With France defeated and Britain off balance, Hitler was prepared for Russia. He readied a campaign and named it Barbarossa for a red-haired German warrior emperor in the Middle Ages who, according to legend, would one day wake and fight again for Germany. In 1941, as summer started, Hitler sent 3 million men to fight in Russia on a front 2,000 miles across. He knew the risk. Napoleon had done the same, 130 years before, and lost half a million men to hunger, cold, and wounds. But Hitler counted on a rapid win, before the cold began. He confidently told a German general, “You have only to kick the door in.”
This sudden blow took Stalin by surprise, though why it did so no one, to this day, can understand. Surely he had known that Hitler would break their pact when he wished to. Why, then, had he ignored the warnings that he got from Winston Churchill; from Russians watching on the German border; from Germany’s ambassador in Moscow, who even told him the day of the invasion; and from a German deserter who revealed not just the day but the hour (and whom Stalin ordered shot)?
The Russians were surprised not only by the fact of the invasion but by its method. Like the Poles and the western Europeans before them, they were ill prepared for blitzkrieg. By fall, the Germans had encircled Leningrad in northwest Russia. In the center they were fighting in the Moscow suburbs. In the south they had conquered half the wheat lands of Ukraine.
As in World War I, the Germans captured Russian armies whole. During all of World War II they captured nearly 6 million Russians. Hitler had decreed that war in Russia not be waged in “knightly fashion,” and more than half these captives died.
A German witness watched one time as captive Russians dragged themselves to German prison camps. “Suddenly we saw a broad, earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us. From it came a subdued hum, like that from a beehive…. We hastened out of the foul cloud that surrounded them. Then what we saw transfixed us where we stood and we forgot our nausea. Were these really human beings, these gray-brown figures, these shadows lurching toward us, stumbling and staggering…creatures whom only some last flicker of will to live enabled to obey the order to march?”1
1John Keegan, The Second World War (1989), p. 196.
The Russians had already, for decades, suffered chaos, civil war, and Stalin’s terror. Now on top of that they all, not only the soldiers, suffered greatly in the war. The people of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) had it worse than most; they underwent a German siege that lasted eighteen months. Their daily ration was a scrap of bread. It’s said that dogs and cats were first to vanish, then the crows. Exhausted, famished people dropped dead in the streets. One evening at the Pushkin Theater people pulled a dying actor off the stage; the show went on. Hunger, cold, disease, and German cannons killed a third of the city’s million people.
This is sacrifice: Dmitry Ivanov had charge of rice at Leningrad’s seed bank, where grains with genes the world might someday need were carefully preserved. After Ivanov had died of hunger at his post, someone found that he had faithfully preserved several thousand packs of rice. The specialist in peanuts, and the woman who preserved the oats, and half a dozen others also perished at their desks. Instead of eating priceless seeds they starved to death.
For the Axis side, the summer and the autumn months of 1942 were good. In west and central Europe, Germans now were ruling the very lands Napoleon once had held. In Russia, they had pushed far south to where they could seize grain and oil, and they smashed the major town of Stalingrad. (Hitler claimed that it was “firmly” in his hands, but we shall see that he was wrong.) On the North Atlantic, German submarines were sinking British ships that carried vital goods from North America. In Africa, Rommel, called the “Desert Fox,” felt so sure of taking Egypt that he chose a horse (a snow white stallion) on which to ride in triumph into Cairo.
NOW THE WAR, which so far had been fought in Europe and Africa, suddenly enlarged; it spread across the world.
The reason was Japan’s unending drive for empire. Japan already held Korea, much of China, and Taiwan, but on the eve of World War II its leaders wanted more. Japan lacked raw materials, and they dreamed of building what they called a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. If only they could take the Asian colonies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands, they’d have abundant rubber, metals, coal, and oil. The colonies they wanted included what now are Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar (or Burma), and Indonesia.
The aloof and revered emperor of Japan, an amateur biologist, was more at ease with fish and fungi than with men. It was Prime Minister (and general) Hideki Tojo who shaped events. Tojo was a friend of Japan’s treaty partner, Germany, and he led a cabinet of army and navy officers said to have “smelled of gunpowder.” To them, the world in 1941 presented just the opening they needed. The European powers had either been subdued or were struggling for their lives. Their colonies begged for taking, like pies that a cook sets out to cool in a kitchen window.
The United States, however, blocked the road. America held the Philippines, which lay on the sea route from Japan to the European colonies it wanted. America was sure to keep Japan from grabbing colonies and getting oil and other goods that it could use in war. So the Japanese resolved to throw a sucker punch. If they did, they may have hoped, the soft Americans would never spend their blood and gold to get revenge.
Before it threw that punch, Japan sent forces down from China to occupy France’s Indochina (now Kampuchea, Vietnam, and Laos). Because of this and other matters, in the fall of 1941 Japanese and U.S. diplomats in Washington held discussions. By now Americans had cracked the Japanese version of the Germans’ Enigma, and could read Japan’s coded messages. They knew that even as the talks went on Japan was readying a blow against America. Washington sent warnings to U.S. commanders in Hawaii and the Philippines.
Early on a Sunday morning in December 1941, Japanese airplanes hit Hawaii. They caught the Americans by surprise, and sank or grounded warships that, despite the warning sent from Washington, were anchored in the harbor. (Most of them were later raised, repaired, and sent to war.) Luckily for America, none of its aircraft carriers was in port. The Japanese pilots found U.S. airplanes on the ground, bunched wing-to-wing, and easily destroyed them.
Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. president, denounced this catlike pounce as “infamy,” as if the Japanese should have told him they were planning to attack. America of course declared war on Japan, and so did Britain. Hitler and Mussolini backed their far-off Axis friend and declared war on the United States, which in turn declared war on them. Here the German and Italian leaders made a great mistake. It’s true, the Axis pact obliged them to support Japan, but in the past Hitler had never felt compelled to keep his word. If he had just kept out, America might well have thrown its weight largely against Japan. Instead, he fused two almost unconnected wars, and egged America to fight him.
The Japanese had much to do before America had time to arm itself and hit them back. They quickly seized the European colonies they wanted and the Philippines. They even pondered taking India and Australia.
Only a few months after the surprise attacks, the United States won a battle at sea. This is how: In the spring of 1942 Americans discovered, from decoded messages, that Japanese ships were steaming across the Pacific. Their fleet included four carriers, each of which could serve as a base for seventy airplanes. But where exactly, on an ocean covering half the world, was this armada headed? The coded Japanese signals that the Americans were reading called the target “AF.” An American code analyst guessed that AF was Midway Island, a lonely Pacific atoll that served the United States as an air base. He tricked the Japanese into confirming (in a coded message to other Japanese) that he was right.
So U.S. warships, fewer than Japan’s, hurried to the island. Over many hundred miles of ocean the airplanes of the fleets engaged. The battle reached a climax when U.S. bombers attacked the Japanese carriers at a time when their planes were loading and refueling. The decks were strewn with bombs and fuel, making eac
h ship as vulnerable as a fireworks factory. The bombers plunged. They sank two carriers; disabled one, which was sunk at noon; and routed another, which they chased and later sank. This all took place between 10:25 A.M. and 10:30. In five minutes the Japanese had lost their dominance at sea.
AS 1942 RAN into 1943, the Allies, east and west, had more than Midway to cheer about. Factories in America were almost fully geared for war and were turning out supplies for all the Allies, including Russia. They would soon be turning out a ship a day and an airplane in five minutes. Meanwhile, on the North Atlantic, the Allies started to destroy the German subs that preyed on transport ships carrying goods to Europe.
In Africa, the British held the Germans back from Cairo, and Americans joined the fight. The Allies crushed the Germans and Italians, capturing a quarter of a million men. Allied armies next invaded Italy and slowly pushed a German army north.
The crucial zone of World War II, however, was on the Russian steppes. On those vast plains the battles were the biggest, and the suffering the greatest. And there, like other conquerors before them, German troops ran into troubles. One of these was “General Winter.” The Germans were not ready for the cold, or hardened to it. Their engine oil turned first to paste and then to glue. While scrawny Russian horses seemed to thrive by nibbling straw from roofs, cold and hungry German ones collapsed. And while the Russian boots had warm felt soles, the German ones had leather soles held on by tacks. Warmth flowed down the metal tacks, and Germans by the tens of thousands lost some toes.
The greatest German problem was the abundance of Russians. Stalin scooped up new recruits as fast as his troops died in battle. As nature can replace an octopus’s missing arm, so Stalin, if he lost an army, put another in its place. A country fights with what it has. When the war was over, Russian officers were shocked to learn that other countries’ armies cleared a path across a minefield by blasting it with shells. Such a waste of shells! The Russians said their method was to form a column and order “Forward march!”
Although they had more men than shells, it’s also true that the Russians manufactured most of what they needed. By rights, when Germans took their towns the Russians should have lost the factories that made their clothing, tanks, and guns. Instead the Russians hauled whole factories over mountains, and rebuilt them in the east. And what the Russians didn’t make America provided.
For both sides, the central Russian city of Stalingrad was crucial. To control it was essential since, if the Germans took this sprawling river city, they could block the oil boats on the Volga, crippling Russia. And with its name, Stalingrad was a symbol. Hitler ordered that it be taken, and Stalin warned his generals, “Not one step backward!”
For months the soldiers battled hand to hand in cellars, sewers, and alleys, and from loft to loft in battered factories, up to their hips in rubble. A German soldier wrote that Stalingrad was not a town but “an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke…a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames…. Dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank.”
In early 1943 the Germans nearly won the city. But then two rested Russian armies dashed to Stalingrad from north and south across the snowy steppes. They circled it and trapped the Germans. The German commanding general wished to fight his way outside the city, but Hitler radioed him to remain. When a German army tried to bring relief, the Russians threw it back. The Germans’ food ran out, and they died of hunger, cold, and sickness. Once they had numbered a third of a million; now they were down to 100,000. The Russians also suffered heavy casualties. They lost more men at Stalingrad than America would lose in all the war.
Finally, disobeying Hitler, the German general surrendered. Hitler had expected him to kill himself and rise to “national immortality.” Instead, said Hitler bitterly, “he prefers to go to Moscow.” In Moscow, Russians rang the Kremlin bells.
Russian armies followed up the victory. Using horses, trucks, and sleighs with camels, they struck the shaken Germans at other points along the front. In just two months they won back all the land they’d lost in 1942. Only once, at Kursk in the Ukraine in the summer of 1943, the Germans halted the pursuing Russians. In a giant battle lasting fifty days, the German forces conquered back a meager twenty miles. When they lost momentum, the Russians counterattacked and won back what they had briefly lost. The battle cost the Germans 1,400 planes, 3,000 tanks, and 40,000 men. After Kursk, the Russians rumbled on and swept the Germans back as far as Poland.
While the Russians, in the east, drove the Germans back, the western Allies were preparing for an invasion on the other side. Their supreme commander was a U.S. general, Dwight Eisenhower, a gifted organizer. In Britain he assembled an armada. When ready, it comprised two million British, Canadian, and American soldiers; 80 warships; 5,000 other ships; 1,500 tanks; 12,000 airplanes; 4,000 landing craft; and two huge artificial floating harbors. The Allies planned to cross the English Channel, storm the western coast of France, emplace the harbors, land the tanks and trucks, and battle eastward.
Before the dawn on June 6, 1944, the armada, so vast it reached to the horizon, crossed the Channel. This was but the first of many crossings on that day. (The planning had been so careful that every soldier carried not just seasickness pills but what the military labeled “Bag, vomit, one.”) The Germans were indeed expecting an invasion, but they thought it would be at Calais, where France is nearest to England. Instead, the Allies landed farther south at beaches on the coast of Normandy.
With heavy packs and rifles, men jumped off their landing craft in water full of swimming tanks, floating boxes, shattered boats, and severed limbs and heads. On several beaches they came under heavy German fire from atop the cliffs. Many died. Along one beach a colonel with a bloody cloth wrapped around his injured wrist strode among the wounded and the frightened shouting, “They’re murdering us here! Let’s move inland and get murdered!” They crossed the sand, and climbed the cliffs.
As they started inland, Hitler eased their task a little. Believing that this landing was a feint and a bigger landing would soon follow farther up the coast, he held back his reserves. The Allied troops fanned out, and launched a drive through France and toward Berlin. Later, other Allied forces landed in the south of France, hurried north, and joined the drive.
After the Germans had slowly retreated for half a year, Hitler hit the Allies back. The place was that familiar battleground, the Belgian forest of Ardennes, and the time was late fall, season of fog and snow. (A German planner had poetically named this German operation Autumn Mist. After the Germans had punched a salient in their front, the Allies named it the Battle of the Bulge.) At first the German counterblow succeeded, but then the Germans slowed, held back both by Allied bombing and the fact that they had, literally, run out of gas. The Allies pushed them back, and when they reached the Rhine they found a bridge the Germans hadn’t wrecked. They poured across the river into Germany.
One has to wonder why the Germans kept on fighting as their foes pressed in from east and west. They hadn’t enough men to fill their ranks, and fuel became so scarce they harnessed steers to drag their tanks to battle. The leading Nazis would not quit because they knew the Allies would refuse to parley and planned to punish them. But it wasn’t only fear of punishment that kept the Germans fighting. For many of them, surrender was unthinkable. Better far to fight until the last, and then, as in the ancient German legend of the twilight of the gods, perish in the flames.
However, certain Germans did want a negotiated peace. Believing one could be arranged if only Hitler were removed, a group of officers conspired to kill him. One of these was Klaus Philip Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, formerly a tank commander. Battle wounds had already cost him his left eye, his right hand, and two fingers of the other hand. But Stauffenberg agreed to carry out the risky task. At a meeting held at Hitler’s headquarters, he left a time bomb in a briefcase next to Hitler’s chair. But just before the bomb exploded, someone moved the case, or maybe
Hitler moved. He survived, wounded, angry. He killed Stauffenberg, some other plotters, and five thousand others who might have known about the plot. General Rommel, the “Desert Fox” and hero of two wars, was marginally involved. The Nazis offered him a choice, suicide or trial, and Rommel swallowed poison.
In the meantime the Russians had fought their way through Poland and were the first to reach Berlin. They battled through the suburbs to the center of the city. As they fought with diehard Germans, shells exploded, buildings fell, and liberated prisoners and drunken Russians raped and plundered.
In a bunker far below the ground, Hitler carried on. He tried to motivate his broken armies with radio speeches, and wrote a “will” enjoining Nazis not to quit the fight with Communists and Jews. He learned that the Allies had defeated the German army in Italy. (Italian partisans had murdered Mussolini and his mistress and hung them upside down like slaughtered pigs in a public square.) Hitler knew the end was near. He ordered his cherished dog and puppies poisoned, wed his longtime mistress, and said farewells. While the Russians waved a banner from atop the Reichstag, in the bunker Hitler and his wife took poison and Hitler shot himself.
The Human Story Page 36