A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  The defence of Tsaritsyn was not, of course, all myth, even if Stalin’s role in it was used in the 1930s to puff up his reputation once he had become dictator. The Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 provoked an almost immediate counter-revolution. By the spring of 1918, the new regime was being assailed from all sides by ‘White’ armies made up of a wide range of enemies, including the southern Cossacks commanded by Lieutenant General Pyotr Krasnov, the Ataman of the Don Cossack Host. Krasnov was armed by the Germans, who in 1918, following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk made with Lenin’s government in March, occupied the Ukraine. Krasnov built up an army of 40,000, supported by artillery and machine guns, and began to drive the infant Red Army units across the Don Steppe towards the Volga, just as Hitler’s armies were to do a generation later. In July, Krasnov launched his first attempt to seize Tsaritsyn and the surrounding area and cut off the food artery to the Bolshevik north.

  It was Krasnov’s threat to Tsaritsyn that prompted Lenin to send Stalin south to make sure that the town did not fall and that the critical grain supplies from the Caucasus, on which the Red Army and the cities depended, could be maintained. On 22 July, a Military Council was established composed of Stalin, a young Bolshevik commander named Kliment Voroshilov and the local communist organizer, S. K. Minin. Stalin set about reorganizing the local military effort, but he distrusted the former Tsarist officers appointed by the head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky. Stalin acted with complete ruthlessness, ordering the execution of men he regarded as incompetent or politically unreliable. He reported back to Moscow: ‘I chase and swear at everyone who asks for it… You can rest assured that I will not spare anyone.’ The first Cossack assault was turned back in August. Red Army military forces were reorganized as the Southern Front under overall command of the former Tsarist general, Pavel Sytin, who had to put up with Stalin’s interference in everything he did. The town and the food supply were still not safe, however. In September 1918, Krasnov reorganized his Cossack Host into two armies: one of 20,000 men and 47 guns; a second with 25,000 men, 93 guns and 6 armoured trains. Behind them stood a reserve army of new recruits, composed of another 20,000.

  It was this battle in late September 1918 that gave rise to the myth of Stalin as the military hero who saved the revolution – he ‘took the reins of leadership into his own firm hands’, wrote Voroshilov in Pravda a decade later. The 10th Army defending the town was not outnumbered, since there were about 40,000 men, 152 guns and 13 armoured trains in support, but the Cossacks were savage and experienced fighters. There was fierce fighting in the suburbs of the town while in the first week of October, Cossack forces reached the Volga south of the town and crossed to the far side of the river, behind the Soviet front. As the White soldiers pressed towards the city, Zhloba’s ‘Steel Division’ of 15,000 men, disobeying military orders, answered Stalin’s summons and marched 800 kilometres (500 miles) in sixteen days, falling on the rear of the Cossack army on the seventeenth day and saving Tsaritsyn from capture. By 25 October, with help from other revolutionary armies, the Cossacks were driven back across the River Don, just as the Soviet counter-offensive in the rear of the German 6th Army later on saved Stalingrad.

  It is difficult to separate myth and reality in the differing accounts of the battle. By the time Voroshilov, now commissar for the army and navy and Stalin’s close ally, wrote his eulogy to the dictator in 1929, few people would have dared to contradict him. Tsaritsyn became known as the ‘Red Verdun’ because it suited Bolshevik propaganda to have an apparently hard-won and symbolic victory. The evidence surrounding the arrival of the ‘Steel Division’, in the nick of time thanks to Stalin, is unreliable. Moreover, Trotsky’s irritation at Stalin’s interference with military orders led to his removal back to Moscow on 19 October, and in November Voroshilov was relieved of command. Later, in 1919, Tsaritsyn was captured by the Whites without serious threat to the survival of the revolution elsewhere. As with many battles, the story of the defence of Tsaritsyn in 1918 was used to serve political purposes quite independent of the battle itself. Stalin, Voroshilov and other men who had fought with them rose to political power and high command; Stalin never forgave Trotsky’s characterization of Bolshevik front-line representatives as ‘Party ignoramuses’ and drove him from Russia a decade after Tsaritsyn. The irony is that Stalingrad was saved from German capture in 1942 only because Stalin at last recognized the considerable limits to his military genius and let the professional soldiers take the lead, once again in the nick of time.

  * * *

  No. 96 SINK THE BISMARCK

  23-27 May 1941

  * * *

  There were very few naval battles in the European theatre of the Second World War. The German navy proved too small and the Italian navy too unprepared for naval war. The Royal Navy was overwhelmingly more powerful than the navies of the European Axis states. Yet, remarkably, the small German force did pose a challenge. Alongside aircraft and submarines, the German navy had a number of major vessels designed as merchant raiders. Their task was to support the blockade of Britain by sinking poorly armed and poorly protected merchant convoys in the Atlantic Ocean. The most famous of them was the German battleship Bismarck.

  Launched in Hamburg in February 1939, Bismarck was the pride of the new German fleet. In spring 1941, the naval commander-in-chief, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, planned to send his small high-seas squadron out into the Atlantic to contribute to the air and sea blockade that was threatening to undermine Britain’s war effort. It was a gamble. Bismarck was to have been accompanied by the new battleship Tirpitz, but it was still undergoing trials; the large battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were undergoing repair. In the end, Bismarck sailed for the ocean on 18 May 1941, accompanied only by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. The commander of the force, Vice Admiral Günther Lütjens, was dubious about the possibility of success – and was no enthusiast for Hiter – but he understood the penalty for protesting.

  A Fairey Swordfish biplane flies at an air show in Duxford, England in 2010. The slow-moving aircraft was a key element in the Royal Navy’s air arm during the Second World War. Armed with a torpedo, one Swordfish proved enough to cripple the German battleship Bismarck.

  Lütjens was right to be cautious. His departure had been revealed to the Royal Navy by Ultra decrypts and by agents in Norway and Sweden. A reconnaissance Spitfire soon spotted the battleship off the Norwegian coast at Bergen. A British heavy cruiser, HMS Norfolk, finally made radar contact on 23 May in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. The British ship shadowed Bismarck until heavier Royal Navy vessels arrived the following day. The new battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Hood, commanded by Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, prepared to engage. It was, on paper, an even contest, but Bismarck’s gunners were well trained. Soon after firing began at 6 a.m., an accurate shell detonated the ammunition store on Hood. The ship blew up at once and within three minutes had sunk, taking down all but three of the 1,418 men on board. Prince of Wales was damaged too, but Lütjens refused to pursue it since his orders were to avoid engagement with major enemy vessels. Bismarck had also sustained some damage: the forward radar was knocked out and the fuel tanks damaged. Forced to sail at 20 knots, the battleship made for port at Saint-Nazaire on the French west coast to undertake essential repairs.

  Smaller British vessels tried to shadow Bismarck but contact was lost after the German ship took evasive action. It now seemed very likely that Bismarck would escape. Within hours there would be long-distance German air cover from France and the support of German destroyers. Then, against the advice of his staff, Lütjens inexplicably sent a half-hour radio message to shore. This was long enough for the British to intercept the transmission and to fix the ship’s new position, but the British battleship King George V miscalculated the route and lost contact. By chance a Catalina flying boat of the RAF Coastal Command found Bismarck on the evening of 26 May, steaming off the Irish coast and within striking distance of safety in France.
The only prospect left for stopping Bismarck’s escape was a lucky air strike. It happened that the Royal Navy aircraft carrier Ark Royal had made its way north from the Mediterranean on hearing of the German threat. The carrier was close enough to be able to send its Fairey Swordfish bi-planes, armed with Britain’s only effective aerial torpedo. The aircraft looked old-fashioned by the standards of recent air combat, but it could operate well enough where there was no air opposition. One of the aircraft found and attacked the German battleship at 9 p.m., shortly before dusk. The Bismarck’s rudder and steering mechanism were damaged and the battleship shuddered to a crawl.

  The hit was made in the nick of time, but it was enough. The following morning King George V and the battleship Rodney moved in for the kill. This time the battle was anything but even. Hit after hit rocked the German ship, then at 9 a.m. the bridge was hit and the command wiped out. At approximately 10.30 a.m. the destroyer HMS Dorsetshire sent three torpedoes towards the stricken vessel. At 10.39 the Bismarck sank, with 1,900 out of its 2,000 crew drowned. Recent exploration of the wreck, taken with testimony of the survivors, has raised the possibility that the ship was scuttled at the last moment, rather than despatched by Royal Navy torpedoes. The exact truth of those last few moments may never be known with certainty.

  The Bismarck might well have survived to fight another day, though even after repairs, the risk of trying to penetrate into the Atlantic was considerable. In the end, everything was owed to the luck of one Fleet Air Arm aircraft finding the ship at the last moment and, in fading light, inflicting sufficient damage to prevent its escape. The destruction of the Bismarck also highlighted an important truth about naval warfare. After thousands of years, the ship’s dominant position in battle was effectively ended by the advent of air power. Without effective air protection, naval vessels became sitting ducks. Prince of Wales escaped because the Germans had no aircraft carriers, but six months later it was sunk in a matter of minutes by Japanese naval bombers in the South China Sea. Air power did not have it all its own way – the carrier Ark Royal was crippled by a submarine a few months later and sank on its way to Gibraltar – but the tide had turned. Bismarck may have been stopped in the nick of time, but time was running out for old-fashioned battleships.

  The battleship Bismarck, seen here at the launching ceremony in Hamburg in Hitler’s presence on 14 February 1939, was the pride of the new German navy. As Germany’s largest warship, the 41,000-ton vessel was expected to play a key role in interrupting trade to the British Isles in the event of war.

  * * *

  No. 97 BATTLE OF MIDWAY

  4 June 1942

  * * *

  It is difficult to think of any battle in the Pacific war, or indeed the whole of the Second World War, quite as decisive and significant as the Battle of Midway. And yet it was a naval battle fought without a gun being fired. It was decided by just ten bombs, a ratio of effort to outcome only exceeded by the two nuclear bombs three years later. Those ten bombs could so easily have gone astray. If Midway was against the odds in the conventional sense of an imbalance of forces, it was also against any reasonable bet that enough American aircraft would get through the wall of Japanese fighters to inflict terminal damage on all the enemy’s aircraft carriers.

  The background to the battle lay in the decision by the Japanese naval high command to exploit the stunning attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 by threatening Midway Island, which was within striking distance of Hawaii, and luring what was left of the US Pacific Fleet to a decisive engagement. Once defeated, the Japanese assumed that the United States would accept a stalemate in the Pacific and allow the Japanese to build their new Asia-Pacific empire. Japanese naval planners began preparation in May 1942, under the codename ‘MI’. The navy brought together an imposing force organized in five attack groups: a carrier force of four fleet carriers commanded by Vice Admiral Nagumo, which was at the heart of the Japanese plan; a large battleship fleet, including the flagship Yamato commanded by the naval commander-in chief, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto; a smaller force to seize and occupy Midway Island; a further diversionary force to capture some of the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska; and finally a screen of submarines to provide intelligence and to intercept American vessels.

  The Japanese could not be confident that the US Pacific Fleet would accept battle, but they assumed that the loss of Midway would be too great a threat for the Americans to ignore. Japanese intelligence discounted the two American aircraft carriers it knew about because those were assumed to be somewhere in the southwest Pacific, guarding Australia. What they did not know was that US Naval Intelligence on Hawaii had broken enough of the Japanese naval code, JN-25, to be able to work out Japanese intentions.

  A painting of the Battle of Midway by the American artist Robert Grant Smith (1914-2001), who became famous for his depictions of naval aviation. Here two Douglas-SBD-3s fly over the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi. Only three bombs on target were required to turn the Japanese flagship into a blazing inferno.

  American uncertainty about the destination of the Japanese fleet was overcome by a clever ruse. A message was sent to Midway by regular radio traffic, which it was known the Japanese would intercept. When the message was relayed back to the Japanese naval command in code, it betrayed the codeword for Midway, confirming Midway as the fleet’s destination. The American commander, Admiral Frank Fletcher, decided to position the American fleet northwest of Midway, out of range of Japanese aircraft and submarines, to ambush the Japanese when they advanced on the island. The whole strategy rested on the presence of not two, but three American aircraft carriers, commanded by Rear Admiral Raymond ‘Electric Brain’ Spruance, nicknamed after his capacity for cool and rapid thinking under pressure. Hornet and Enterprise sailed north from the southwest Pacific, and were joined by Yorktown, quickly repaired at Pearl Harbor in time to join the battle.

  As the Japanese fleet steamed towards Midway and the Aleutians, it was assumed that the American navy had no knowledge of the plan. On 3 June, an American Catalina flying boat spotted the Midway task force and reported back. The Japanese carrier task force was known to be further to the north, so Fletcher moved his force to be on the northern flank of Nagumo’s ships as they moved towards Midway. On the morning of 4 June, a Japanese reconnaissance plane flew over the American fleet but failed to see it; other reconnaissance aircraft failed to take off, but Nagumo was overconfident that there was no American strike force within reach. He ordered waves of carrier aircraft to pound the small American base on Midway Island. An American aircraft spotted the carriers, and bombers from Midway air base flew out to attack Nagumo’s force. Most were shot down by the screen of waiting Mitsubishi Zero fighters. Then at 7.30 a.m. news finally came from a Japanese aircraft that there were American ships to the north, but no carriers. Nagumo hesitated. He had aircraft converting from torpedoes to bombs, and aircraft about to return from the Midway raids to rearm. At 8.20 a.m. he was warned that there might after all be one American carrier. He decided this was not a great threat and allowed his aircraft to land for rearming and refuelling. His carriers were now exceptionally vulnerable; all over the decks and below decks were aircraft with fuel lines, stacks of bombs and torpedoes and gun ammunition.

  Fletcher and Spruance enjoyed remarkable good fortune. Nagumo’s decision meant that most Japanese aircraft were dangerously immobile at just the point when the American carrier aircraft prepared to make their strike. The attack was nevertheless not easy, over open ocean with a small target to locate. Aircraft from Hornet took off on a notorious ‘flight to nowhere’, with some having to ditch into the ocean after failing to find the enemy and running out of fuel. Torpedo bombers from the other two carriers struck Nagumo’s fleet at around 9.30 a.m. They were shot to pieces by the circling Zeros – only six out of forty-one returned, and not a single torpedo hit. Everything rested on a group of fifty-four Dauntless dive bombers circling high above, undetected by Japanese fighters. They dived out of the sun ‘like
a beautiful silver waterfall’, as one survivor recalled. Their bombs were the margin between victory and defeat. Most failed to hit the target, but Nagumo’s flagship Akagi was hit by three bombs and turned into a floating torch; Kaga was hit by four bombs and Soryu by three, both blazing out of control. Aircraft from the remaining Japanese carrier, Hiryu, managed to damage Yorktown (which was sunk by submarine three days later) but at 5 p.m. it, too, was struck by four bombs dropped by dive-bombers from Enterprise, and it sank the following morning, with its commander, Admiral Yamaguchi, standing on deck, sword drawn, as it slipped beneath the waves.

  The Battle of Midway had been decided by just ten bombs. Of course the outcome relied on sound intelligence, Nagumo’s failure to take the American threat seriously, and the solid training of America’s professional naval aviators, but the margin was slim indeed. Most bombs fell harmlessly into the sea. For Yamamoto, the outcome was disastrous, different in every respect from what had been expected. The Japanese navy never recovered. Japan built a further seven carriers, the United States a further twenty-three. Almost three-quarters of Japan’s elite naval airmen were casualties. For the American Pacific Fleet, and for the American people, the improbable victory against an overwhelmingly larger force, thanks to just a handful of bombs, finally confirmed that old-fashioned big fleet engagement, battleship to battleship, was history. Midway was won entirely by aircraft.

  * * *

  No. 98 BATTLE OF KURSK

  5-13 July 1943