at Stalingrad, as he told his staff the day that Paulus surrendered, ‘We were always superior …’77 Moreover for the Citadel operation he left the planning and execution largely to the professionals, Manstein and Zeitzler. The crude weight of Soviet numbers cannot be the answer either. Soviet forces on paper greatly outnumbered the German attackers in 1941, but were cut to pieces; at Stalingrad and Kursk, though the margin in equipment slightly favoured the Soviet side, the gap was too small to blame German defeat on Soviet ‘masses’. It is true that German forces found themselves taking loss rates that would have seemed inconceivable in 1941. The rest of Europe was conquered for less than the losses they suffered in December 1942 and January 1943. But Soviet losses were also exceptional, totalling in the end almost nine million dead and twenty million wounded. During the critical battles of 1942–1943, long before Britain and the United States had set their own armed forces and populations fully on the scales, the balance of population between the Axis states and the Soviet Union was approximately 130 millions each, while Germany could also exploit the labour-power of the Soviet areas it had conquered, with more than 60 million people. Soviet divisions were seldom more than a fraction of their formal establishment, and the quality of much Soviet manpower (over-age or recuperating soldiers) declined as the war went on. The idea that the German armed forces were simply swamped by human numbers is a myth.78

  The reasons for Soviet victory on such a scale in 1943 are active Soviet reasons, the result of a remarkable resurgence in Soviet fighting power and organisation after a year and a half of shattering defeats. When Marshal Zhukov wrote his reminiscences of the campaign he could point to solid achievements: better central planning of operations, and their careful supervision by the General Staff; very great improvements in Soviet technology and the tactics for using them, exemplified nowhere more fully than on the prepared defensive ground around Kursk; and the ability at last to deploy millions of men and thousands of tanks and aircraft, with all their supplies and rearward services, in lengthy and complex operations, without losing control of them.79 To this Zhukov might have added the argument that Soviet planning and central direction, generally viewed unfavourably today, were the final factors that turned a demoralised population and its shattered economy into a great armed camp, providing the weapons and food and labour to sustain ‘deep war’. No other society in the Second World War was mobilised so extensively, or shared such sacrifices. The success in 1943 was earned not just by the tankmen and gunners at the front, but also by the engineers and transport workers in the rear, the old men and the women who kept farms going without tractors or horses, and the Siberian workforce struggling in bitter conditions to turn out a swelling stream of simply constructed guns, tanks and aircraft.

  Doubtless some of this energy was conscripted at the point of a gun and through fear of the Gulag, but this cannot explain on its own the remarkable effort of will expressed by ordinary Soviet citizens and soldiers in the face of the German threat. That effort was fuelled by the very visible consequences of invasion. When Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet writer, visited the Kursk salient after the battle he was horrified by what he saw: ‘Villages destroyed by fire, shattered towns, stumps of trees, cars bogged down in green slime, field hospitals, hastily dug graves – it all merges into one, into deep war.’80 The sight of so much wanton destruction in the areas once occupied by the invader provoked Ehrenburg to write in Red Star: ‘Now the word “German” has become the most terrible swear-word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill … if you have killed one German, kill another!’81 When General Chuikov crossed the Volga in September 1942 to join the 62nd army he had been moved to tears by the sight of Soviet refugees huddled on the jetties waiting to escape the bombing, small children without parents, their eyes filled with a blank despair.82 For Soviet soldiers war was not something happening in another country; it was happening in front of them, to their villages and cities, and to their families.

  The drive to succeed in the battles in 1943 stemmed from violent emotions and a directed hatred. The stubbornness of Soviet resistance astonished German commanders; the ferocity of the confrontation led to barbarisms on both sides. The contest came to assume the character of that very struggle of nature which Hitler believed lay at the root of all human life, the survival of the fittest. The Soviet will to win, which emerged painfully from the wreckage of Soviet fortunes before Stalingrad, was not a mere abstraction but a spur to efforts that both sides, Soviet and German, would have thought impossible a year before. The Soviet people were the instrument of their own redemption from the depths of war.

  4

  THE MEANS TO VICTORY

  Bombers and Bombing

  ‘… our supreme effort must be to gain

  overwhelming mastery in the air. The Fighters

  are our salvation, but the Bombers alone

  provide the means to victory.’

  Winston Churchill, 3 September 1940

  * * *

  ON 6 OCTOBER 1942, at the height of the dangerous struggle on the Don steppe in front of Stalingrad, Pravda published a cartoon by Yefimov ridiculing the failure of Russia’s British ally to help the desperate Soviet forces by attacking the German rear. The picture showed three Blimpish British officers, General What-ifthey-lick-us, General What’s-the-hurry and General Why-take-risks, confronted by two go-getting young Americans, General Guts and General Decision. The Soviet public needed no caption. They understood that Britain, perhaps from timid
ity, certainly in bad faith, had failed to help her ally at her hour of greatest need.1

  It is easy to understand the disappointment felt by Soviet leaders and the Soviet people. Germany had almost won the contest in 1941; she was poised for what might be the decisive victory in 1942. The feeling in Moscow was that anything the British or Americans could do to tie down or divert German forces away from the Russian front should at least be attempted. Ever since the initial German assault in June 1941, Stalin had pleaded with the western powers to do something. In June 1942 a half-hearted hint was given from London and Washington that a ‘Second Front’ might be started in Europe in the course of that year. But actions spoke louder than words and only a month earlier Britain had suspended supplies to the Soviet Union on the difficult Arctic route to Archangel because of German submarine and air attack from Norway. And on 21 June, the anniversary of the German invasion, Rommel succeeded in capturing Tobruk with only limited resistance. In Moscow the ‘gutless’ surrender of Tobruk was contrasted with the heroic defence of Sebastopol. Stalin, not one to mince words, accused the British of cowardice.2

  In truth Britain and America lacked the trained manpower and shipping, particularly landing craft, to do anything very effective in Europe; British forces in North Africa were stretched to the limit containing a mere four German divisions. British and American military planning was based on the assumption that a large-scale landing in Europe could not be contemplated before the summer of 1943 at the earliest.3 But Churchill was bitterly provoked by the suggestion of western cowardice. On 30 July he proposed a faceto-face meeting with Stalin at a place of his choosing. The following day Stalin extended a formal invitation to come to Moscow. Churchill accepted. On 12 August he flew from the Middle East in a converted B-24 Liberator bomber which was so noisy that the passengers could only communicate by passing handwritten notes. The plane landed at Moscow in the early evening, and Churchill was whisked away in a limousine with windows of 2-inch-thick glass to State Villa No. 7 on the outskirts of the Russian capital. Churchill found everything prepared with ‘totalitarian lavishness’ – caviar, vodka, veteran servants with ‘beaming smiles’, and the novelty of mixer taps, which he later installed at Chartwell. At seven o’clock he was driven to the Kremlin to meet Stalin.4