Under Speer the German economy at last promised to deliver the sort of numbers produced in the Soviet Union and America. It was a promise still difficult to redeem. The military continued to disrupt long production runs and standardisation if they felt military necessity required it. The army procurement officers regarded Speer as an ‘inexperienced intruder’. Speer recalled ruefully in his memoirs the survival of ‘excessive bureaucratisation’, which he fought ‘in vain’.62 Göring kept a jealous hold on aircraft production until the spring of 1944, when real mass-production was introduced at last. The one thing that kept Speer going was Hitler’s backing, but the war economy always threatened to return to the unrationalised, disordered mêlée of its early years. For all his enthusiasm and sense of urgency, Speer was unable to reap an early harvest. Not until the summer of 1943 did the reforms begin to bear real fruit, long after the Soviet Union and the United States had mass-production established. At just the moment when German potential was on the point of being realised in the large, mechanised, centralised assembly plants, bombing began in earnest.
Bombing was the enemy of rationalisation. Speer’s deputy responsible for tank production explained to his postwar interrogators that bombing forced measures that contradicted mass-production: ‘the breaking down and dispersal of plants, starting up factories on account of their geographical position instead of their technical capacity …’63 As German factories moved into smaller, camouflaged premises, into woods or even underground, it became progressively more difficult to expand production. There was enough momentum in the Speer reforms to carry German industry to a peak in September 1944, but bombing made it impossible for managers and workers alike to achieve the maximum. By the autumn of 1944 the war industries were living off accumulated stocks of materials and components. Under the impact of bombing, conditions on the home front deteriorated rapidly. More and more of the workforce was made up of unwilling labourers forced from their homes across Europe to fill the German workhalls. By 1944 seven million of them – a quarter of the workforce – lived and worked in squalid conditions on low pay, regimented by the Nazi authorities, bullied and victimised by German workers whose own conditions in the industrial regions of the Reich were growing steadily worse. Food supplies declined and urban amenities were strained to breaking point; millions of Germans were made homeless and could not be satisfactorily rehabilitated. Hundreds of hours were spent huddled in shelters and absenteeism rates soared. The more bombing affected the willingness to work, the more the regime resorted to draconian methods to extract the labour. The SS mobilised the population of its empire of concentration and extermination camps, which was literally worked to death. Workers caught pilfering or slacking were taken into the camps or sent on ‘work education weekends’ organised by the Gestapo; even industrialists who displayed defeatism or obstructed the growing number of SS officials recruited to run the bombed economy could follow their employees behind barbed wire. Work was kept going on a basis of fear: dread of the Soviet enemy as the Red Army neared the borders of the Reich and dread of the rule of terror at home.64
The German wartime economy was a paradox. Germany possessed a wealth of resources, a large class of competent entrepreneurs and engineers and a highly skilled workforce, all at the disposal of an authoritarian system that brooked no opposition, led by a dictator with delusions of super-power grandeur. This was a rich mixture, which promised a great deal more than it could deliver. The German economy fell between two stools. It was not enough of a command economy to do what the Soviet system could do; yet it was not capitalist enough to rely, as America did, on the recruitment of private enterprise. Only too late was an effort made to do both these things, to coerce more ruthlessly and at the same time to give industry more responsibility for production. Before that German mobilisation was hostage to the ambitions of a highly professional and exclusive military elite which saw war in all its elements as a military affair and clung on to that prerogative with stifling effects on Germany’s industrial effort.
* * *
Hitler had little respect for American economic power. ‘What is America’, he asked, ‘but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records and Hollywood?’ He had even less for the Soviet Union. On the eve of Barbarossa he told Goebbels that between German and Soviet strength there was no comparison; ‘Bolshevism will collapse like a pack of cards,’ wrote Goebbels gleefully in his diary.65 These turned out to be profound misjudgements, though who, in the summer of 1941, could have clearly foreseen how rapidly and on what a scale America and the Soviet Union would arm themselves? Two years of production turned both states into the super-powers Hitler’s Germany hankered to become.
What Hitler failed to see was how central industry was to the Allied view of warfare. ‘Modern war is waged with steel,’ Churchill told Hopkins when he weighed up the imbalance between American and Japanese economic strength. Stalin’s view of the war was entirely conditioned by economics, as befitted any disciple of Marx: ‘The war will be won by industrial production,’ he told an American delegation in October 1941. Roosevelt’s opinion of American power was every bit as determinist. In planning the Victory Programme in 1941 he told War Secretary Stimson to work on the assumption ‘that the reservoir of munitions power available to the United States and her friends is sufficiently superior to that available to the Axis powers to insure defeat of the latter.’66 Though Hitler was the inspiration behind the German adoption of mass-production in 1941, he did not consider economics as central to the war effort. Rather, he stuck to the view that racial character – willpower, resolve, endurance – was the prime mover; weapons mattered only to the extent that they could be married to the moral qualities of the fighting man.
There was much in common between the Soviet and American experience. One of the correspondents who made the trip to Magnitogorsk observed that the Russian people were ‘in many ways like Americans … they have a fresh and unspoiled outlook which is close to our own.’67 These were sentiments that pre-dated the Cold War, but they contained a grain of truth. In both countries mobilisation was a hustling, improvised affair; technical tasks were tackled head-on and quickly; production was big in scale and easily standardised; engineers and managers were given wide scope to solve problems themselves. Both economies had a good deal of central planning, but here the similarity ends, for the one enjoyed a supervised abundance, the other a regimented scarcity. Both countries shared the sudden shock of unprovoked aggression, which gave a genuine urgency to economic planning, and forced their economies to give priority to finding a cluster of advanced weapons on which to concentrate production energies.
The situation facing Germany was very different. There was no direct threat to the homeland until the onset of serious bombing. German planners and designers had almost two years at war before conflict with the Soviet Union and America. During that time there was little pressure to mass-produce, even if the military had approved it, or to concentrate on a narrow band of designs. The military slowly built up their version of a heavily bureaucratic command economy, which displayed a ponderous inflexibility beside the enemy. A few hours before the attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, Speer wrote to him that the great strength of the American and Soviet systems was their ability to use ‘organisationally simple methods’. He drew a contrast between Germany’s ‘overbred organisation’ and the ‘art of improvisation’ on the other side.68 Speer was a man constantly banging his head against officialdom. Posterity, he warned Hitler, would judge that Germany lost the struggle by clinging on to an ‘arthritic organisational system’. Posterity might find this view a little harsh, for Speer himself had given the system a good shaking. But the contrast between American and Soviet productionism and Germany’s bureaucratised economy was more than superficial. No war was more industrialised than the Second World War. Factory for factory, the Allies made better use of their industry than their enemy.
7
A WAR OF ENGINES
Technology and Military Po
wer
‘… modern imperialist war
is a war of engines
– engines in the air and
engines on the land.’
N. Voznesensky, Chairman
of the Soviet State Planning Commission, 1940
* * *
ONE OF THE most famous of the German armoured divisions, the Panzer Lehr division commanded by General Fritz Bayerlein, experienced in 1944, at the height of the struggle for Nomandy, the full weight of Allied technical might. The hapless division, reduced after 49 days of continuous fighting to a mere 2,200 men and 45 serviceable tanks, held a stretch of French countryside 3 miles wide south of the town of St Lô. It sat right in the path of overwhelming American forces poised for the breakthrough – Operation Cobra – which destroyed the German front in France.
On the morning of 25 July waves of American Thunderbolt fighter-bombers swept over the division, every two minutes, fifty at a time. They dropped high explosive bombs and napalm incendiaries. They were followed by four hundred medium-bombers carrying 500-pound bombs. Then from the north came the sound every German soldier dreaded, the heavy drone of the big bombers – 1,500 Flying Fortresses and Liberators. From their swollen bomb-bays 3,300 tons of bombs obliterated almost everything on the ground. Finally, the German line, or what was left of it, was pounded by three hundred Lightnings carrying fragmentation bombs and more of the new incendiaries. It was an awesome display of power, numbing and terrifying for the soldiers and French civilians who lay under it. One survivor remembered that everything shook so much ‘it was like being at sea in a force 10 gale’.1
Almost half the Panzer Lehr remnant perished in the bombardment. Hundreds more were killed or blasted by the barrels of ten thousand American guns that opened up as the last aircraft disappeared from view. Bayerlein later told his captors that the experience of that morning was the worst he ever saw in battle. In front of him stretched a moon-like landscape, so filled with dust that German artillerymen were forced to fire blind at the oncoming enemy. All communications were destroyed. He could see no human life left where the bombs had fallen. To the astonishment of the Americans the bemused and wretched dregs of Panzer Lehr fought on, until they were swept aside by American armour the following day. Bayerlein reported that evening the utter destruction of his division. The same night the American General Hobbs, leading the assault, reported his success: ‘This thing has busted wide open.’2 Panzer Lehr’s few survivors joined the general retreat across France. When they were regrouped beyond the Seine they could find only twenty tanks and six self-propelled guns and a handful of lorries. From then until the end of the war this elite Panzer division averaged a strength of only 22 tanks instead of the 74 it should have had. Most of those who joined the division in 1944 soon became casualties, victims of an exceptional disparity in firepower and mobility between Germany and the western Allies.3
Here was a complete reversal of fortune. Four years before it was German armour and aircraft that tore the Allied front to shreds and sped almost unopposed across French soil; the combination of tank and aircraft proved irresistible. German forces were regarded as the most modern in the world, the product of years of frantic mechanisation and technical improvement. That apparent modernity gave the German armed forces in 1941 what one senior staff general, Gunther Blumentritt, called ‘the reputation and aura of invincibility’.4 Something of that same aura touched the Japanese when they swept aside western forces in southern Asia and the Pacific. The fighting skills of both peoples contrasted starkly with their enemies’ feeble efforts to obstruct them. Some of that reputation, though not all, was hastily constructed myth, serving to explain Allied humiliations. But about one thing there was no doubt in 1940 and 1941: the German use of air power and ground mobility set their armed forces apart from every other major state. Why that lead was lost, and then overturned, why Panzer Lehr was obliterated in Normandy, is a central explanation of Allied victory.
The answer lay in imitation of German practice. By the end of the war America, Britain and the Soviet Union possessed very large and increasingly effective mechanised forces; American and British Commonwealth armies were fully motorised; each of the Allies developed sophisticated systems of tactical air support, marrying together air and ground power. Given the extraordinary success of German arms, the Allied learning curve had to be short. In the Soviet Union, against which the bulk of German armour and air power was concentrated in 1941 and 1942, Stalin grasped the obvious lesson. In his speech to mark the 24th anniversary of the revolution on 6 November 1941 he pinpointed Soviet weaknesses in tanks and aircraft as the critical difference between the two sides: ‘In modern warfare it is very difficult for the infantry to fight without tanks and without adequate protection from the air.’5 Priority in 1942 went to the production of tanks and planes, with revolutionary changes in the way the Red Army deployed them. Britain and America were forced to build up large modernised forces almost from scratch in the early 1940s to counter the substantial operational skills displayed by the enemy, and both adapted German practice to their particular circumstances.
By contrast the military effectiveness of both German and Japanese forces first stagnated, then went into decline. Both had been flattered at the beginning of the war by the weaknesses of Allied forces, which served to exaggerate their military prowess. American servicemen were issued with pamphlets ‘Exploding the Japanese “Superman” Myth’ to counter the image of Japanese superiority. In reality Japanese forces were poorly armed, a situation masked by high levels of training and endurance. The technological balance between Japan and her enemies was greatly in the latter’s favour, and the underdeveloped state of the Japanese economy made extensive modernisation of the armed forces difficult to achieve. For every American soldier in the Pacific war there were 4 tons of supplies; for every Japanese a mere 2 pounds.6 German forces were also under-armed for much of the war. Modernisation was concentrated on a small portion of the army; German air power, for all its successes, remained limited in role and in size and was all but eliminated by 1944 from the skies of battle. By 1944 a great portion of the German ground forces relied on horse-transport. Neither the quality nor quantity of German technical resources was sufficient to prevent the dissipation of the myth of German invincibility.
* * *
The core armoury of offensive warfare in the Second World War consisted of aircraft, tanks and trucks. The effectiveness of these weapons in German hands depended on their use in combination, concentrated in great number at the decisive point of battle. Operational success also relied on communication. Radio played a vital role in linking tank to tank, and tank to aircraft. Good communications enhanced the flexibility of armoured forces and helped to concentrate its firepower. They were essential for units that were effectively self-contained divisions, operating with their own motorised infantry – some in trucks, some in armoured carriers – engineers, artillery and anti-aircraft batteries. The German Panzer forces did not have to wait for the mass of ordinary infantry divisions to catch up by rail and by foot but could fight at the pace of the tank, punching holes in the enemy front to outflank and envelop his forces. Panzer divisions were organised by the German army as battle winners, designed to ‘strike decisively’.7 They worked at their best on flat open plain, less well in built-up areas, and with least effect in mountainous terrain. The wide even grasslands of the Soviet Union showed German armoured forces at their most deadly in the summer of 1941. Against overwhelming odds – some 3,648 tanks against an estimated fifteen thousand Soviet tanks – the Panzer armies cut swathe after swathe through the Soviet defences, virtually destroyed the Soviet tank and air arm, and brought the Soviet Union almost to the point of collapse.8
Though the Soviet tank and air forces were numerically large, the German attack exposed fundamental weaknesses in the way they were used. The key to Soviet revival in 1942 and 1943 lay in improving the quality of both forces and in the transformation of the way in which they were used tactically o
n the battlefield. The eastern front was vital to Allied survival. It was here that German armour and air power were blunted. More than two-thirds of German tank casualties were suffered in the east. Later on at Kursk Soviet armies won the largest tank battle of the war.
The almost complete destruction of the Soviet mechanised corps in 1941 allowed the Red Army to start from scratch in the spring of 1942. The basic organisational unit became the tank corps, equipped with 168 tanks, supported by anti-tank guns, a battalion of Katyusha rockets and anti-aircraft artillery. Two tank corps and a rifle division were put together to form tank armies, combining tanks, infantry and supporting arms and services, like the German Panzer armies. The shortage of purpose-built armoured carriers for the infantry, which helped German soldiers to keep up with the tanks, was solved by the simple but dangerous expedient of welding hand rails on to Soviet tanks, each of which then advanced into battle with a dozen riflemen clinging precariously to its hull. In September 1942 the Red Army began to organise mechanised corps, with a higher proportion of infantry and fewer tanks. The infantry were heavily armed and more mobile than the bulk of Soviet forces, particularly when, from December 1942, they began to receive the first self-propelled artillery units. During 1943 both tank and mechanised corps were strengthened and the modernisation of their equipment was accelerated. By the autumn of 1943 each tank corps boasted 195 of the most modern tanks, each tank army about four hundred. Between 1942 and 1945 43 tank corps were activated, and 22 mechanised corps. Overall Soviet tank strength climbed steadily from the low point of November 1941; by the end of 1942 it was more than double German strength, and by the autumn of 1943 more than three times greater.9 The new tank and mechanised forces were designed to do what German armour did, to punch hard at the weak points of the enemy line, to pierce it and to exploit that penetration in sweeping pincer movements. It was first used with real success at Stalingrad, and repeated devastatingly at Kursk, when other improvements in equipment and training began to bear fruit. The new Soviet tank armies were equipped almost entirely with the new generation of tanks, the versatile, hard-hitting T-34, and the heavier KV-1. The T-34 provided mobility, the slower KV-1 firepower against enemy strongholds or tanks. During 1942 they were converted to diesel engines, which improved the tanks’ radius of action by a factor of three; they had wide tracks, unlike most German tanks, to cope with the autumn muds and the winter snow; and during 1943 the greatest defect of the Soviet tank arm was made good with the gradual introduction of two-way radio. At a stroke this improved the battlefield performance of the tank arm. Air support could be called up, and tank commanders could communicate with each other quickly to bring armour to bear where it was needed. The use of just two tank types at any one time throughout the war (the KV-1 was phased out as too slow in 1943 and replaced with the ‘Iosef Stalin’ IS-2 in 1944) simplified problems of repair and maintenance. Teams of engineers accompanied the armoured corps, travelling with lorries full of equipment and spare parts. When Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards tank army drove 150 miles in 48 hours to help at the Battle of Kursk along roads so choked with dust that the red circle of the sun was barely visible through the shroud, mechanics performed miracles keeping almost all the tanks going. In two days of heavy fighting the Guards lost four hundred tanks, but 112 were returned by the repair crews within hours.10 The Red Army learned quickly from its mistakes; critical improvements were made. In 1941 and 1942 Soviet armoured forces lost six or seven vehicles to every one German; by the autumn of 1944 the ratio was down to one to one.
Why the Allies Won Page 31